SimpleFold: Folding Proteins is Simpler than You Think

Protein folding models have achieved groundbreaking results since the introduction of AlphaFold2, typically built via a
combination of integrating domain-expertise into its architectural designs and training pipelines. Nonetheless, given the
success of generative models across different but related problems, it is natural to question whether these architectural
designs are a necessity to build performant models. In this paper, we introduce SimpleFold, the first flow-matching based
protein folding model that solely uses general purpose transformer layers. Instead of relying on expensive…