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Oct 16

High-throughput calculations of magnetic topological materials

The discoveries of intrinsically magnetic topological materials, including semimetals with a large anomalous Hall effect and axion insulators, have directed fundamental research in solid-state materials. Topological quantum chemistry has enabled the understanding of and the search for paramagnetic topological materials. Using magnetic topological indices obtained from magnetic topological quantum chemistry (MTQC), here we perform a high-throughput search for magnetic topological materials based on first-principles calculations. We use as our starting point the Magnetic Materials Database on the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, which contains more than 549 magnetic compounds with magnetic structures deduced from neutron-scattering experiments, and identify 130 enforced semimetals (for which the band crossings are implied by symmetry eigenvalues), and topological insulators. For each compound, we perform complete electronic structure calculations, which include complete topological phase diagrams using different values of the Hubbard potential. Using a custom code to find the magnetic co-representations of all bands in all magnetic space groups, we generate data to be fed into the algorithm of MTQC to determine the topology of each magnetic material. Several of these materials display previously unknown topological phases, including symmetry-indicated magnetic semimetals, three-dimensional anomalous Hall insulators and higher-order magnetic semimetals. We analyse topological trends in the materials under varying interactions: 60 per cent of the 130 topological materials have topologies sensitive to interactions, and the others have stable topologies under varying interactions. We provide a materials database for future experimental studies and open-source code for diagnosing topologies of magnetic materials.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2020

Emergent magnetic nonanalyticity in Dirac altermagnets

Symmetry has long provided the organizing principle for understanding how materials respond to external perturbations. Here we show that what is permitted by symmetry need not be what actually emerges from the underlying system, and this distinction becomes particularly consequential for symmetry-related gapless Dirac fermions such as in altermagnets. A perturbation that shifts the Dirac points drives a Lifshitz reconstruction and generates an intrinsically nonanalytic effective potential, giving rise to undiscovered singular responses. In Dirac altermagnets, this nonanalyticity acquires a magnetic manifestation through C-paired spin-polarized Dirac cones: breaking the pairing symmetry C lifts their degeneracy and converts the associated Lifshitz reconstruction into an itinerant magnetization. As a consequence, piezomagnetism, the induction of a net magnetization by a mechanical strain, becomes nonlinear and nonanalytic, with Mproptosgn(varepsilon)varepsilon^2, whereas the linear response is absent despite being allowed by symmetry. Accordingly, the leading response cannot be inferred from the conventional symmetry-based paradigm of material response built upon the cornerstones of Neumann's principle and analytic Landau expansion. First-principles calculations identify the monolayer Fe_2S as a candidate material realization for such singular magnetic responses. These results suggest quantum singularities as a new degree of freedom for engineering material responses.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2

Benchmark Dataset for Catalysis on 2D MXenes

Merging first-principles calculations with machine learning (ML), we aim to accelerate the exploration of catalytic behaviour in novel materials. We focus on two-dimensional (2D) Ti_2CT_y MXenes, whose versatile surface chemistry makes them particularly compelling candidates for catalysis. Resolving their composition and structure under realistic conditions exceeds the reach of standard density functional theory (DFT) due to computational cost. To address this challenge, we generate a comprehensive dataset of 50,000 DFT calculations for training and 10,000 for testing, encompassing both Ti_2CT_y MXene configurations and molecular systems, along with an additional test dataset with 1000 genuinely new, larger systems to investigate how well models generalise. We train and validate widely used and competitive machine learning interatomic potential (MLIP) models, including EquiformerV2, MACE, MatRIS, and UPET, that accurately predict atomic forces and formation energies -- quantities that DFT must repeatedly compute for structural and catalytic investigations -- for these 2D materials. This combined DFT-ML framework achieves computational acceleration on the order of approximately 1-4 cdot 10^3 (on a CPU) while maintaining desired-level accuracy (approximately +/- 10 meV/A for forces and approximately +/- 1 meV for per-atom energies), paving the way for more efficient investigations of MXene catalytic behaviour. Moreover, we perform an extensive qualitative evaluation of the trained models, showcasing the importance of comprehensive simulation-based comparison beyond benchmark metrics. The dataset and the trained models with the code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CatalystAnonymous/catalyst_mxenes.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29

Facet: highly efficient E(3)-equivariant networks for interatomic potentials

Computational materials discovery is limited by the high cost of first-principles calculations. Machine learning (ML) potentials that predict energies from crystal structures are promising, but existing methods face computational bottlenecks. Steerable graph neural networks (GNNs) encode geometry with spherical harmonics, respecting atomic symmetries -- permutation, rotation, and translation -- for physically realistic predictions. Yet maintaining equivariance is difficult: activation functions must be modified, and each layer must handle multiple data types for different harmonic orders. We present Facet, a GNN architecture for efficient ML potentials, developed through systematic analysis of steerable GNNs. Our innovations include replacing expensive multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for interatomic distances with splines, which match performance while cutting computational and memory demands. We also introduce a general-purpose equivariant layer that mixes node information via spherical grid projection followed by standard MLPs -- faster than tensor products and more expressive than linear or gate layers. On the MPTrj dataset, Facet matches leading models with far fewer parameters and under 10% of their training compute. On a crystal relaxation task, it runs twice as fast as MACE models. We further show SevenNet-0's parameters can be reduced by over 25% with no accuracy loss. These techniques enable more than 10x faster training of large-scale foundation models for ML potentials, potentially reshaping computational materials discovery.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 10, 2025

AQVolt26: High-Temperature r$^2$SCAN Halide Dataset for Universal ML Potentials and Solid-State Batteries

The demand for safe, high-energy-density batteries has spotlighted halide solid-state electrolytes, which offer the potential for enhanced ionic mobility, electrochemical stability, and interfacial deformability. Accelerating their discovery requires extensive molecular dynamics, which has been increasingly enabled by universal machine learning interatomic potentials trained on foundational datasets. However, the dynamic softness of halides poses a stringent test of whether general-purpose models can reliably replace first-principles calculations under the highly distorted, elevated-temperature regimes necessary to probe ion transport. Here, we present AQVolt26, a dataset of 322,656 r^2SCAN single-point calculations for lithium halides, generated via high-temperature configurational sampling across sim5K structures. We demonstrate that foundational datasets provide a strong baseline for stable halide chemistries and transfer local forces well, however absolute energy predictions degrade in distorted higher-temperature regimes. Co-training with AQVolt26 resolves this blind spot. Furthermore, incorporating Materials Project relaxation data improves near-equilibrium performance but degrades extreme-strain robustness without enhancing high-temperature force accuracy. These results demonstrate that domain-specific configurational sampling is essential for the reliable dynamic screening of halide electrolytes. Furthermore, our findings suggest that while foundational models provide a robust base, they are most effective for dynamically soft solid-state chemistries when augmented with targeted, high-temperature data. Finally, we show that near-equilibrium relaxation data serves as a task-specific complement rather than a universally beneficial addition.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 1

Fine-tuning foundation models of materials interatomic potentials with frozen transfer learning

Machine-learned interatomic potentials are revolutionising atomistic materials simulations by providing accurate and scalable predictions within the scope covered by the training data. However, generation of an accurate and robust training data set remains a challenge, often requiring thousands of first-principles calculations to achieve high accuracy. Foundation models have started to emerge with the ambition to create universally applicable potentials across a wide range of materials. While foundation models can be robust and transferable, they do not yet achieve the accuracy required to predict reaction barriers, phase transitions, and material stability. This work demonstrates that foundation model potentials can reach chemical accuracy when fine-tuned using transfer learning with partially frozen weights and biases. For two challenging datasets on reactive chemistry at surfaces and stability and elastic properties of tertiary alloys, we show that frozen transfer learning with 10-20% of the data (hundreds of datapoints) achieves similar accuracies to models trained from scratch (on thousands of datapoints). Moreover, we show that an equally accurate, but significantly more efficient surrogate model can be built using the transfer learned potential as the ground truth. In combination, we present a simulation workflow for machine learning potentials that improves data efficiency and computational efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Combining Electron-Phonon and Dynamical Mean-Field Theory Calculations of Correlated Materials: Transport in the Correlated Metal Sr$_2$RuO$_4$

Electron-electron (e-e) and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions are challenging to describe in correlated materials, where their joint effects govern unconventional transport, phase transitions, and superconductivity. Here we combine first-principles e-ph calculations with dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) as a step toward a unified description of e-e and e-ph interactions in correlated materials. We compute the e-ph self-energy using the DMFT electron Green's function, and combine it with the e-e self-energy from DMFT to obtain a Green's function including both interactions. This approach captures the renormalization of quasiparticle dispersion and spectral weight on equal footing. Using our method, we study the e-ph and e-e contributions to the resistivity and spectral functions in the correlated metal Sr_2RuO_4. In this material, our results show that e-e interactions dominate transport and spectral broadening in the temperature range we study (50-310~K), while e-ph interactions are relatively weak and account for only sim10\% of the experimental resistivity. We also compute effective scattering rates, and find that the e-e interactions result in scattering several times greater than the Planckian value k_BT, whereas e-ph interactions are associated with scattering rates lower than k_BT. Our work demonstrates a first-principles approach to combine electron dynamical correlations from DMFT with e-ph interactions in a consistent way, advancing quantitative studies of correlated materials.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13, 2023

First-principles predictions of Hall and drift mobilities in semiconductors

Significant progress on parameter-free calculations of carrier mobilities in real materials has been made during the past decade; however, the role of various approximations remains unclear and a unified methodology is lacking. Here, we present and analyse a comprehensive and efficient approach to compute the intrinsic, phonon-limited drift and Hall carrier mobilities of semiconductors, within the framework of the first-principles Boltzmann transport equation. The methodology exploits a novel approach for estimating quadrupole tensors and including them in the electron-phonon interactions, and capitalises on a rigorous and efficient procedure for numerical convergence. The accuracy reached in this work allows to assess common approximations, including the role of exchange and correlation functionals, spin-orbit coupling, pseudopotentials, Wannier interpolation, Brillouin-zone sampling, dipole and quadrupole corrections, and the relaxation-time approximation. A detailed analysis is showcased on ten prototypical semiconductors, namely diamond, silicon, GaAs, 3C-SiC, AlP, GaP, c-BN, AlAs, AlSb, and SrO. By comparing this extensive dataset with available experimental data, we explore the intrinsic nature of phonon-limited carrier transport and magnetotransport phenomena in these compounds. We find that the most accurate calculations predict Hall mobilities up to a factor of two larger than experimental data; this could point to promising experimental improvements in the samples quality, or to the limitations of density-function theory in predicting the carrier effective masses and overscreening the electron-phonon matrix elements. By setting tight standards for reliability and reproducibility, the present work aims to facilitate validation and verification of data and software towards predictive calculations of transport phenomena in semiconductors.

