Deconstructing equivariant representations in molecular systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Kin Long Kelvin, Galkin, Mikhail, Miret, Santiago
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Lee, Kin Long Kelvin
Galkin, Mikhail
Miret, Santiago
author_facet Lee, Kin Long Kelvin
Galkin, Mikhail
Miret, Santiago
contents Recent equivariant models have shown significant progress in not just chemical property prediction, but as surrogates for dynamical simulations of molecules and materials. Many of the top performing models in this category are built within the framework of tensor products, which preserves equivariance by restricting interactions and transformations to those that are allowed by symmetry selection rules. Despite being a core part of the modeling process, there has not yet been much attention into understanding what information persists in these equivariant representations, and their general behavior outside of benchmark metrics. In this work, we report on a set of experiments using a simple equivariant graph convolution model on the QM9 dataset, focusing on correlating quantitative performance with the resulting molecular graph embeddings. Our key finding is that, for a scalar prediction task, many of the irreducible representations are simply ignored during training -- specifically those pertaining to vector ($l=1$) and tensor quantities ($l=2$) -- an issue that does not necessarily make itself evident in the test metric. We empirically show that removing some unused orders of spherical harmonics improves model performance, correlating with improved latent space structure. We provide a number of recommendations for future experiments to try and improve efficiency and utilization of equivariant features based on these observations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deconstructing equivariant representations in molecular systems
Lee, Kin Long Kelvin
Galkin, Mikhail
Miret, Santiago
Materials Science
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Recent equivariant models have shown significant progress in not just chemical property prediction, but as surrogates for dynamical simulations of molecules and materials. Many of the top performing models in this category are built within the framework of tensor products, which preserves equivariance by restricting interactions and transformations to those that are allowed by symmetry selection rules. Despite being a core part of the modeling process, there has not yet been much attention into understanding what information persists in these equivariant representations, and their general behavior outside of benchmark metrics. In this work, we report on a set of experiments using a simple equivariant graph convolution model on the QM9 dataset, focusing on correlating quantitative performance with the resulting molecular graph embeddings. Our key finding is that, for a scalar prediction task, many of the irreducible representations are simply ignored during training -- specifically those pertaining to vector ($l=1$) and tensor quantities ($l=2$) -- an issue that does not necessarily make itself evident in the test metric. We empirically show that removing some unused orders of spherical harmonics improves model performance, correlating with improved latent space structure. We provide a number of recommendations for future experiments to try and improve efficiency and utilization of equivariant features based on these observations.
title Deconstructing equivariant representations in molecular systems
topic Materials Science
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08131