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Main Authors: Radova, Mariia, Stark, Wojciech G., Allen, Connor S., Maurer, Reinhard J., Bartók, Albert P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15582
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author Radova, Mariia
Stark, Wojciech G.
Allen, Connor S.
Maurer, Reinhard J.
Bartók, Albert P.
author_facet Radova, Mariia
Stark, Wojciech G.
Allen, Connor S.
Maurer, Reinhard J.
Bartók, Albert P.
contents Machine-learned interatomic potentials are revolutionising atomistic materials simulations by providing accurate and scalable predictions within the scope covered by the training data. However, generation of an accurate and robust training data set remains a challenge, often requiring thousands of first-principles calculations to achieve high accuracy. Foundation models have started to emerge with the ambition to create universally applicable potentials across a wide range of materials. While foundation models can be robust and transferable, they do not yet achieve the accuracy required to predict reaction barriers, phase transitions, and material stability. This work demonstrates that foundation model potentials can reach chemical accuracy when fine-tuned using transfer learning with partially frozen weights and biases. For two challenging datasets on reactive chemistry at surfaces and stability and elastic properties of tertiary alloys, we show that frozen transfer learning with 10-20% of the data (hundreds of datapoints) achieves similar accuracies to models trained from scratch (on thousands of datapoints). Moreover, we show that an equally accurate, but significantly more efficient surrogate model can be built using the transfer learned potential as the ground truth. In combination, we present a simulation workflow for machine learning potentials that improves data efficiency and computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15582
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-tuning foundation models of materials interatomic potentials with frozen transfer learning
Radova, Mariia
Stark, Wojciech G.
Allen, Connor S.
Maurer, Reinhard J.
Bartók, Albert P.
Materials Science
Machine-learned interatomic potentials are revolutionising atomistic materials simulations by providing accurate and scalable predictions within the scope covered by the training data. However, generation of an accurate and robust training data set remains a challenge, often requiring thousands of first-principles calculations to achieve high accuracy. Foundation models have started to emerge with the ambition to create universally applicable potentials across a wide range of materials. While foundation models can be robust and transferable, they do not yet achieve the accuracy required to predict reaction barriers, phase transitions, and material stability. This work demonstrates that foundation model potentials can reach chemical accuracy when fine-tuned using transfer learning with partially frozen weights and biases. For two challenging datasets on reactive chemistry at surfaces and stability and elastic properties of tertiary alloys, we show that frozen transfer learning with 10-20% of the data (hundreds of datapoints) achieves similar accuracies to models trained from scratch (on thousands of datapoints). Moreover, we show that an equally accurate, but significantly more efficient surrogate model can be built using the transfer learned potential as the ground truth. In combination, we present a simulation workflow for machine learning potentials that improves data efficiency and computational efficiency.
title Fine-tuning foundation models of materials interatomic potentials with frozen transfer learning
topic Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15582