ELECTRA: A Cartesian Network for 3D Charge Density Prediction with Floating Orbitals

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Elsborg, Jonas, Thiede, Luca, Aspuru-Guzik, Alán, Vegge, Tejs, Bhowmik, Arghya
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Elsborg, Jonas
Thiede, Luca
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Vegge, Tejs
Bhowmik, Arghya
author_facet Elsborg, Jonas
Thiede, Luca
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Vegge, Tejs
Bhowmik, Arghya
contents We present the Electronic Tensor Reconstruction Algorithm (ELECTRA) - an equivariant model for predicting electronic charge densities using floating orbitals. Floating orbitals are a long-standing concept in the quantum chemistry community that promises more compact and accurate representations by placing orbitals freely in space, as opposed to centering all orbitals at the position of atoms. Finding the ideal placement of these orbitals requires extensive domain knowledge, though, which thus far has prevented widespread adoption. We solve this in a data-driven manner by training a Cartesian tensor network to predict the orbital positions along with orbital coefficients. This is made possible through a symmetry-breaking mechanism that is used to learn position displacements with lower symmetry than the input molecule while preserving the rotation equivariance of the charge density itself. Inspired by recent successes of Gaussian Splatting in representing densities in space, we are using Gaussian orbitals and predicting their weights and covariance matrices. Our method achieves a state-of-the-art balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy on established benchmarks. Furthermore, ELECTRA is able to lower the compute time required to arrive at converged DFT solutions - initializing calculations using our predicted densities yields an average 50.72 % reduction in self-consistent field (SCF) iterations on unseen molecules.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08305
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ELECTRA: A Cartesian Network for 3D Charge Density Prediction with Floating Orbitals
Elsborg, Jonas
Thiede, Luca
Aspuru-Guzik, Alán
Vegge, Tejs
Bhowmik, Arghya
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
We present the Electronic Tensor Reconstruction Algorithm (ELECTRA) - an equivariant model for predicting electronic charge densities using floating orbitals. Floating orbitals are a long-standing concept in the quantum chemistry community that promises more compact and accurate representations by placing orbitals freely in space, as opposed to centering all orbitals at the position of atoms. Finding the ideal placement of these orbitals requires extensive domain knowledge, though, which thus far has prevented widespread adoption. We solve this in a data-driven manner by training a Cartesian tensor network to predict the orbital positions along with orbital coefficients. This is made possible through a symmetry-breaking mechanism that is used to learn position displacements with lower symmetry than the input molecule while preserving the rotation equivariance of the charge density itself. Inspired by recent successes of Gaussian Splatting in representing densities in space, we are using Gaussian orbitals and predicting their weights and covariance matrices. Our method achieves a state-of-the-art balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy on established benchmarks. Furthermore, ELECTRA is able to lower the compute time required to arrive at converged DFT solutions - initializing calculations using our predicted densities yields an average 50.72 % reduction in self-consistent field (SCF) iterations on unseen molecules.
title ELECTRA: A Cartesian Network for 3D Charge Density Prediction with Floating Orbitals
topic Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08305