GeoAda: Efficiently Finetune Geometric Diffusion Models with Equivariant Adapters
Wanjia Zhao, Jiaqi Han, Siyi Gu, Mingjian Jiang, James Zou, Stefano Ermon
Geometric diffusion models have shown remarkable success in molecular dynamics and structure generation. However, efficiently fine-tuning them for downstream tasks with varying geometric controls remains underexplored. In this work, we propose an SE(3)-equivariant adapter framework (GeoAda) that enables flexible and parameter-efficient fine-tuning for controlled generative tasks without modifying the original model architecture.  GeoAda introduces a structured adapter design: control signals are first encoded through coupling operators, then processed by a trainable copy of selected base model layers, and finally projected back via decoupling operators followed by an equivariant zero-initialized convolution. By fine-tuning only these lightweight adapter modules, GeoAda preserves the model’s geometric consistency while mitigating overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. We theoretically prove that the proposed adapters maintain SE(3)-equivariance, ensuring that the geometric inductive biases of the pretrained diffusion model remain intact during adaptation. We demonstrate the wide applicability of \method across diverse geometric control types, including frame control, global control, subgraph control, and a broad range of application domains such as particle dynamics, molecular dynamics, human motion prediction, and molecule generation. Empirical results show that  GeoAda achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance while preserving original task accuracy, whereas other baselines experience significant performance degradation due to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting.