Brandon M. Wood

LG
h-index158
11papers
1,146citations
Novelty50%
AI Score52

11 Papers

MTRL-SCIJun 17, 2022Code
The Open Catalyst 2022 (OC22) Dataset and Challenges for Oxide Electrocatalysts

Richard Tran, Janice Lan, Muhammed Shuaibi et al. · baidu, cmu

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.

MTRL-SCINov 29, 2022
AdsorbML: A Leap in Efficiency for Adsorption Energy Calculations using Generalizable Machine Learning Potentials

Janice Lan, Aini Palizhati, Muhammed Shuaibi et al. · meta-ai

Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the adsorption energy for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations more accurately and efficiently. Our algorithm provides a spectrum of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration 87.36% of the time, while achieving a 2000x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 100,000 unique configurations.

LGMar 18, 2022
Towards Training Billion Parameter Graph Neural Networks for Atomic Simulations

Anuroop Sriram, Abhishek Das, Brandon M. Wood et al. · baidu, cmu

Recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for modeling atomic simulations has the potential to revolutionize catalyst discovery, which is a key step in making progress towards the energy breakthroughs needed to combat climate change. However, the GNNs that have proven most effective for this task are memory intensive as they model higher-order interactions in the graphs such as those between triplets or quadruplets of atoms, making it challenging to scale these models. In this paper, we introduce Graph Parallelism, a method to distribute input graphs across multiple GPUs, enabling us to train very large GNNs with hundreds of millions or billions of parameters. We empirically evaluate our method by scaling up the number of parameters of the recently proposed DimeNet++ and GemNet models by over an order of magnitude. On the large-scale Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset, these graph-parallelized models lead to relative improvements of 1) 15% on the force MAE metric for the S2EF task and 2) 21% on the AFbT metric for the IS2RS task, establishing new state-of-the-art results.

LGOct 25, 2023
From Molecules to Materials: Pre-training Large Generalizable Models for Atomic Property Prediction

Nima Shoghi, Adeesh Kolluru, John R. Kitchin et al.

Foundation models have been transformational in machine learning fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. Similar success in atomic property prediction has been limited due to the challenges of training effective models across multiple chemical domains. To address this, we introduce Joint Multi-domain Pre-training (JMP), a supervised pre-training strategy that simultaneously trains on multiple datasets from different chemical domains, treating each dataset as a unique pre-training task within a multi-task framework. Our combined training dataset consists of $\sim$120M systems from OC20, OC22, ANI-1x, and Transition-1x. We evaluate performance and generalization by fine-tuning over a diverse set of downstream tasks and datasets including: QM9, rMD17, MatBench, QMOF, SPICE, and MD22. JMP demonstrates an average improvement of 59% over training from scratch, and matches or sets state-of-the-art on 34 out of 40 tasks. Our work highlights the potential of pre-training strategies that utilize diverse data to advance property prediction across chemical domains, especially for low-data tasks. Please visit https://nima.sh/jmp for further information.

CHEM-PHAug 4, 2025Code
FastCSP: Accelerated Molecular Crystal Structure Prediction with Universal Model for Atoms

Vahe Gharakhanyan, Yi Yang, Luis Barroso-Luque et al. · baidu, cmu

Crystal Structure Prediction (CSP) of molecular crystals plays a central role in applications, such as pharmaceuticals and organic electronics. CSP is challenging and computationally expensive due to the need to explore a large search space with sufficient accuracy to capture energy differences of a few kJ/mol between polymorphs. Dispersion-inclusive density functional theory (DFT) provides the required accuracy but its computational cost is impractical for a large number of putative structures. We introduce FastCSP, an open-source, high-throughput CSP workflow based on machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). FastCSP combines random structure generation using Genarris 3.0 with geometry relaxation and free energy calculations powered entirely by the Universal Model for Atoms (UMA) MLIP. We benchmark FastCSP on a curated set of 28 mostly rigid molecules, demonstrating that our workflow consistently generates known experimental structures and ranks them within 5 kJ/mol per molecule of the global minimum. Our results demonstrate that universal MLIPs can be used across diverse compounds without requiring system-specific tuning. Moreover, the speed and accuracy afforded by UMA eliminate the need for classical force fields in the early stages of CSP and for final re-ranking with DFT. The open-source release of the entire FastCSP workflow significantly lowers the barrier to accessing CSP. CSP results for a single system can be obtained within hours on tens of modern GPUs, making high-throughput crystal structure prediction feasible for a broad range of scientific applications.