  • 6 authors
·
May 9, 2021

InvDesMobility: a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework for closed-loop materials discovery

Inverse materials design starts from target functionality and searches for structures that can realize it. Its value in closed-loop discovery depends not only on prediction performance, but also on whether expensive first-principles results are independently validated, provenance-recorded, and admitted as feedback only when evidence is sufficient. This is especially important for composite properties such as carrier mobility, where a final scalar value hides intermediate quantities, fit quality, convergence history, and workflow assumptions. Here we present InvDesMobility, a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework that integrates multi-agent automated DFT, evidence stratification, generative structure proposal, acquisition ranking, and auditable release. Using 516 2DMatPedia-derived candidates, the workflow produced 280 QC-passed materials and 573 retained carrier-direction seed channels after channel-level reliability gating. These records were split into two feedback objects: relaxed structures updated the generative model, while retained mobility channels trained the acquisition model and set validation priority. Over multiple iterations, InvDesMobility screened 2.4 x 10^6 structures, submitted 102 candidates for DFT validation, and retained 86 reliability-gated generated channels across 41 formulas. Overall, the main contribution is not a fixed list of high-mobility materials, but a transferable feedback contract that makes closed-loop inverse design both useful and auditable when learning from expensive calculated properties. All source data, retained feedback records, and workflows are available at https://github.com/DreamLufei/invDesMobility, with an accompanying evidence website at https://dreamlufei.github.io/invDesMobility/.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 14

Harnessing Structural Disorder: Unraveling Hydrogen Evolution in Monolayer Amorphous Carbon via First-Principles Simulations and Machine-Learned Potentials

Disorder and defective coordination in the catalytic plane are crucial for enhancing the Hydrogen Evolution Reaction (HER) on two-dimensional catalysts. Amorphous materials are disordered, making them catalytically adaptive for many reactions. In this work, the HER capabilities of Monolayer Amorphous Carbon (MAC) were studied in comparison with crystalline carbon derivatives, such as pristine graphene (GE) and graphyne derivatives. MAC generated from melt-quench simulations revealed a diverse framework of predominantly sp2 and sp3 carbons with numerous 5-, 6-, and 7-membered rings. Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations investigated free-energy variations in hydrogen adsorption for each material. According to Sabatier's principle, optimum activity is achieved when the Gibbs free energy (Delta GH) change approaches zero. Crystalline carbon materials possess limited active sites, with beta-graphyne showing the best Delta GH value of +0.34 eV. The adsorption study for MAC was conducted in 30 distinct local environments, where core structural properties were analyzed against varying radii. Calculations showed a Delta GH distribution for MAC ranging from -0.02 eV to +1.35 eV. To evaluate activity across the entire MAC surface, a MACE MLIP foundation model was finetuned, achieving optimal energy and force fitting of 1.67 meV/atom and 29.15 meV/A, respectively. The MLIP predicted Delta GH values from -0.91 eV to +1.70 eV, with approximately 15% of sites exhibiting values below +0.25 eV. Feature analysis revealed that 7-membered rings, curvature, and ripple height enhance HER activity. Our findings suggest that, with careful optimization of local features, MAC can be tuned to compete with noble metal catalysts.

  • 3 authors
·
May 7

Periodic Trends and a Physics-Based Multistage Search for High-$T_c$ Hydride Superconductors

Hydrogen-rich materials under pressure are candidates for conventional phonon-mediated superconductivity, but first-principles electron--phonon-coupling (EPC) calculations are computationally demanding. We develop an interpretable multistage workflow for prioritizing binary hydride superconductors before full EPC calculations. Using controlled cubic X_mH_n prototypes at 200~GPa, we introduce the spectral moment A_1 as an intermediate measure of electron--phonon perturbation strength. In its linewidth-based construction, A_1 remains finite as harmonic phonons soften, allowing related structures with imaginary harmonic modes to be screened; it does not establish superconductivity or physical realizability for unstable structures. For dynamically stable cubic systems, A_1 correlates strongly with the H-1s density-of-states fraction at the Fermi level, α, a projected Fermi-surface descriptor, β, and atomic number density, ρ. These trends are summarized heuristically by A_1approx hαβρ, where h is framework- and pressure-dependent; the descriptor is used for ranking, not as a universal T_c predictor. We incorporate αβρ and enthalpic competitiveness into a three-stage evolutionary search comprising multiobjective structural screening, harmonic-phonon stability filtering, and coarse density-functional perturbation-theory (DFPT) EPC calculations. Application to more than 100,000 binary hydride structures at 50 and 200~GPa identifies candidates and prioritizes NaH_6 structural families. Higher-accuracy calculations show that Pm3m NaH_6 is dynamically stable down to 50~GPa and has a harmonic Allen--Dynes estimate of T_capprox230~K. The framework combines electronic descriptors with progressively more expensive stability and EPC calculations for scalable hydride exploration.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 27

Expanding the extreme-k dielectric materials space through physics-validated generative reasoning

The most technologically consequential materials are often the rarest: they occupy narrow regions of chemical space, obey competing physical constraints, and appear only sparsely in existing databases. High-kappa dielectrics, high-Tc superconductors, and ferromagnetic insulators are to name a few. This scarcity fundamentally limits today's data-driven materials discovery, where machine-learning models excel at interpolation but struggle to generate genuinely new candidates. Here, we introduce DielecMIND, an artificial intelligence framework that reframes materials discovery as a reasoning-driven exploration instead of a database-screening problem. Using high-kappa dielectrics as a data-scarce and technologically stringent test case, DielecMIND combines large-language-model hypothesis generation for the first time with physics validated first-principles calculation to navigate chemical space beyond known compounds. Prior to our work, only 14 experimentally or computationally validated materials with kappa > 150 were known. Our framework discovers and validates 5 new such compounds, expanding this rare-materials class by a remarkable = 35% in a single study. Among them, we find that Ba2TiHfO6 exhibits a dielectric constant of 637, minimal loss at low optical frequencies, and stability up to 800 K. Beyond dielectrics, this work demonstrates a new paradigm for artificial-intelligence-guided discovery: one that generates a small number of physically grounded, experimentally plausible candidates yet measurably expands sparsely populated functional materials spaces. Thus, DielecMIND points toward a general strategy for discovering rare, high-impact functional materials where data scarcity has long constrained progress.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 21

Quantifying Diversity of Thought: A Predictive Law of Weighted LLM Ensemble Lift

This paper provides an experimentally verified formal law for calculating the uplift that diversity of thought provides in Large Language Model (LLM) ensembles. From first principles, we derive an exact decomposition of LLM ensemble lift into rescue and damage masses, which yields a compact heuristic for calculating uplift. From this we extract the metrics which predict ensemble performance: an accuracy adjusted correctness correlation, ϕ_{adj}, together with the accuracy gap and collective accuracy of the pair. We test the law on 767,520 inferences from ten open-weight models over two graduate-level science benchmarks, together with a novel agentic cybersecurity benchmark in which each model conducts digital-forensics investigations by multi-turn tool use in a network-isolated sandbox (23,520 graded trials including abstentions); all votes are released openly. Calibrated once on SuperGPQA at a 40:60 vote split, the heuristic predicts lift on the calibration set with Spearman's ρ=0.84 and, with its coefficients frozen, transfers to two datasets never used in calibration (ρ=0.51 on GPQA Diamond and 0.84 on the forensic tasks), whilst the measured swap mass tracks realised lift with R^2ge 0.96 throughout. Raw ϕ has almost no predictive power (R^2le 0.09 throughout); the accuracy-adjusted ϕ_{adj} is markedly superior (R^2=0.67 on SuperGPQA), and the heuristic combining these metrics is the most stable pre pooling predictor across the three datasets.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 18

A Benchmark for Quantum Chemistry Relaxations via Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials

Computational quantum chemistry plays a critical role in drug discovery, chemical synthesis, and materials science. While first-principles methods, such as density functional theory (DFT), provide high accuracy in modeling electronic structures and predicting molecular properties, they are computationally expensive. Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have emerged as promising surrogate models that aim to achieve DFT-level accuracy while enabling efficient large-scale atomistic simulations. The development of accurate and transferable MLIPs requires large-scale, high-quality datasets with both energy and force labels. Critically, MLIPs must generalize not only to stable geometries but also to intermediate, non-equilibrium conformations encountered during atomistic simulations. In this work, we introduce PubChemQCR, a large-scale dataset of molecular relaxation trajectories curated from the raw geometry optimization outputs of the PubChemQC project. PubChemQCR is the largest publicly available dataset of DFT-based relaxation trajectories for small organic molecules, comprising approximately 3.5 million trajectories and over 300 million molecular conformations computed at various levels of theory. Each conformation is labeled with both total energy and atomic forces, making the dataset suitable for training and evaluating MLIPs. To provide baselines for future developments, we benchmark nine representative MLIP models on the dataset. Our resources are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/divelab

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 28, 2025

MatterSim: A Deep Learning Atomistic Model Across Elements, Temperatures and Pressures

Accurate and fast prediction of materials properties is central to the digital transformation of materials design. However, the vast design space and diverse operating conditions pose significant challenges for accurately modeling arbitrary material candidates and forecasting their properties. We present MatterSim, a deep learning model actively learned from large-scale first-principles computations, for efficient atomistic simulations at first-principles level and accurate prediction of broad material properties across the periodic table, spanning temperatures from 0 to 5000 K and pressures up to 1000 GPa. Out-of-the-box, the model serves as a machine learning force field, and shows remarkable capabilities not only in predicting ground-state material structures and energetics, but also in simulating their behavior under realistic temperatures and pressures, signifying an up to ten-fold enhancement in precision compared to the prior best-in-class. This enables MatterSim to compute materials' lattice dynamics, mechanical and thermodynamic properties, and beyond, to an accuracy comparable with first-principles methods. Specifically, MatterSim predicts Gibbs free energies for a wide range of inorganic solids with near-first-principles accuracy and achieves a 15 meV/atom resolution for temperatures up to 1000K compared with experiments. This opens an opportunity to predict experimental phase diagrams of materials at minimal computational cost. Moreover, MatterSim also serves as a platform for continuous learning and customization by integrating domain-specific data. The model can be fine-tuned for atomistic simulations at a desired level of theory or for direct structure-to-property predictions, achieving high data efficiency with a reduction in data requirements by up to 97%.

