Crystal structures are characterized by atomic bases within a primitive unit cell that repeats along a regular lattice throughout 3D space. The periodic and infinite nature of crystals poses unique challenges for geometric graph representation learning. Specifically, constructing graphs that effectively capture the complete geometric information of crystals and handle chiral crystals remains an unsolved and challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the periodic patterns of unit cells to establish the lattice-based representation for each atom, enabling efficient and expressive graph representations of crystals. Furthermore, we propose ComFormer, a SE(3) transformer designed specifically for crystalline materials. ComFormer includes two variants; namely, iComFormer that employs invariant geometric descriptors of Euclidean distances and angles, and eComFormer that utilizes equivariant vector representations. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art predictive accuracy of ComFormer variants on various tasks across three widely-used crystal benchmarks. Our code is publicly available as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS). However, the current reliance on traditional, costly, and time-consuming trial-and-error experimental methods poses practical challenges. In this regard, computational approaches based on quantum mechanics, such as density functional theory (DFT), have made significant contributions for predicting the physical and chemical properties of materials to guide materials discovery experiments. However, these crystal graph representations have limitations in distinguishing different crystalline materials. In other words, they cannot guarantee to capture the complete geometric information of input crystal structures, and may map different crystal structures with different properties to the same graph representation and produce the identical property predictions. Illustrative examples and detailed discussions can be found in Appendix A.1. While graph representations that can capture any structural differences in small molecules have been investigated in previous works (Wang et al., 2022; Klicpera et al., 2021), these methods fail short to capture periodic patterns of crystals and cannot maintain geometric completeness for crystals.

Accurately predicting the elastic properties of crystalline solids is vital for computational materials science. However, traditional atomistic scale ab initio approaches are computationally intensive, especially for studying complex materials with a large number of atoms in a unit cell. We introduce a novel data-driven approach to efficiently predict the elastic properties of crystal structures using SE(3)-equivariant graph neural networks (GNNs). This approach yields important scalar elastic moduli with the accuracy comparable to recent data-driven studies. Importantly, our symmetry-aware GNNs model also enables the prediction of the strain energy density (SED) and the associated elastic constants, the fundamental tensorial quantities that are significantly influenced by a material's crystallographic group. The model consistently distinguishes independent elements of SED tensors, in accordance with the symmetry of the crystal structures. Finally, our deep learning model possesses meaningful latent features, offering an interpretable prediction of the elastic properties.

Use of graphs to represent crystal structures has become popular in recent years as they provide a natural translation from atoms and bonds to nodes and edges. Graphs capture structure, while remaining invariant to the symmetries that crystals display. Several works in property prediction, including those with state-of-the-art results, make use of the Crystal Graph. The present work offers a graph based on Point-wise Distance Distributions which retains symmetrical invariance, decreases computational load, and yields similar or better prediction accuracy on both experimental and simulated crystals.

In recent years, graph neural network (GNN) based approaches have emerged as a powerful technique to encode complex topological structure of crystal materials in an enriched representation space. These models are often supervised in nature and using the property-specific training data, learn relationship between crystal structure and different properties like formation energy, bandgap, bulk modulus, etc. Most of these methods require a huge amount of property-tagged data to train the system which may not be available for different properties. However, there is an availability of a huge amount of crystal data with its chemical composition and structural bonds. To leverage these untapped data, this paper presents CrysGNN, a new pre-trained GNN framework for crystalline materials, which captures both node and graph level structural information of crystal graphs using a huge amount of unlabelled material data. Further, we extract distilled knowledge from CrysGNN and inject into different state of the art property predictors to enhance their property prediction accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments to show that with distilled knowledge from the pre-trained model, all the SOTA algorithms are able to outperform their own vanilla version with good margins. We also observe that the distillation process provides a significant improvement over the conventional approach of finetuning the pre-trained model. We have released the pre-trained model along with the large dataset of 800K crystal graph which we carefully curated; so that the pretrained model can be plugged into any existing and upcoming models to enhance their prediction accuracy.

Predicting material properties base on micro structure of materials has long been a challenging problem. Recently many deep learning methods have been developed for material property prediction. In this study, we propose a crystal representation learning framework, Orbital CrystalNet, OCrystalNet, which consists of two parts: atomic descriptor generation and graph representation learning. In OCrystalNet, we first incorporate orbital field matrix (OFM) and atomic features to construct OFM-feature atomic descriptor, and then the atomic descriptor is used as atom embedding in the atom-bond message passing module which takes advantage of the topological structure of crystal graphs to learn crystal representation. To demonstrate the capabilities of OCrystalNet we performed a number of prediction tasks on Material Project dataset and JARVIS dataset and compared our model with other baselines and state of art methods. To further present the effectiveness of OCrystalNet, we conducted ablation study and case study of our model. The results show that our model have various advantages over other state of art models.