Nikolaj Rønne

Nikolaj Rønne, Mads-Peter V. Christiansen, Andreas Møller Slavensky et al.

We describe a local surrogate model for use in conjunction with global structure search methods. The model follows the Gaussian approximation potential (GAP) formalism and is based on a the smooth overlap of atomic positions descriptor with sparsification in terms of a reduced number of local environments using mini-batch $k$-means. The model is implemented in the Atomistic Global Optimization X framework and used as a partial replacement of the local relaxations in basin hopping structure search. The approach is shown to be robust for a wide range of atomistic system including molecules, nano-particles, surface supported clusters and surface thin films. The benefits in a structure search context of a local surrogate model are demonstrated. This includes the ability to transfer learning from smaller systems as well as the possibility to perform concurrent multi-stoichiometry searches.

Andreas Burger, Luca Thiede, Nikolaj Rønne et al.

Fundamental tasks in computational chemistry, from transition state search to vibrational analysis, rely on molecular Hessians, which are the second derivatives of the potential energy. Yet, Hessians are computationally expensive to calculate and scale poorly with system size, with both quantum mechanical methods and neural networks. In this work, we demonstrate that Hessians can be predicted directly from a deep learning model, without relying on automatic differentiation or finite differences. We observe that one can construct SE(3)-equivariant, symmetric Hessians from irreducible representations (irrep) features up to degree $l$=2 computed during message passing in graph neural networks. This makes HIP Hessians one to two orders of magnitude faster, more accurate, more memory efficient, easier to train, and enables more favorable scaling with system size. We validate our predictions across a wide range of downstream tasks, demonstrating consistently superior performance for transition state search, accelerated geometry optimization, zero-point energy corrections, and vibrational analysis benchmarks. We open-source the HIP codebase and model weights to enable further development of the direct prediction of Hessians at https://github.com/BurgerAndreas/hip