ConfDock: Atom-specific Uncertainty Quantification for Molecular Docking via Conformal Prediction

Molecular docking is widely used in structure-based drug discovery, yet most approaches provide point estimates without rigorous uncertainty quantification. This limitation makes it difficult to assess when a predicted pose should be trusted, especially when docking methods are applied to diverse protein-ligand systems. We present ConfDock, a conformal prediction (CP) framework for constructing atom-specific prediction intervals for ligand docking poses. ConfDock combines graph neural network (GNN) based quantile estimation with split conformal calibration, producing intervals that adapt to local protein-ligand environments while retaining distribution-free finite-sample coverage guarantees.