  • 22 authors
·
May 9, 2024

Towards A Universally Transferable Acceleration Method for Density Functional Theory

Recently, sophisticated deep learning-based approaches have been developed for generating efficient initial guesses to accelerate the convergence of density functional theory (DFT) calculations. While the actual initial guesses are often density matrices (DM), quantities that can convert into density matrices also qualify as alternative forms of initial guesses. Hence, existing works mostly rely on the prediction of the Hamiltonian matrix for obtaining high-quality initial guesses. However, the Hamiltonian matrix is both numerically difficult to predict and intrinsically non-transferable, hindering the application of such models in real scenarios. In light of this, we propose a method that constructs DFT initial guesses by predicting the electron density in a compact auxiliary basis representation using E(3)-equivariant neural networks. Trained on small molecules with up to 20 atoms, our model is able to achieve an average 33.3% self-consistent field (SCF) step reduction on systems up to 60 atoms, substantially outperforming Hamiltonian-centric and DM-centric models. Critically, this acceleration remains nearly constant with increasing system sizes and exhibits strong transferring behaviors across orbital basis sets and exchange-correlation (XC) functionals. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first and robust candidate for a universally transferable DFT acceleration method. We are also releasing the SCFbench dataset and its accompanying code to facilitate future research in this promising direction.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025

Learning the Kohn-Sham map with neural operators for quasi-linear scaling density functional theory

Kohn--Sham density functional theory (DFT) underpins electronic-structure simulations, but repeated orbital diagonalizations lead to cubic scaling, restricting quantum calculations to modest scales only. Eliminating these auxiliary orbitals while retaining Kohn--Sham accuracy is the central goal of orbital-free DFT, but both analytical and machine-learning methods have so far fallen short. Prior learning approaches either try to learn the variational kinetic-energy functionals, which are ill-conditioned, or directly predict the ground state, which extrapolate poorly to larger systems. Instead, we identify the Kohn--Sham map as the right learning target for orbital-free DFT. It maps a Kohn--Sham potential directly to the corresponding density and noninteracting kinetic energy, quantities otherwise obtained through an orbital diagonalization. Focusing on the density component in this work, a domain-invariant SE(3)-equivariant Fourier neural operator learns to predict it from the potential as input on real-space grids, enabling stable quasi-linear scaling SCFs. Trained jointly on 8,504 molecules and solids, a single model generalizes to out-of-distribution organic molecules, insulators, and metals. For the first time, the same method converges SCFs across these systems without explicitly constructing Kohn--Sham orbitals, while reproducing densities, electronic spectra, and structural observables at Kohn--Sham DFT accuracy. Linear-scaling SCFs additionally allow converging magnesium dislocation densities containing up to 82,500 valence electrons on a single GPU.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 23

Accurate and scalable exchange-correlation with deep learning

Density Functional Theory (DFT) underpins much of modern computational chemistry and materials science. Yet, the reliability of DFT-derived predictions of experimentally measurable properties remains fundamentally limited by the need to approximate the unknown exchange-correlation (XC) functional. The traditional paradigm for improving accuracy has relied on increasingly elaborate hand-crafted functional forms. This approach has led to a longstanding trade-off between computational efficiency and accuracy, which remains insufficient for reliable predictive modelling of laboratory experiments. Here we introduce Skala, a deep learning-based XC functional that surpasses state-of-the-art hybrid functionals in accuracy across the main-group chemistry benchmark set GMTKN55 with an error of 2.8 kcal/mol, while retaining the lower computational cost characteristic of semi-local DFT. This demonstrated departure from the historical trade-off between accuracy and efficiency is enabled by learning non-local representations of electronic structure directly from data, bypassing the need for increasingly costly hand-engineered features. Leveraging an unprecedented volume of high-accuracy reference data from wavefunction-based methods, we establish that modern deep learning enables systematically improvable neural exchange-correlation models as training datasets expand, positioning first-principles simulations to become progressively more predictive.

microsoft Microsoft
·
Apr 20 2

Benchmarking foundation potentials against quantum chemistry methods for predicting molecular redox potentials

Computational high-throughput virtual screening is essential for identifying redox-active molecules for sustainable applications such as electrochemical carbon capture. A primary challenge in this approach is the high computational cost associated with accurate quantum chemistry calculations. Machine learning foundation potentials (FPs) trained on extensive density functional theory (DFT) calculations offer a computationally efficient alternative. Here, we benchmark the MACE-OMol-0 and UMA FPs against a hierarchy of DFT functionals for predicting experimental molecular redox potentials for both electron transfer (ET) and proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) reactions. We find that these FPs achieve exceptional accuracy for PCET processes, rivaling their target DFT method. However, the performance is diminished for ET reactions, particularly for multi-electron transfers involving reactive ions that are underrepresented in the OMol25 training data, revealing a key out-of-distribution limitation. To overcome this, we propose an optimal hybrid workflow that uses the FPs for efficient geometry optimization and thermochemical analysis, followed by a crucial single-point DFT energy refinement and an implicit solvation correction. This pragmatic approach provides a robust and scalable strategy for accelerating high-throughput virtual screening in sustainable chemistry.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Complete Neural Electronic Initialization Accelerates Materials DFT

We present the first complete machine learning method for accelerating plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) in materials under the projector augmented wave (PAW) formalism. We formalize seven criteria that a Complete Neural Electronic Initializer must satisfy for practical end-to-end PAW DFT acceleration. Applying these criteria to prior work reveals two missing structure-dependent components, augmentation occupancies and spin initialization, that prevent existing methods from providing complete reference-free initialization. Controlled ablations show that omitting these components can eliminate or reverse the acceleration obtained via models that only predict the smooth valence density. We satisfy these missing requirements by introducing AugNet, the first general equivariant model for PAW augmentation occupancies, and the first general spin density model for materials, which predicts the smooth spin-difference density and spin-difference PAW augmentation occupancies using predicted magnetic moments to constrain the global magnetic state. Combined with existing valence density models, these components satisfy all seven criteria and form a fully reference-free electronic initializer for materials DFT, requiring no electronic quantities from a converged target calculation. Our method reduces end-to-end DFT wall time by up to ~25% on unseen structures while preserving converged energies.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 17

Robust Determination of the Chemical Potential in the Pole Expansion and Selected Inversion Method for Solving Kohn-Sham density functional theory

Fermi operator expansion (FOE) methods are powerful alternatives to diagonalization type methods for solving Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KSDFT). One example is the pole expansion and selected inversion (PEXSI) method, which approximates the Fermi operator by rational matrix functions and reduces the computational complexity to at most quadratic scaling for solving KSDFT. Unlike diagonalization type methods, the chemical potential often cannot be directly read off from the result of a single step of evaluation of the Fermi operator. Hence multiple evaluations are needed to be sequentially performed to compute the chemical potential to ensure the correct number of electrons within a given tolerance. This hinders the performance of FOE methods in practice. In this paper we develop an efficient and robust strategy to determine the chemical potential in the context of the PEXSI method. The main idea of the new method is not to find the exact chemical potential at each self-consistent-field (SCF) iteration iteration, but to dynamically and rigorously update the upper and lower bounds for the true chemical potential, so that the chemical potential reaches its convergence along the SCF iteration. Instead of evaluating the Fermi operator for multiple times sequentially, our method uses a two-level strategy that evaluates the Fermi operators in parallel. In the regime of full parallelization, the wall clock time of each SCF iteration is always close to the time for one single evaluation of the Fermi operator, even when the initial guess is far away from the converged solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method using examples with metallic and insulating characters, as well as results from ab initio molecular dynamics.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 14, 2017

Equivariant Neural Networks for Force-Field Models of Lattice Systems

Machine-learning (ML) force fields enable large-scale simulations with near-first-principles accuracy at substantially reduced computational cost. Recent work has extended ML force-field approaches to adiabatic dynamical simulations of condensed-matter lattice models with coupled electronic and structural or magnetic degrees of freedom. However, most existing formulations rely on hand-crafted, symmetry-aware descriptors, whose construction is often system-specific and can hinder generality and transferability across different lattice Hamiltonians. Here we introduce a symmetry-preserving framework based on equivariant neural networks (ENNs) that provides a general, data-driven mapping from local configurations of dynamical variables to the associated on-site forces in a lattice Hamiltonian. In contrast to ENN architectures developed for molecular systems -- where continuous Euclidean symmetries dominate -- our approach aims to embed the discrete point-group and internal symmetries intrinsic to lattice models directly into the neural-network representation of the force field. As a proof of principle, we construct an ENN-based force-field model for the adiabatic dynamics of the Holstein Hamiltonian on a square lattice, a canonical system for electron-lattice physics. The resulting ML-enabled large-scale dynamical simulations faithfully capture mesoscale evolution of the symmetry-breaking phase, illustrating the utility of lattice-equivariant architectures for linking microscopic electronic processes to emergent dynamical behavior in condensed-matter lattice systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 7

