Marginal Girsanov Reweighting: Stable Variance Reduction for Long-Time-Scale Dynamics from Biased Simulation
Journal article, 2026

Recovering unbiased kinetic and thermodynamic observables from enhanced sampling simulations is a central challenge in rare-event sampling. Classical Girsanov Reweighting (GR) offers a principled solution by yielding exact pathwise probability ratios between biased and unbiased processes. However, the variance of GR weights grows rapidly with time, rendering it impractical for long-horizon reweighting. We introduce Marginal Girsanov Reweighting (MGR), which mitigates variance explosion by marginalizing over intermediate paths, producing stable and scalable weights for long-time-scale dynamics. Experiments on various molecular dynamics (MD) systems demonstrate that MGR accurately recovers unbiased kinetic properties from trajectories generated under biased simulations.

Author

Yan Wang

Tongji University

Hao Wu

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Simon Olsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Data Science and AI

University of Gothenburg

Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation

1549-9618 (ISSN) 1549-9626 (eISSN)

Vol. In Press

Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)

Probability Theory and Statistics

DOI

10.1021/acs.jctc.6c00777

More information

Latest update

9/23/2026