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Fractional Brownian Bridges for Aligned Data

Gabriel Nobis
Arina Belova
Maximilian Springenberg
Rembert Daems
Christoph Knochenhauer
Manfred Opper
Tolga Birdal
Wojciech Samek

March 06, 2025

Modeling stochastic processes with fractional diffusion instead of purely Brownian-driven dynamics may better account for real-world memory effects, long-range dependencies, and anomalous diffusion phenomena that standard Brownian motion fails to capture. We incorporate fractional Brownian motion (fBM) into aligned diffusion bridges for conformational changes in proteins, utilizing a Markov approximation of fractional Brownian motion (MA-fBM) to study the effect of this generalized prior reference process on predicting future states of the protein conformations from aligned data. We observe that our generalized dynamics yield a lower root mean-squared deviation (RMSD) of Cα atomic positions in the predicted future state from the ground truth. The best performance for this task is achieved with a scaled Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) reference process, which predicts 32% of examples with an RMSD<A∘ on the D3PM test split, whereas purely Brownian driven dynamics achieve 0% for this threshold.