Enabling Domain-Specific Atomistic Models: A Machine Learning Potential for the Solid Acid Family

Machine-learned interatomic potentials trained across the periodic table have made atomistic simulation broadly accessible, and specializing them to a single compound class is widely expected to improve accuracy. Yet examples remain scarce, and fewer still surpass universal models in speed or reach a higher level of electronic-structure theory. Here we present a potential that is universal within the class of water-free solid-state hydrogen-bond network mediated proton conductors rather than across chemistry and a database of 4.4 million first-principles configurations spanning 55 materials. It surpasses leading general-purpose potentials across this domain, recovering measured activation energies and the ordering of anion rotational dynamics that those models miss; agreement on static structure does not imply agreement on transport. Accuracy falls for compositions far from the training set but stays competitive for close structural relatives, and a higher level of electronic-structure theory is reached with a few hundred additional configurations per material. We further introduce a compact variant carrying a fifth of the parameters, faster still and yet more accurate than every general-purpose model tested. It sustains more than a quarter of a million atoms on a single graphics processor, placing grain boundaries and the transition into the highly conducting phase within reach, and making a quantum treatment of the protons affordable. Reference accuracy and accessible system size thus become largely independent, offering a template for other compound classes.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 28

Grad DFT: a software library for machine learning enhanced density functional theory

Density functional theory (DFT) stands as a cornerstone method in computational quantum chemistry and materials science due to its remarkable versatility and scalability. Yet, it suffers from limitations in accuracy, particularly when dealing with strongly correlated systems. To address these shortcomings, recent work has begun to explore how machine learning can expand the capabilities of DFT; an endeavor with many open questions and technical challenges. In this work, we present Grad DFT: a fully differentiable JAX-based DFT library, enabling quick prototyping and experimentation with machine learning-enhanced exchange-correlation energy functionals. Grad DFT employs a pioneering parametrization of exchange-correlation functionals constructed using a weighted sum of energy densities, where the weights are determined using neural networks. Moreover, Grad DFT encompasses a comprehensive suite of auxiliary functions, notably featuring a just-in-time compilable and fully differentiable self-consistent iterative procedure. To support training and benchmarking efforts, we additionally compile a curated dataset of experimental dissociation energies of dimers, half of which contain transition metal atoms characterized by strong electronic correlations. The software library is tested against experimental results to study the generalization capabilities of a neural functional across potential energy surfaces and atomic species, as well as the effect of training data noise on the resulting model accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023

Machine-Learning Surrogate Model for Accelerating the Search of Stable Ternary Alloys

The prediction of phase diagrams in the search for new phases is a complex and computationally intensive task. Density functional theory provides, in many situations, the desired accuracy, but its throughput becomes prohibitively limited as the number of species involved grows, even when used with local and semi-local functionals. Here, we explore the possibility of integrating machine-learning models in the workflow for the construction of ternary convex hull diagrams. In particular, we train a set of spectral neighbour-analysis potentials (SNAPs) over readily available binary phases and we establish whether this is good enough to predict the energies of novel ternaries. Such a strategy does not require any new calculations specific for the construction of the model, but just avails of data stored in binary-phase-diagram repositories. We find that a so-constructed SNAP is capable of accurate total-energy estimates for ternary phases close to the equilibrium geometry but, in general, is not able to perform atomic relaxation. This is because during a typical relaxation path a given phase traverses regions in the parameter space poorly represented by the training set. Different metrics are then investigated to assess how an unknown structure is well described by a given SNAP model, and we find that the standard deviation of an ensemble of SNAPs provides a fast and non-specie-specific metric.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

PyCDFT: A Python-scriptable library for analytical evaluation of orbital conceptual density (matrix) functional theory

Conceptual density functional theory (CDFT) defines chemical reactivity descriptors as derivatives of the electronic energy with respect to the number of electrons and the external potential, or combinations thereof; in practice, however, researchers almost always replace these derivatives with finite-difference and frontier-orbital approximations, and no common software exists for their analytical evaluation. We present PyCDFT, to our knowledge, the first standardized, open-source, and scriptable code that analytically computes the descriptors of conceptual density (matrix) functional theory for ground and excited states up to second order, including the orbital hardness, the Fukui function and Fukui matrix, and the linear response function, from a single converged mean-field wavefunction imported from virtually any electronic-structure package. The descriptors are obtained from matrix-free, preconditioned Krylov-subspace solutions of the coupled-perturbed self-consistent-field equations for both spin-unpolarized and spin-polarized references, with the work distributed over MPI ranks and all data flowing through a single HDF5 checkpoint file that supports restart, post-processing, and the export of real-space descriptors as cube files for visualization. The design delegates integrals, grids, and exchange-correlation kernels to PySCF and Libxc, keeping the library compact, user-friendly, and interoperable. Worked examples on the ground state of H_2O and a broken-symmetry ΔSCF excited state of NH_3 show that a complete second-order CDFT analysis requires only a few lines of user code.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 30

KineticNet: Deep learning a transferable kinetic energy functional for orbital-free density functional theory

Orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) holds the promise to compute ground state molecular properties at minimal cost. However, it has been held back by our inability to compute the kinetic energy as a functional of the electron density only. We here set out to learn the kinetic energy functional from ground truth provided by the more expensive Kohn-Sham density functional theory. Such learning is confronted with two key challenges: Giving the model sufficient expressivity and spatial context while limiting the memory footprint to afford computations on a GPU; and creating a sufficiently broad distribution of training data to enable iterative density optimization even when starting from a poor initial guess. In response, we introduce KineticNet, an equivariant deep neural network architecture based on point convolutions adapted to the prediction of quantities on molecular quadrature grids. Important contributions include convolution filters with sufficient spatial resolution in the vicinity of the nuclear cusp, an atom-centric sparse but expressive architecture that relays information across multiple bond lengths; and a new strategy to generate varied training data by finding ground state densities in the face of perturbations by a random external potential. KineticNet achieves, for the first time, chemical accuracy of the learned functionals across input densities and geometries of tiny molecules. For two electron systems, we additionally demonstrate OF-DFT density optimization with chemical accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
May 8, 2023

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023 2

Machine-learning enabled thermodynamic model for the design of new rare-earth compounds

We employ a descriptor based machine-learning approach to assess the effect of chemical alloying on formation-enthalpy of rare-earth intermetallics. Application of machine-learning approaches in rare-earth intermetallic design have been sparse due to limited availability of reliable datasets. In this work, we developed an `in-house' rare-earth database with more than 600+ compounds, each entry was populated with formation enthalpy and related atomic features using high-throughput density-functional theory (DFT). The SISSO (sure independence screening and sparsifying operator) based machine-learning method with meaningful atomic features was used for training and testing the formation enthalpies of rare earth compounds. The complex lattice function coupled with the machine-learning model was used to explore the effect of transition metal alloying on the energy stability of Ce based cubic Laves phases (MgCu_{2} type). The SISSO predictions show good agreement with high-fidelity DFT calculations and X-ray powder diffraction measurements. Our study provides quantitative guidance for compositional considerations within a machine-learning model and discovering new metastable materials. The electronic-structure of Ce-Fe-Cu based compound was also analyzed in-depth to understand the electronic origin of phase stability. The interpretable analytical models in combination with density-functional theory and experiments provide a fast and reliable design guide for discovering technologically useful materials.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3, 2022

Full optimization of Jastrow-Slater wave functions with application to the first-row atoms and homonuclear diatomic molecules

We pursue the development and application of the recently-introduced linear optimization method for determining the optimal linear and nonlinear parameters of Jastrow-Slater wave functions in a variational Monte Carlo framework. In this approach, the optimal parameters are found iteratively by diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix in the space spanned by the wave function and its first-order derivatives, making use of a strong zero-variance principle. We extend the method to optimize the exponents of the basis functions, simultaneously with all the other parameters, namely the Jastrow, configuration state function and orbital parameters. We show that the linear optimization method can be thought of as a so-called augmented Hessian approach, which helps explain the robustness of the method and permits us to extend it to minimize a linear combination of the energy and the energy variance. We apply the linear optimization method to obtain the complete ground-state potential energy curve of the C_2 molecule up to the dissociation limit, and discuss size consistency and broken spin-symmetry issues in quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We perform calculations of the first-row atoms and homonuclear diatomic molecules with fully optimized Jastrow-Slater wave functions, and we demonstrate that molecular well depths can be obtained with near chemical accuracy quite systematically at the diffusion Monte Carlo level for these systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 19, 2008

Machine Learning for Polaritonic Chemistry: Accessing chemical kinetics

Altering chemical reactivity and material structure in confined optical environments is on the rise, and yet, a conclusive understanding of the microscopic mechanisms remains elusive. This originates mostly from the fact that accurately predicting vibrational and reactive dynamics for soluted ensembles of realistic molecules is no small endeavor, and adding (collective) strong light-matter interaction does not simplify matters. Here, we establish a framework based on a combination of machine learning (ML) models, trained using density-functional theory calculations, and molecular dynamics to accelerate such simulations. We then apply this approach to evaluate strong coupling, changes in reaction rate constant, and their influence on enthalpy and entropy for the deprotection reaction of 1-phenyl-2-trimethylsilylacetylene, which has been studied previously both experimentally and using ab initio simulations. While we find qualitative agreement with critical experimental observations, especially with regard to the changes in kinetics, we also find differences in comparison with previous theoretical predictions. The features for which the ML-accelerated and ab initio simulations agree show the experimentally estimated kinetic behavior. Conflicting features indicate that a contribution of dynamic electronic polarization to the reaction process is more relevant then currently believed. Our work demonstrates the practical use of ML for polaritonic chemistry, discusses limitations of common approximations and paves the way for a more holistic description of polaritonic chemistry.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 16, 2023