COMP-PHFeb 17, 2025
Learning Smooth and Expressive Interatomic Potentials for Physical Property Prediction

Xiang Fu, Brandon M. Wood, Luis Barroso-Luque et al.

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become increasingly effective at approximating quantum mechanical calculations at a fraction of the computational cost. However, lower errors on held out test sets do not always translate to improved results on downstream physical property prediction tasks. In this paper, we propose testing MLIPs on their practical ability to conserve energy during molecular dynamic simulations. If passed, improved correlations are found between test errors and their performance on physical property prediction tasks. We identify choices which may lead to models failing this test, and use these observations to improve upon highly-expressive models. The resulting model, eSEN, provides state-of-the-art results on a range of physical property prediction tasks, including materials stability prediction, thermal conductivity prediction, and phonon calculations.

MTRL-SCIOct 16, 2024
Open Materials 2024 (OMat24) Inorganic Materials Dataset and Models

Luis Barroso-Luque, Muhammed Shuaibi, Xiang Fu et al.

The ability to discover new materials with desirable properties is critical for numerous applications from helping mitigate climate change to advances in next generation computing hardware. AI has the potential to accelerate materials discovery and design by more effectively exploring the chemical space compared to other computational methods or by trial-and-error. While substantial progress has been made on AI for materials data, benchmarks, and models, a barrier that has emerged is the lack of publicly available training data and open pre-trained models. To address this, we present a Meta FAIR release of the Open Materials 2024 (OMat24) large-scale open dataset and an accompanying set of pre-trained models. OMat24 contains over 110 million density functional theory (DFT) calculations focused on structural and compositional diversity. Our EquiformerV2 models achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Matbench Discovery leaderboard and are capable of predicting ground-state stability and formation energies to an F1 score above 0.9 and an accuracy of 20 meV/atom, respectively. We explore the impact of model size, auxiliary denoising objectives, and fine-tuning on performance across a range of datasets including OMat24, MPtraj, and Alexandria. The open release of the OMat24 dataset and models enables the research community to build upon our efforts and drive further advancements in AI-assisted materials science.

MTRL-SCIMar 12, 2025
A practical guide to machine learning interatomic potentials -- Status and future

Ryan Jacobs, Dane Morgan, Siamak Attarian et al.

The rapid development and large body of literature on machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) can make it difficult to know how to proceed for researchers who are not experts but wish to use these tools. The spirit of this review is to help such researchers by serving as a practical, accessible guide to the state-of-the-art in MLIPs. This review paper covers a broad range of topics related to MLIPs, including (i) central aspects of how and why MLIPs are enablers of many exciting advancements in molecular modeling, (ii) the main underpinnings of different types of MLIPs, including their basic structure and formalism, (iii) the potentially transformative impact of universal MLIPs for both organic and inorganic systems, including an overview of the most recent advances, capabilities, downsides, and potential applications of this nascent class of MLIPs, (iv) a practical guide for estimating and understanding the execution speed of MLIPs, including guidance for users based on hardware availability, type of MLIP used, and prospective simulation size and time, (v) a manual for what MLIP a user should choose for a given application by considering hardware resources, speed requirements, energy and force accuracy requirements, as well as guidance for choosing pre-trained potentials or fitting a new potential from scratch, (vi) discussion around MLIP infrastructure, including sources of training data, pre-trained potentials, and hardware resources for training, (vii) summary of some key limitations of present MLIPs and current approaches to mitigate such limitations, including methods of including long-range interactions, handling magnetic systems, and treatment of excited states, and finally (viii) we finish with some more speculative thoughts on what the future holds for the development and application of MLIPs over the next 3-10+ years.

