Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions

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Main Authors: Goswami, Rohit, Masterov, Maxim, Kamath, Satish, Peña-Torres, Alejandro, Jónsson, Hannes
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Goswami, Rohit
Masterov, Maxim
Kamath, Satish
Peña-Torres, Alejandro
Jónsson, Hannes
author_facet Goswami, Rohit
Masterov, Maxim
Kamath, Satish
Peña-Torres, Alejandro
Jónsson, Hannes
contents The task of locating first order saddle points on high-dimensional surfaces describing the variation of energy as a function of atomic coordinates is an essential step for identifying the mechanism and estimating the rate of thermally activated events within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory. When combined directly with electronic structure calculations, the number of energy and atomic force evaluations needed for convergence is a primary issue. Here, we describe an efficient implementation of Gaussian process regression (GPR) acceleration of the minimum mode following method where a dimer is used to estimate the lowest eigenmode of the Hessian. A surrogate energy surface is constructed and updated after each electronic structure calculation. The method is applied to a test set of 500 molecular reactions previously generated by Hermez and coworkers [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 18, 6974 (2022)]. An order of magnitude reduction in the number of electronic structure calculations needed to reach the saddle point configurations is obtained by using the GPR compared to the dimer method. Despite the wide range in stiffness of the molecular degrees of freedom, the calculations are carried out using Cartesian coordinates and are found to require similar number of electronic structure calculations as an elaborate internal coordinate method implemented in the Sella software package. The present implementation of the GPR surrogate model in C++ is efficient enough for the wall time of the saddle point searches to be reduced in 3 out of 4 cases even though the calculations are carried out at a low Hartree-Fock level.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12519
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions
Goswami, Rohit
Masterov, Maxim
Kamath, Satish
Peña-Torres, Alejandro
Jónsson, Hannes
Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
The task of locating first order saddle points on high-dimensional surfaces describing the variation of energy as a function of atomic coordinates is an essential step for identifying the mechanism and estimating the rate of thermally activated events within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory. When combined directly with electronic structure calculations, the number of energy and atomic force evaluations needed for convergence is a primary issue. Here, we describe an efficient implementation of Gaussian process regression (GPR) acceleration of the minimum mode following method where a dimer is used to estimate the lowest eigenmode of the Hessian. A surrogate energy surface is constructed and updated after each electronic structure calculation. The method is applied to a test set of 500 molecular reactions previously generated by Hermez and coworkers [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 18, 6974 (2022)]. An order of magnitude reduction in the number of electronic structure calculations needed to reach the saddle point configurations is obtained by using the GPR compared to the dimer method. Despite the wide range in stiffness of the molecular degrees of freedom, the calculations are carried out using Cartesian coordinates and are found to require similar number of electronic structure calculations as an elaborate internal coordinate method implemented in the Sella software package. The present implementation of the GPR surrogate model in C++ is efficient enough for the wall time of the saddle point searches to be reduced in 3 out of 4 cases even though the calculations are carried out at a low Hartree-Fock level.
title Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions
topic Chemical Physics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12519