Cross Learning between Electronic Structure Theories for Unifying Molecular, Surface, and Inorganic Crystal Foundation Force Fields

Creating a single unified interatomic potential capable of attaining ab initio accuracy across all chemistry remains a long-standing challenge in computational chemistry and materials science. This work introduces a training protocol for foundation machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) that bridge molecular, surface, and materials chemistry through cross-domain learning. First, we introduce enhancements to the MACE architecture that improve its performance on chemically diverse databases by increasing weight sharing across chemical elements and introducing non-linear factors into the tensor decomposition of the product basis. Second, we develop a multi-head replay post-training methodology that enables efficient knowledge transfer across diverse chemical domains. By fine-tuning on datasets at different levels of electronic structure theory, including inorganic crystals, molecular systems, surface chemistry, and reactive organic chemistry, we demonstrate that a single unified model achieves state-of-the-art performance across several chemical domains. Comprehensive benchmarking reveals superior cross-domain transferability compared with existing specialised and multi-task models, with notable improvements in molecular and surface properties while maintaining state-of-the-art performance in materials-property prediction.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025

Differentiable quantum computational chemistry with PennyLane

This work describes the theoretical foundation for all quantum chemistry functionality in PennyLane, a quantum computing software library specializing in quantum differentiable programming. We provide an overview of fundamental concepts in quantum chemistry, including the basic principles of the Hartree-Fock method. A flagship feature in PennyLane is the differentiable Hartree-Fock solver, allowing users to compute exact gradients of molecular Hamiltonians with respect to nuclear coordinates and basis set parameters. PennyLane provides specialized operations for quantum chemistry, including excitation gates as Givens rotations and templates for quantum chemistry circuits. Moreover, built-in simulators exploit sparse matrix techniques for representing molecular Hamiltonians that lead to fast simulation for quantum chemistry applications. In combination with PennyLane's existing methods for constructing, optimizing, and executing circuits, these methods allow users to implement a wide range of quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry. We discuss how PennyLane can be used to implement variational algorithms for calculating ground-state energies, excited-state energies, and energy derivatives, all of which can be differentiated with respect to both circuit and Hamiltonian parameters. We provide an example workflow describing how to jointly optimize circuit parameters, nuclear coordinates, and basis set parameters for quantum chemistry algorithms. We discuss a functionality for reducing the number of qubits by using symmetries and explain how PennyLane can be used to estimate quantum resources needed to implement several quantum algorithms. By combining insights from quantum computing, computational chemistry, and machine learning, PennyLane is the first library for differentiable quantum computational chemistry.

  • 18 authors
·
Jan 4, 2023

CLOUD: A Scalable and Physics-Informed Foundation Model for Crystal Representation Learning

The prediction of crystal properties is essential for understanding structure-property relationships and accelerating the discovery of functional materials. However, conventional approaches relying on experimental measurements or density functional theory (DFT) calculations are often resource-intensive, limiting their scalability. Machine learning (ML) models offer a promising alternative by learning complex structure-property relationships from data, enabling faster predictions. Yet, existing ML models often rely on labeled data, adopt representations that poorly capture essential structural characteristics, and lack integration with physical principles--factors that limit their generalizability and interpretability. Here, we introduce CLOUD (Crystal Language mOdel for Unified and Differentiable materials modeling), a transformer-based framework trained on a novel Symmetry-Consistent Ordered Parameter Encoding (SCOPE) that encodes crystal symmetry, Wyckoff positions, and composition in a compact, coordinate-free string representation. Pre-trained on over six million crystal structures, CLOUD is fine-tuned on multiple downstream tasks and achieves competitive performance in predicting a wide range of material properties, demonstrating strong scaling performance. Furthermore, as proof of concept of differentiable materials modeling, CLOUD is applied to predict the phonon internal energy and heat capacity, which integrates the Debye model to preserve thermodynamic consistency. The CLOUD-DEBYE framework enforces thermodynamic consistency and enables temperature-dependent property prediction without requiring additional data. These results demonstrate the potential of CLOUD as a scalable and physics-informed foundation model for crystalline materials, unifying symmetry-consistent representations with physically grounded learning for property prediction and materials discovery.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

CHGNet: Pretrained universal neural network potential for charge-informed atomistic modeling

The simulation of large-scale systems with complex electron interactions remains one of the greatest challenges for the atomistic modeling of materials. Although classical force fields often fail to describe the coupling between electronic states and ionic rearrangements, the more accurate ab-initio molecular dynamics suffers from computational complexity that prevents long-time and large-scale simulations, which are essential to study many technologically relevant phenomena, such as reactions, ion migrations, phase transformations, and degradation. In this work, we present the Crystal Hamiltonian Graph neural Network (CHGNet) as a novel machine-learning interatomic potential (MLIP), using a graph-neural-network-based force field to model a universal potential energy surface. CHGNet is pretrained on the energies, forces, stresses, and magnetic moments from the Materials Project Trajectory Dataset, which consists of over 10 years of density functional theory static and relaxation trajectories of sim 1.5 million inorganic structures. The explicit inclusion of magnetic moments enables CHGNet to learn and accurately represent the orbital occupancy of electrons, enhancing its capability to describe both atomic and electronic degrees of freedom. We demonstrate several applications of CHGNet in solid-state materials, including charge-informed molecular dynamics in Li_xMnO_2, the finite temperature phase diagram for Li_xFePO_4 and Li diffusion in garnet conductors. We critically analyze the significance of including charge information for capturing appropriate chemistry, and we provide new insights into ionic systems with additional electronic degrees of freedom that can not be observed by previous MLIPs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27, 2023

Exploring the extremes: atomic basis for multi-elemental materials science under complex thermodynamic conditions

Modern materials science has historically been founded on combining restricted subsets of the periodic table, favoring high-purity, few-element systems. However, the demands of an emerging circular economy, together with the need to understand materials behavior under planetary and industrial extremes, increasingly require mastering Mendeleev materials - chemically and structurally complex systems that span large portions of the periodic table. In these regimes, current universal machine-learning interatomic potentials often fail, largely due to systematic gaps in traditional training datasets that heavily emphasize low-energy, near-equilibrium structures. We address this limitation by introducing a chemistry-agnostic, information-entropy-maximization protocol for data generation. By decoupling structural sampling from thermodynamic bias, our approach provides a robust physical prior for atomic interactions across the entire periodic table, including regimes far from equilibrium and under extreme conditions. Training a Graph Atomic Cluster Expansion (GRACE) model on the resulting statistically maximized entropy (SMAX) dataset yields markedly improved robustness across a range of stringent benchmarks. These include large-strain phase transformations in tin, defect evolution in tungsten-based alloys, and catalytic reaction barrier prediction. More broadly, our approach establishes a scalable and principled methodology for navigating the vast chemical and configurational space relevant to future materials design. It enables a paradigm of discovery by simulation in which unbiased sampling protocols autonomously resolve emergent structures in multi-elemental mixtures-such as systems containing the nine most abundant elements in the Earth's crust-without reliance on a priori chemical assumptions.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 25

AIMS-EREA -- A framework for AI-accelerated Innovation of Materials for Sustainability -- for Environmental Remediation and Energy Applications

Many environmental remediation and energy applications (conversion and storage) for sustainability need design and development of green novel materials. Discovery processes of such novel materials are time taking and cumbersome due to large number of possible combinations and permutations of materials structures. Often theoretical studies based on Density Functional Theory (DFT) and other theories, coupled with Simulations are conducted to narrow down sample space of candidate materials, before conducting laboratory-based synthesis and analytical process. With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), AI techniques are being tried in this process too to ease out simulation time and cost. However tremendous values of previously published research from various parts of the world are still left as labor-intensive manual effort and discretion of individual researcher and prone to human omissions. AIMS-EREA is our novel framework to blend best of breed of Material Science theory with power of Generative AI to give best impact and smooth and quickest discovery of material for sustainability. This also helps to eliminate the possibility of production of hazardous residues and bye-products of the reactions. AIMS-EREA uses all available resources -- Predictive and Analytical AI on large collection of chemical databases along with automated intelligent assimilation of deep materials knowledge from previously published research works through Generative AI. We demonstrate use of our own novel framework with an example, how this framework can be successfully applied to achieve desired success in development of thermoelectric material for waste heat conversion.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 18, 2023

MACE-POLAR-1: A Polarisable Electrostatic Foundation Model for Molecular Chemistry

Accurate modelling of electrostatic interactions and charge transfer is fundamental to computational chemistry, yet most machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) rely on local atomic descriptors that cannot capture long-range electrostatic effects. We present a new electrostatic foundation model for molecular chemistry that extends the MACE architecture with explicit treatment of long-range interactions and electrostatic induction. Our approach combines local many-body geometric features with a non-self-consistent field formalism that updates learnable charge and spin densities through polarisable iterations to model induction, followed by global charge equilibration via learnable Fukui functions to control total charge and total spin. This design enables an accurate and physical description of systems with varying charge and spin states while maintaining computational efficiency. Trained on the OMol25 dataset of 100 million hybrid DFT calculations, our models achieve chemical accuracy across diverse benchmarks, with accuracy competitive with hybrid DFT on thermochemistry, reaction barriers, conformational energies, and transition metal complexes. Notably, we demonstrate that the inclusion of long-range electrostatics leads to a large improvement in the description of non-covalent interactions and supramolecular complexes over non-electrostatic models, including sub-kcal/mol prediction of molecular crystal formation energy in the X23-DMC dataset and a fourfold improvement over short-ranged models on protein-ligand interactions. The model's ability to handle variable charge and spin states, respond to external fields, provide interpretable spin-resolved charge densities, and maintain accuracy from small molecules to protein-ligand complexes positions it as a versatile tool for computational molecular chemistry and drug discovery.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 22

Molecule3D: A Benchmark for Predicting 3D Geometries from Molecular Graphs

Graph neural networks are emerging as promising methods for modeling molecular graphs, in which nodes and edges correspond to atoms and chemical bonds, respectively. Recent studies show that when 3D molecular geometries, such as bond lengths and angles, are available, molecular property prediction tasks can be made more accurate. However, computing of 3D molecular geometries requires quantum calculations that are computationally prohibitive. For example, accurate calculation of 3D geometries of a small molecule requires hours of computing time using density functional theory (DFT). Here, we propose to predict the ground-state 3D geometries from molecular graphs using machine learning methods. To make this feasible, we develop a benchmark, known as Molecule3D, that includes a dataset with precise ground-state geometries of approximately 4 million molecules derived from DFT. We also provide a set of software tools for data processing, splitting, training, and evaluation, etc. Specifically, we propose to assess the error and validity of predicted geometries using four metrics. We implement two baseline methods that either predict the pairwise distance between atoms or atom coordinates in 3D space. Experimental results show that, compared with generating 3D geometries with RDKit, our method can achieve comparable prediction accuracy but with much smaller computational costs. Our Molecule3D is available as a module of the MoleculeX software library (https://github.com/divelab/MoleculeX).

