Adri C. T. van Duin

Mert Y. Sengul, Yao Song, Linglin He et al.

Motivated by the problem of optimization of force-field systems in physics using large-scale computer simulations, we consider exploration of a deterministic complex multivariate response surface. The objective is to find input combinations that generate output close to some desired or "target" vector. In spite of reducing the problem to exploration of the input space with respect to a one-dimensional loss function, the search is nontrivial and challenging due to infeasible input combinations, high dimensionalities of the input and output space and multiple "desirable" regions in the input space and the difficulty of emulating the objective function well with a surrogate model. We propose an approach that is based on combining machine learning techniques with smart experimental design ideas to locate multiple good regions in the input space.

H. R. Larsson, A. C. T. van Duin, B. Hartke

We have used unbiased global optimization to fit a reactive force field to a given set of reference data. Specifically, we have employed genetic algorithms (GA) to fit ReaxFF to SiOH data, using an in-house GA code that is parallelized across reference data items via the message-passing interface (MPI). Details of GA tuning turn out to be far less important for global optimization efficiency than using suitable ranges within which the parameters are varied. To establish these ranges, either prior knowledge can be used or successive stages of GA optimizations, each building upon the best parameter vectors and ranges found in the previous stage. We finally arrive at optimized force fields with smaller error measures than those published previously. Hence, this optimization approach will contribute to converting force-field fitting from a specialist task to an everyday commodity, even for the more difficult case of reactive force fields.