RFDiffusion: (5) anecdotal observations over a year

1k words, 5 minutes reading time

RFDiffusion-AA (All Atom) was recently (finally) released, a little over a year after the original RFDiffusion release. This blog post was started months ago, when I had first started to play with RFDiffusion, but abandoned due to Life happening. Now that the second generation model has dropped, I thought it’d be fun to return to this post to study how RFDiffusion has fared over the past year. I’ll do a short recap on aspects of RFDiffusion, and then dive into a mostly unstructured set of observations I've had of the model. The observations come from a mixture of my own work, my coworkers, and posts from forums. I'll update this post as I come across any other interesting insights.

First, an introduction.

In November 2022, the Baker Lab at the University of Washington released a protein design model called RFDiffusion, which demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating monomers, higher-order oligomers, binders, and motif scaffolds while being symmetry aware. The model's speed, eas…