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 30, 2021

Molecular Implementation of the Machine-Learned Skala Exchange-Correlation Functional in CP2K through GauXC

Machine-learned exchange--correlation (XC) functionals offer a route to improve Kohn--Sham density-functional theory without incurring the cost of explicitly correlated electronic-structure methods. Their use in production simulation codes, however, requires a well-defined mapping between the learned model and the host-code density representation. We formulate and implement a Skala-1.1 interface in CP2K through the external GauXC library. CP2K supplies the geometry, Gaussian basis, spin-resolved atomic-orbital density matrix, and communicator, while GauXC evaluates the XC energy, atomic-orbital potential matrix, and available nuclear derivatives. The interface accepts both all-electron and valence-only density matrices. The latter may arise from separable dual-space pseudopotentials or molecular effective-core potentials. Implementation errors are isolated from functional differences by comparing the Perdew--Burke--Ernzerhof (PBE) functional evaluated through GauXC with native CP2K PBE. The resulting interface gives consistent energies, forces validated against finite-difference total-energy checks, and force-based molecular-virial diagnostics for representative molecular cases. The dietGMTKN55 benchmark suite is evaluated with an all-electron Gaussian augmented plane-wave treatment for elements up to bromine and def2 effective-core potentials for the heavier elements. The resulting aggregate mean absolute deviation of 1.255 kcal/mol is within 0.020 kcal/mol of the corresponding Skala reference value of 1.235 kcal/mol. This work establishes a validated molecular implementation of Skala in CP2K through GauXC.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 18

AQCat25: Unlocking spin-aware, high-fidelity machine learning potentials for heterogeneous catalysis

Large-scale datasets have enabled highly accurate machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) for general-purpose heterogeneous catalysis modeling. There are, however, some limitations in what can be treated with these potentials because of gaps in the underlying training data. To extend these capabilities, we introduce AQCat25, a complementary dataset of 13.5 million density functional theory (DFT) single point calculations designed to improve the treatment of systems where spin polarization and/or higher fidelity are critical. We also investigate methodologies for integrating new datasets, such as AQCat25, with the broader Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset to create spin-aware models without sacrificing generalizability. We find that directly tuning a general model on AQCat25 leads to catastrophic forgetting of the original dataset's knowledge. Conversely, joint training strategies prove effective for improving accuracy on the new data without sacrificing general performance. This joint approach introduces a challenge, as the model must learn from a dataset containing both mixed-fidelity calculations and mixed-physics (spin-polarized vs. unpolarized). We show that explicitly conditioning the model on this system-specific metadata, for example by using Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), successfully addresses this challenge and further enhances model accuracy. Ultimately, our work establishes an effective protocol for bridging DFT fidelity domains to advance the predictive power of foundational models in catalysis.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 26, 2025

Multi-property directed generative design of inorganic materials through Wyckoff-augmented transfer learning

Accelerated materials discovery is an urgent demand to drive advancements in fields such as energy conversion, storage, and catalysis. Property-directed generative design has emerged as a transformative approach for rapidly discovering new functional inorganic materials with multiple desired properties within vast and complex search spaces. However, this approach faces two primary challenges: data scarcity for functional properties and the multi-objective optimization required to balance competing tasks. Here, we present a multi-property-directed generative framework designed to overcome these limitations and enhance site symmetry-compliant crystal generation beyond P1 (translational) symmetry. By incorporating Wyckoff-position-based data augmentation and transfer learning, our framework effectively handles sparse and small functional datasets, enabling the generation of new stable materials simultaneously conditioned on targeted space group, band gap, and formation energy. Using this approach, we identified previously unknown thermodynamically and lattice-dynamically stable semiconductors in tetragonal, trigonal, and cubic systems, with bandgaps ranging from 0.13 to 2.20 eV, as validated by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Additionally, we assessed their thermoelectric descriptors using DFT, indicating their potential suitability for thermoelectric applications. We believe our integrated framework represents a significant step forward in generative design of inorganic materials.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

First principles simulations of dense hydrogen

Accurate knowledge of the properties of hydrogen at high compression is crucial for astrophysics (e.g. planetary and stellar interiors, brown dwarfs, atmosphere of compact stars) and laboratory experiments, including inertial confinement fusion. There exists experimental data for the equation of state, conductivity, and Thomson scattering spectra. However, the analysis of the measurements at extreme pressures and temperatures typically involves additional model assumptions, which makes it difficult to assess the accuracy of the experimental data. rigorously. On the other hand, theory and modeling have produced extensive collections of data. They originate from a very large variety of models and simulations including path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations, density functional theory (DFT), chemical models, machine-learned models, and combinations thereof. At the same time, each of these methods has fundamental limitations (fermion sign problem in PIMC, approximate exchange-correlation functionals of DFT, inconsistent interaction energy contributions in chemical models, etc.), so for some parameter ranges accurate predictions are difficult. Recently, a number of breakthroughs in first principle PIMC and DFT simulations were achieved which are discussed in this review. Here we use these results to benchmark different simulation methods. We present an update of the hydrogen phase diagram at high pressures, the expected phase transitions, and thermodynamic properties including the equation of state and momentum distribution. Furthermore, we discuss available dynamic results for warm dense hydrogen, including the conductivity, dynamic structure factor, plasmon dispersion, imaginary-time structure, and density response functions. We conclude by outlining strategies to combine different simulations to achieve accurate theoretical predictions.

  • 27 authors
·
May 17, 2024

Machine learning for materials discovery: two-dimensional topological insulators

One of the main goals and challenges of materials discovery is to find the best candidates for each interest property or application. Machine learning rises in this context to efficiently optimize this search, exploring the immense materials space, consisting of simultaneously the atomic, compositional, and structural spaces. Topological insulators, presenting symmetry-protected metallic edge states, are a promising class of materials for different applications. However, further, development is limited by the scarcity of viable candidates. Here we present and discuss machine learning-accelerated strategies for searching the materials space for two-dimensional topological materials. We show the importance of detailed investigations of each machine learning component, leading to different results. Using recently created databases containing thousands of ab initio calculations of 2D materials, we train machine learning models capable of determining the electronic topology of materials, with an accuracy of over 90%. We can then generate and screen thousands of novel materials, efficiently predicting their topological character without the need for a priori structural knowledge. We discover 56 non-trivial materials, of which 17 novel insulating candidates for further investigation, for which we corroborate their topological properties with density functional theory calculations. This strategy is 10times more efficient than the trial-and-error approach while few orders of magnitude faster and is a proof of concept for guiding improved materials discovery search strategies.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 14, 2021

Open Catalyst Experiments 2024 (OCx24): Bridging Experiments and Computational Models

The search for low-cost, durable, and effective catalysts is essential for green hydrogen production and carbon dioxide upcycling to help in the mitigation of climate change. Discovery of new catalysts is currently limited by the gap between what AI-accelerated computational models predict and what experimental studies produce. To make progress, large and diverse experimental datasets are needed that are reproducible and tested at industrially-relevant conditions. We address these needs by utilizing a comprehensive high-throughput characterization and experimental pipeline to create the Open Catalyst Experiments 2024 (OCX24) dataset. The dataset contains 572 samples synthesized using both wet and dry methods with X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction characterization. We prepared 441 gas diffusion electrodes, including replicates, and evaluated them using zero-gap electrolysis for carbon dioxide reduction (CO_2RR) and hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) at current densities up to 300 mA/cm^2. To find correlations with experimental outcomes and to perform computational screens, DFT-verified adsorption energies for six adsorbates were calculated on sim20,000 inorganic materials requiring 685 million AI-accelerated relaxations. Remarkably from this large set of materials, a data driven Sabatier volcano independently identified Pt as being a top candidate for HER without having any experimental measurements on Pt or Pt-alloy samples. We anticipate the availability of experimental data generated specifically for AI training, such as OCX24, will significantly improve the utility of computational models in selecting materials for experimental screening.

