Modeling the energy and forces of atomic systems is a fundamental problem in computational chemistry with the potential to help address many of the world's most pressing problems, including those related to energy scarcity and climate change. These calculations are traditionally performed using Density Functional Theory, which is computationally very expensive. Machine learning has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency of these calculations from days or hours to seconds.We propose the Spherical Channel Network (SCN) to model atomic energies and forces. The SCN is a graph neural network where nodes represent atoms and edges their neighboring atoms. The atom embeddings are a set of spherical functions, called spherical channels, represented using spherical harmonics. We demonstrate, that by rotating the embeddings based on the 3D edge orientation, more information may be utilized while maintaining the rotational equivariance of the messages. While equivariance is a desirable property, we find that by relaxing this constraint in both message passing and aggregation, improved accuracy may be achieved. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the large-scale Open Catalyst 2020 dataset in both energy and force prediction for numerous tasks and metrics.

Density Functional Theory (DFT) is a widely used computational method for estimating the energy and behavior of molecules. Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials (MLIPs) are models trained to approximate DFT-level energies and forces at dramatically lower computational cost. Many modern MLIPs rely on a scalar regression formulation; given information about a molecule, they predict a single energy value and corresponding forces while minimizing absolute error with DFT's calculations. In this work, we explore a multi-class classification formulation that predicts a categorical distribution over energy/force values, providing richer supervision through multiple targets. Most importantly, this approach offers a principled way to quantify model uncertainty. In particular, our method predicts a histogram of the energy/force distribution, converts scalar targets into histograms, and trains the model using cross-entropy loss. Our results demonstrate that this categorical formulation can achieve absolute error performance comparable to regression baselines. Furthermore, this representation enables the quantification of epistemic uncertainty through the entropy of the predicted distribution, offering a measure of model confidence absent in scalar regression approaches.

Hydrogen atom transfer (HAT) reactions are essential in many biological processes, such as radical migration in damaged proteins, but their mechanistic pathways remain incompletely understood. Simulating HAT is challenging due to the need for quantum chemical accuracy at biologically relevant scales; thus, neither classical force fields nor DFT-based molecular dynamics are applicable. Machine-learned potentials offer an alternative, able to learn potential energy surfaces (PESs) with near-quantum accuracy. However, training these models to generalize across diverse HAT configurations, especially at radical positions in proteins, requires tailored data generation and careful model selection. Here, we systematically generate HAT configurations in peptides to build large datasets using semiempirical methods and DFT. We benchmark three graph neural network architectures (SchNet, Allegro, and MACE) on their ability to learn HAT PESs and indirectly predict reaction barriers from energy predictions. MACE consistently outperforms the others in energy, force, and barrier prediction, achieving a mean absolute error of 1.13 kcal/mol on out-of-distribution DFT barrier predictions. Using molecular dynamics, we show our MACE potential is stable, reactive, and generalizes beyond training data to model HAT barriers in collagen I. This accuracy enables integration of ML potentials into large-scale collagen simulations to compute reaction rates from predicted barriers, advancing mechanistic understanding of HAT and radical migration in peptides. We analyze scaling laws, model transferability, and cost-performance trade-offs, and outline strategies for improvement by combining ML potentials with transition state search algorithms and active learning. Our approach is generalizable to other biomolecular systems, enabling quantum-accurate simulations of chemical reactivity in complex environments.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Machine learning potentials (MLPs) have become essential for large-scale atomistic simulations, enabling ab initio-level accuracy with computational efficiency. However, current MLPs struggle with uncertainty quantification, limiting their reliability for active learning, calibration, and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We address these challenges by developing Bayesian E(3) equivariant MLPs with iterative restratification of many-body message passing. Our approach introduces the joint energy-force negative log-likelihood (NLL$_\text{JEF}$) loss function, which explicitly models uncertainty in both energies and interatomic forces, yielding superior accuracy compared to conventional NLL losses. We systematically benchmark multiple Bayesian approaches, including deep ensembles with mean-variance estimation, stochastic weight averaging Gaussian, improved variational online Newton, and laplace approximation by evaluating their performance on uncertainty prediction, OOD detection, calibration, and active learning tasks. We further demonstrate that NLL$_\text{JEF}$ facilitates efficient active learning by quantifying energy and force uncertainties. Using Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD), our framework outperforms random sampling and energy-uncertainty-based sampling. Our results demonstrate that Bayesian MLPs achieve competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art models while enabling uncertainty-guided active learning, OOD detection, and energy/forces calibration. This work establishes Bayesian equivariant neural networks as a powerful framework for developing uncertainty-aware MLPs for atomistic simulations at scale.