GoFlow: Efficient Transition State Geometry Prediction with Flow Matching and E(3)-Equivariant Neural Networks

Transition state (TS) geometries of chemical reactions are key to understanding reaction mechanisms and estimating kinetic properties. Inferring these directly from 2D reaction graphs offers chemists a powerful tool for rapid and accessible reaction analysis. Quantum chemical methods for computing TSs are computationally intensive and often infeasible for larger molecular systems. Recently, deep learning–based diffusion models have shown promise in generating TSs from 2D reaction graphs for single-step reactions. However, framing TS generation as a diffusion process, by design, requires a prohibitively large number of sampling steps during inference. Here we show that modeling TS generation as an optimal transport flow problem, solved via E(3)-equivariant flow matching with geometric tensor networks, achieves over a hundredfold speedup in inference while improving geometric accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art. This breakthrough increase in sampling efficiency and predictive accuracy enables the practical use of deep learning-based TS generators in high-throughput settings for larger and more complex chemical systems. Our method, GoFlow, thus represents a significant methodological advancement in machine learning-based TS generation, bringing it closer to widespread use in computational chemistry workflows.