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 17, 2024

Reactive Chemistry at Unrestricted Coupled Cluster Level: High-throughput Calculations for Training Machine Learning Potentials

Accurately modeling chemical reactions at the atomistic level requires high-level electronic structure theory due to the presence of unpaired electrons and the need to properly describe bond breaking and making energetics. Commonly used approaches such as Density Functional Theory (DFT) frequently fail for this task due to deficiencies that are well recognized. However, for high-fidelity approaches, creating large datasets of energies and forces for reactive processes to train machine learning interatomic potentials or force fields is daunting. For example, the use of the unrestricted coupled cluster level of theory has previously been seen as unfeasible due to high computational costs, the lack of analytical gradients in many computational codes, and additional challenges such as constructing suitable basis set corrections for forces. In this work, we develop new methods and workflows to overcome the challenges inherent to automating unrestricted coupled cluster calculations. Using these advancements, we create a dataset of gas-phase reactions containing energies and forces for 3119 different organic molecules configurations calculated at the gold-standard level of unrestricted CCSD(T) (coupled cluster singles doubles and perturbative triples). With this dataset, we provide an analysis of the differences between the density functional and unrestricted CCSD(T) descriptions. We develop a transferable machine learning interatomic potential for gas-phase reactions, trained on unrestricted CCSD(T) data, and demonstrate the advantages of transitioning away from DFT data. Transitioning from training to DFT to training to UCCSD(T) datasets yields an improvement of more than 0.1 eV/Å in force accuracy and over 0.1 eV in activation energy reproduction.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

What types of chemical problems benefit from density-corrected DFT? A probe using an extensive and chemically diverse test suite

For the large and chemically diverse GMTKN55 benchmark suite, we have studied the performance of density-corrected density functional theory (HF-DFT), compared to self-consistent DFT, for several pure and hybrid GGA and meta-GGA exchange-correlation (XC) functionals (PBE, BLYP, TPSS, SCAN) as a function of the percentage of HF exchange in the hybrid. The D4 empirical dispersion correction has been added throughout. For subsets dominated by dynamical correlation -- particularly noncovalent interaction subsets -- HF-DFT is highly beneficial, particularly at low HF exchange percentages. For subsets with significant static correlation (i.e., where a Hartree-Fock determinant is not a good zero-order wavefunction), HF-DFT may do more harm than good. While the self-consistent series show optima at or near 37.5% (i.e., 3/8) for all four XC functionals -- consistent with Grimme's proposal of the PBE38 functional -- HF-BnLYP-D4, HF-PBEn-D4, and HF-TPSSn-D4 all exhibit minima nearer 25% (i.e., 1/4). Intriguingly, for HF-SCANn-D4, the minimum is near 10%, but the weighted mean absolute error (WTMAD2) for GMTKN55 is only barely lower than that of HF-SCAN-D4 (i.e., where the post-HF step is a pure meta-GGA). The latter becomes an attractive option, only slightly more costly than pure Hartree-Fock, and devoid of adjustable parameters other than the three in the dispersion correction. Moreover, its WTMAD2 is only surpassed by the highly empirical M06-2X and by the combinatorically optimized empirical range-separated hybrids wB97X-V and wB97M-V.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 4, 2020

QuantumChem-200K: A Large-Scale Open Organic Molecular Dataset for Quantum-Chemistry Property Screening and Language Model Benchmarking

The discovery of next-generation photoinitiators for two-photon polymerization (TPP) is hindered by the absence of large, open datasets containing the quantum-chemical and photophysical properties required to model photodissociation and excited-state behavior. Existing molecular datasets typically provide only basic physicochemical descriptors and therefore cannot support data-driven screening or AI-assisted design of photoinitiators. To address this gap, we introduce QuantumChem-200K, a large-scale dataset of over 200,000 organic molecules annotated with eleven quantum-chemical properties, including two-photon absorption (TPA) cross sections, TPA spectral ranges, singlet-triplet intersystem crossing (ISC) energies, toxicity and synthetic accessibility scores, hydrophilicity, solubility, boiling point, molecular weight, and aromaticity. These values are computed using a hybrid workflow that integrates density function theory (DFT), semi-empirical excited-state methods, atomistic quantum solvers, and neural-network predictors. Using QuantumChem-200K, we fine tune the open-source Qwen2.5-32B large language model to create a chemistry AI assistant capable of forward property prediction from SMILES. Benchmarking on 3000 unseen molecules from VQM24 and ZINC20 demonstrates that domain-specific fine-tuning significantly improves accuracy over GPT-4o, Llama-3.1-70B, and the base Qwen2.5-32B model, particularly for TPA and ISC predictions central to photoinitiator design. QuantumChem-200K and the corresponding AI assistant together provide the first scalable platform for high-throughput, LLM-driven photoinitiator screening and accelerated discovery of photosensitive materials.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 22, 2025

Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions

The task of locating first order saddle points on high-dimensional surfaces describing the variation of energy as a function of atomic coordinates is an essential step for identifying the mechanism and estimating the rate of thermally activated events within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory. When combined directly with electronic structure calculations, the number of energy and atomic force evaluations needed for convergence is a primary issue. Here, we describe an efficient implementation of Gaussian process regression (GPR) acceleration of the minimum mode following method where a dimer is used to estimate the lowest eigenmode of the Hessian. A surrogate energy surface is constructed and updated after each electronic structure calculation. The method is applied to a test set of 500 molecular reactions previously generated by Hermez and coworkers [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 18, 6974 (2022)]. An order of magnitude reduction in the number of electronic structure calculations needed to reach the saddle point configurations is obtained by using the GPR compared to the dimer method. Despite the wide range in stiffness of the molecular degrees of freedom, the calculations are carried out using Cartesian coordinates and are found to require similar number of electronic structure calculations as an elaborate internal coordinate method implemented in the Sella software package. The present implementation of the GPR surrogate model in C++ is efficient enough for the wall time of the saddle point searches to be reduced in 3 out of 4 cases even though the calculations are carried out at a low Hartree-Fock level.

  • 5 authors
·
May 18, 2025 7

CP2K: An electronic structure and molecular dynamics software package - Dynamics, Transport, and Spectroscopic Response

One of the distinguishing aspects of CP2K is its seamless integration of diverse structural and transition-state optimization techniques with advanced sampling approaches including Monte Carlo, molecular dynamics, and metadynamics, enabling the efficient exploration of complex potential- and free-energy landscapes, including rare events. These capabilities are combined with a broad hierarchy of energy and force evaluation methods, ranging from classical and machine-learned interaction potentials and mixed quantum-classical multiscale and semiempirical schemes, to highly accurate quantum-mechanical electronic-structure approaches. At the heart of the latter lies the Gaussian and plane-wave framework, along with its augmented all-electron generalization, which have been described in detail in our previous code review [T. D. Kühne et al., J. Chem. Phys. 152, 194103 (2020)]. Building on this foundation, the present work revisits the methods within CP2K that turn electronic structure into dynamics, transport, and spectroscopic response. Particular emphasis is placed on the coupling between static response calculations and nuclear motion: spectra may be evaluated at optimized structures, averaged over thermally sampled configurations, obtained from time-correlation functions along ab-initio or path integral molecular trajectories, or followed in real time together with electronic and nuclear dynamics. The same modular structure also enables equilibrium and biased transport simulations, from Kubo-type linear response to open-boundary approaches under external potentials, highlighting CP2K's unique capability to unify quantum chemistry with quantum and statistical mechanics within a versatile, holistic simulation environment.

  • 42 authors
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Jul 30

A Graph Neural Network for the Era of Large Atomistic Models

Foundation models, or large atomistic models (LAMs), aim to universally represent the ground-state potential energy surface (PES) of atomistic systems as defined by density functional theory (DFT). The scaling law is pivotal in the development of large models, suggesting that their generalizability in downstream tasks consistently improves with increased model size, expanded training datasets, and larger computational budgets. In this study, we present DPA3, a multi-layer graph neural network founded on line graph series (LiGS), designed explicitly for the era of LAMs. We demonstrate that the generalization error of the DPA3 model adheres to the scaling law. The scalability in the number of model parameters is attained by stacking additional layers within DPA3. Additionally, the model employs a dataset encoding mechanism that decouples the scaling of training data size from the model size within its multi-task training framework. When trained as problem-oriented potential energy models, the DPA3 model exhibits superior accuracy in the majority of benchmark cases, encompassing systems with diverse features, including molecules, bulk materials, surface and cluster catalysts, two-dimensional materials, and battery materials. When trained as a LAM on the OpenLAM-v1 dataset, the DPA-3.1-3M model exhibits state-of-the-art performance in the LAMBench benchmark suite for LAMs, demonstrating lowest overall zero-shot generalization error across 17 downstream tasks from a broad spectrum of research domains. This performance suggests superior accuracy as an out-of-the-box potential model, requiring minimal fine-tuning data for downstream scientific applications.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

Inverse Materials Design via Joint Generation of Crystal Structures and Local Electronic Descriptors

Inverse design of inorganic crystals, in which structures are generated to satisfy a target property while preserving diversity and physical plausibility, remains more demanding than ab initio generation, as property conditioning can degrade the structural quality that current generative models otherwise achieve. We propose a diffusion framework that jointly denoises crystal-structure variables and site-resolved local electronic descriptors through a shared score network. As representative descriptors, we adopt Bader charge and atomic density of states (atomic DOS). Under both band-gap and formation energy conditioned generation, the joint models achieved higher success rates than the structure-only baseline in most target conditions, while simultaneously increasing the fraction of generated structures that satisfy uniqueness, novelty, thermodynamic stability, and physical validity (VSUN criteria). A dummy-variable control confirms that these gains originate from the electronic content of the descriptors rather than from auxiliary site-wise variables. The generated Bader charges agree with DFT references with an MAE of 5.5e-2 e on stable structures, and the generated atomic DOS captures the coarse spectral profile of the DFT reference around the modal accuracy range, although finer details and accuracy vary with elemental species. These results establish local electronic descriptors as effective generative variables that serve two complementary roles: broadening the explored materials space through increased structural diversity, and mitigating the trade-off between property targeting and structural quality by guiding the structural trajectory toward electronically plausible configurations during joint denoising.

