Improving Reliability of Machine Learned Interatomic Potentials With Physics-Informed Pretraining

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-informed pretraining method for machine learned interatomic potentials, enhancing their stability and accuracy in molecular dynamics simulations across diverse materials.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel pretraining approach using simple physical potentials to improve MLIP robustness and reliability in materials simulations.

Findings

Pretraining improves stability in MD simulations.

Enhanced prediction accuracy across multiple MLIP architectures.

Effective across diverse material systems.

Abstract

Machine learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have emerged as powerful tools for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with their competitive accuracy and computational efficiency. However, MLIPs are often observed to exhibit un-physical behavior when encountering configurations which deviate significantly from their training data distribution, leading to simulation instabilities and unreliable dynamics, thus limiting the reliability of MLIPs for materials simulations. We present a physics-informed pretraining strategy that leverages simple physical potentials which can improve the robustness and stability of graph-based MLIPs for MD simulations. We demonstrate this approach by deploying a pretraining-finetuning pipeline where MLIPs are initially pretrained on data labelled with embedded atom model potentials and subsequently finetuned on the quantum mechanical ground truth data. By evaluating across three diverse material systems (phosphorus, silica, and a subset of Materials Project) and three representative MLIP architectures (CGCNN, M3GNet, and TorchMD-NET), we find that this physics-informed pretraining consistently improves both prediction accuracy as well as stability in MD compared to the baselines.