LGOct 30, 2024
FlowLLM: Flow Matching for Material Generation with Large Language Models as Base Distributions

Anuroop Sriram, Benjamin Kurt Miller, Ricky T. Q. Chen et al. · baidu, cmu

Material discovery is a critical area of research with the potential to revolutionize various fields, including carbon capture, renewable energy, and electronics. However, the immense scale of the chemical space makes it challenging to explore all possible materials experimentally. In this paper, we introduce FlowLLM, a novel generative model that combines large language models (LLMs) and Riemannian flow matching (RFM) to design novel crystalline materials. FlowLLM first fine-tunes an LLM to learn an effective base distribution of meta-stable crystals in a text representation. After converting to a graph representation, the RFM model takes samples from the LLM and iteratively refines the coordinates and lattice parameters. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, increasing the generation rate of stable materials by over three times and increasing the rate for stable, unique, and novel crystals by $\sim50\%$ - a huge improvement on a difficult problem. Additionally, the crystals generated by FlowLLM are much closer to their relaxed state when compared with another leading model, significantly reducing post-hoc computational cost.

LGJun 30, 2025
UMA: A Family of Universal Models for Atoms

Brandon M. Wood, Misko Dzamba, Xiang Fu et al. · baidu, cmu

The ability to quickly and accurately compute properties from atomic simulations is critical for advancing a large number of applications in chemistry and materials science including drug discovery, energy storage, and semiconductor manufacturing. To address this need, Meta FAIR presents a family of Universal Models for Atoms (UMA), designed to push the frontier of speed, accuracy, and generalization. UMA models are trained on half a billion unique 3D atomic structures (the largest training runs to date) by compiling data across multiple chemical domains, e.g. molecules, materials, and catalysts. We develop empirical scaling laws to help understand how to increase model capacity alongside dataset size to achieve the best accuracy. The UMA small and medium models utilize a novel architectural design we refer to as mixture of linear experts that enables increasing model capacity without sacrificing speed. For example, UMA-medium has 1.4B parameters but only ~50M active parameters per atomic structure. We evaluate UMA models on a diverse set of applications across multiple domains and find that, remarkably, a single model without any fine-tuning can perform similarly or better than specialized models. We are releasing the UMA code, weights, and associated data to accelerate computational workflows and enable the community to continue to build increasingly capable AI models.

LGMar 6
A recipe for scalable attention-based MLIPs: unlocking long-range accuracy with all-to-all node attention

Eric Qu, Brandon M. Wood, Aditi S. Krishnapriyan et al.

Machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have advanced rapidly, with many top models relying on strong physics-based inductive biases. However, as models scale to larger systems like biomolecules and electrolytes, they struggle to accurately capture long-range (LR) interactions, leading current approaches to rely on explicit physics-based terms or components. In this work, we propose AllScAIP, a straightforward, attention-based, and energy-conserving MLIP model that scales to O(100 million) training samples. It addresses the long-range challenge using an all-to-all node attention component that is data-driven. Extensive ablations reveal that in low-data/small-model regimes, inductive biases improve sample efficiency. However, as data and model size scale, these benefits diminish or even reverse, while all-to-all attention remains critical for capturing LR interactions. Our model achieves state-of-the-art energy/force accuracy on molecular systems, as well as a number of physics-based evaluations (OMol25), while being competitive on materials (OMat24) and catalysts (OC20). Furthermore, it enables stable, long-timescale MD simulations that accurately recover experimental observables, including density and heat of vaporization predictions.