Our new preprint LLM-to-Flow Distillation (LFD) is finally live! 🧬
I’m convinced language is the right interface for controlling generative models. And that should apply to molecules just as much as images!
LLMs know a lot about science. DPO gives us a way to transfer that knowledge into scientific generators. With LFD, “design molecules that bind to the D2 dopamine receptor” becomes a goal we can actually train a flow model to pursue.
The LLM builds an adaptive curriculum around what the generator can currently produce. As the model improves, the teaching and guidance from the LLM change too.
The cool part is that we can do this with models we already have, without redesigning their architectures or engineering a task-specific proxy reward.
Really happy to share this work with Riccardo, Federico and the rest of the team!! Full thread below 👇
We’re bringing natural-language control to any scientific generator.
We are very excited to introduce LLM-to-Flow Distillation (LFD), a method to adapt scientific generators to high-level natural-language discovery goals.
Starting from textual goals like “design peptides with promising anticancer activity” or “design small molecules binding to the D2 dopamine receptor”, LFD distills high-level goal-related knowledge from LLMs into scientific generators through iterative DPO on LLM-generated sub-goals.
🔥 LFD does not need task-specific proxy rewards, works with any frontier LLM via API-access, and outperforms state-of-the-art reward-guided methods such as FlowGRPO and DiffusionNFT on held-out computational evaluations. (1/6)