  • 3 authors
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May 1

OrbNet Denali: A machine learning potential for biological and organic chemistry with semi-empirical cost and DFT accuracy

We present OrbNet Denali, a machine learning model for electronic structure that is designed as a drop-in replacement for ground-state density functional theory (DFT) energy calculations. The model is a message-passing neural network that uses symmetry-adapted atomic orbital features from a low-cost quantum calculation to predict the energy of a molecule. OrbNet Denali is trained on a vast dataset of 2.3 million DFT calculations on molecules and geometries. This dataset covers the most common elements in bio- and organic chemistry (H, Li, B, C, N, O, F, Na, Mg, Si, P, S, Cl, K, Ca, Br, I) as well as charged molecules. OrbNet Denali is demonstrated on several well-established benchmark datasets, and we find that it provides accuracy that is on par with modern DFT methods while offering a speedup of up to three orders of magnitude. For the GMTKN55 benchmark set, OrbNet Denali achieves WTMAD-1 and WTMAD-2 scores of 7.19 and 9.84, on par with modern DFT functionals. For several GMTKN55 subsets, which contain chemical problems that are not present in the training set, OrbNet Denali produces a mean absolute error comparable to those of DFT methods. For the Hutchison conformers benchmark set, OrbNet Denali has a median correlation coefficient of R^2=0.90 compared to the reference DLPNO-CCSD(T) calculation, and R^2=0.97 compared to the method used to generate the training data (wB97X-D3/def2-TZVP), exceeding the performance of any other method with a similar cost. Similarly, the model reaches chemical accuracy for non-covalent interactions in the S66x10 dataset. For torsional profiles, OrbNet Denali reproduces the torsion profiles of wB97X-D3/def2-TZVP with an average MAE of 0.12 kcal/mol for the potential energy surfaces of the diverse fragments in the TorsionNet500 dataset.

  • 11 authors
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Jul 1, 2021

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

  • 38 authors
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Jun 20, 2023

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. Here, we present UniFFBench, a comprehensive framework for evaluating UMLFFs against experimental measurements of ~1,500 carefully curated mineral structures spanning diverse chemical environments, bonding types, structural complexity, and elastic properties. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial reality gap: models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. Most strikingly, we observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method. These findings demonstrate that while current computational benchmarks provide valuable controlled comparisons, they may overestimate model reliability when extrapolated to experimentally complex chemical spaces. Altogether, UniFFBench establishes essential experimental validation standards and reveals systematic limitations that must be addressed to achieve truly universal force field capabilities.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

The Open Catalyst 2025 (OC25) Dataset and Models for Solid-Liquid Interfaces

Catalysis at solid-liquid interfaces plays a central role in the advancement of energy storage and sustainable chemical production technologies. By enabling accurate, long-time scale simulations, machine learning (ML) models have the potential to accelerate the discovery of (electro)catalysts. While prior Open Catalyst datasets (OC20 and OC22) have advanced the field by providing large-scale density functional theory (DFT) data of adsorbates on surfaces at solid-gas interfaces, they do not capture the critical role of solvent and electrolyte effects at solid-liquid interfaces. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Open Catalyst 2025 (OC25) dataset, consisting of 7,801,261 calculations across 1,511,270 unique explicit solvent environments. OC25 constitutes the largest and most diverse solid-liquid interface dataset that is currently available and provides configurational and elemental diversity: spanning 88 elements, commonly used solvents/ions, varying solvent layers, and off-equilibrium sampling. State-of-the-art models trained on the OC25 dataset exhibit energy, force, and solvation energy errors as low as 0.1 eV, 0.015 eV/A, and 0.04 eV, respectively; significantly lower than than the recently released Universal Models for Atoms (UMA-OC20). Additionally, we discuss the impact of the quality of DFT-calculated forces on model training and performance. The dataset and accompanying baseline models are made openly available for the community. We anticipate the dataset to facilitate large length-scale and long-timescale simulations of catalytic transformations at solid-liquid interfaces, advancing molecular-level insights into functional interfaces and enabling the discovery of next-generation energy storage and conversion technologies.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025

CrystalReasoner: Reasoning and RL for Property-Conditioned Crystal Structure Generation

Generative modeling has emerged as a promising approach for crystal structure discovery. However, existing LLM-based generative models struggle with low-level atomic precision, while diffusion-based methods fall short in integrating high-level scientific knowledge. As a result, generated structures are often invalid, unstable, or do not possess desirable properties. To address this gap, we propose CrystalReasoner (\method), an end-to-end LLM framework that generates crystal structures from natural language instructions through reasoning and alignment. \method introduces physical priors as thinking tokens, which include crystallographic symmetry, local coordination environments and predicted physical properties before generating atomic coordinates. This bridges the gap between natural language and 3D structures. \method then employs reinforcement learning (RL) with a multi-objective, dense reward function to align generation with physical validity, chemical consistency, and thermodynamic stability. For property-conditioned tasks, we design task-specific reward functions and train specialized models for discrete constraints (e.g., space group) and continuous properties (e.g., elasticity, thermal expansion). Empirical results demonstrate that compared to prior works and baselines without thinking traces or RL, \method obtains better performance on diverse metrics, triples S.U.N. ratio, and achieves better performance for property conditioned generation. \method also exhibits adaptive reasoning, increasing reasoning lengths as the number of atoms increases. Our work demonstrates the potential of leveraging thinking traces and RL for generating valid, stable, and property-conditioned crystal structures. Please see our work at https://crystalreasoner.github.io/ .

  • 4 authors
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May 13

CIS(2): a state-specific, size-intensive perturbative correction to configuration interaction singles

We present a state-specific second-order perturbation theory based on a configuration interaction singles (CIS) reference and its generalized Fock operator. Starting from a fully internally contracted construction, we retain the complete doubles space and internally contracted triples in the first-order wave function. We consider two partitions, Canonical and Block-diagonal, with reference excitation energies given by the Fock excitation gap ω^{(0)} and the CIS excitation energy ω_{rm CIS}, respectively. Our analysis establishes that strict size-intensivity is preserved when the contracted-triples denominators use bare Fock gaps and the occupied--virtual Fock block is projected to remove residual spectator coupling. Based on this observation, combining Canonical triples with Block-diagonal doubles yields a size-intensive Hybrid partition. These properties are verified for water with non-interacting helium atoms. Our formulation enables O(o^3v^2) cost per matrix--vector product in a semicanonical basis. On the QUEST\#1 benchmark, Canonical and Block-diagonal show opposite systematic biases, whereas Hybrid gives the best overall accuracy among the three partitions. Its mean absolute errors for singlets and triplets are 0.24 and 0.15~eV, compared with 0.28 and 0.22~eV for CIS(D). The improvement is largest for Rydberg excitations, although CIS(D) remains more accurate for valence singlets.

  • 1 authors
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Oct 1

Importance of Electronic Entropy for Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) enable large-scale atomistic simulations but remain challenged in describing mixed-valence materials where charge ordering strongly influences thermodynamic stability. Here we investigate the role of electronic entropy in MLIP structural optimization of the battery cathode material NaFePO4. We show that conventional MLIPs fail to reproduce the correct stability of intermediate Na concentrations because structural optimization leads to incorrect Fe^{2+}/Fe^{3+} charge assignments, resulting in erroneous energy ordering and convex-hull predictions. Analysis of magnetic moments during structural optimization reveals that MLIPs are unable to capture electronic entropy associated with charge ordering. To address this limitation, we introduce an approach that embeds charge-state information directly into the MLIP representation by distinguishing between Fe^{2+} and Fe^{3+} environments during training. Retraining CHGNet, cPaiNN, and MACE with this representation enables accurate structural optimization, correct identification of charge ordering, and improved agreement with density functional theory convex hulls. Our results demonstrate that incorporating electronic entropy into MLIP representations is essential for modeling charge-disordered materials and provide a practical framework for extending MLIP simulations to mixed-valence transition-metal systems.

  • 5 authors
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Mar 26

OXtal: An All-Atom Diffusion Model for Organic Crystal Structure Prediction

Accurately predicting experimentally realizable 3D molecular crystal structures from their 2D chemical graphs is a long-standing open challenge in computational chemistry called crystal structure prediction (CSP). Efficiently solving this problem has implications ranging from pharmaceuticals to organic semiconductors, as crystal packing directly governs the physical and chemical properties of organic solids. In this paper, we introduce OXtal, a large-scale 100M parameter all-atom diffusion model that directly learns the conditional joint distribution over intramolecular conformations and periodic packing. To efficiently scale OXtal, we abandon explicit equivariant architectures imposing inductive bias arising from crystal symmetries in favor of data augmentation strategies. We further propose a novel crystallization-inspired lattice-free training scheme, Stoichiometric Stochastic Shell Sampling (S^4), that efficiently captures long-range interactions while sidestepping explicit lattice parametrization -- thus enabling more scalable architectural choices at all-atom resolution. By leveraging a large dataset of 600K experimentally validated crystal structures (including rigid and flexible molecules, co-crystals, and solvates), OXtal achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements over prior ab initio machine learning CSP methods, while remaining orders of magnitude cheaper than traditional quantum-chemical approaches. Specifically, OXtal recovers experimental structures with conformer RMSD_1<0.5 Å and attains over 80\% packing similarity rate, demonstrating its ability to model both thermodynamic and kinetic regularities of molecular crystallization.

  • 11 authors
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Apr 19

The Open Catalyst 2022 (OC22) Dataset and Challenges for Oxide Electrocatalysts

The development of machine learning models for electrocatalysts requires a broad set of training data to enable their use across a wide variety of materials. One class of materials that currently lacks sufficient training data is oxides, which are critical for the development of OER catalysts. To address this, we developed the OC22 dataset, consisting of 62,331 DFT relaxations (~9,854,504 single point calculations) across a range of oxide materials, coverages, and adsorbates. We define generalized total energy tasks that enable property prediction beyond adsorption energies; we test baseline performance of several graph neural networks; and we provide pre-defined dataset splits to establish clear benchmarks for future efforts. In the most general task, GemNet-OC sees a ~36% improvement in energy predictions when combining the chemically dissimilar OC20 and OC22 datasets via fine-tuning. Similarly, we achieved a ~19% improvement in total energy predictions on OC20 and a ~9% improvement in force predictions in OC22 when using joint training. We demonstrate the practical utility of a top performing model by capturing literature adsorption energies and important OER scaling relationships. We expect OC22 to provide an important benchmark for models seeking to incorporate intricate long-range electrostatic and magnetic interactions in oxide surfaces. Dataset and baseline models are open sourced, and a public leaderboard is available to encourage continued community developments on the total energy tasks and data.

  • 17 authors
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Jun 17, 2022