Committors without Descriptors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kang, Peilin, Zhang, Jintu, Trizio, Enrico, Hou, TingJun, Parrinello, Michele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kang, Peilin
Zhang, Jintu
Trizio, Enrico
Hou, TingJun
Parrinello, Michele
author_facet Kang, Peilin
Zhang, Jintu
Trizio, Enrico
Hou, TingJun
Parrinello, Michele
contents The study of rare events is one of the major challenges in atomistic simulations, and several enhanced sampling methods towards its solution have been proposed. Recently, it has been suggested that the use of the committor, which provides a precise formal description of rare events, could be of use in this context. We have recently followed up on this suggestion and proposed a committor-based method that promotes frequent transitions between the metastable states of the system and allows extensive sampling of the process transition state ensemble. One of the strengths of our approach is being self-consistent and semi-automatic, exploiting a variational criterion to iteratively optimize a neural-network-based parametrization of the committor, which uses a set of physical descriptors as input. Here, we further automate this procedure by combining our previous method with the expressive power of graph neural networks, which can directly process atomic coordinates rather than descriptors. Besides applications on benchmark systems, we highlight the advantages of a graph-based approach in describing the role of solvent molecules in systems, such as ion pair dissociation or ligand binding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18018
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Committors without Descriptors
Kang, Peilin
Zhang, Jintu
Trizio, Enrico
Hou, TingJun
Parrinello, Michele
Computational Physics
Statistical Mechanics
Chemical Physics
The study of rare events is one of the major challenges in atomistic simulations, and several enhanced sampling methods towards its solution have been proposed. Recently, it has been suggested that the use of the committor, which provides a precise formal description of rare events, could be of use in this context. We have recently followed up on this suggestion and proposed a committor-based method that promotes frequent transitions between the metastable states of the system and allows extensive sampling of the process transition state ensemble. One of the strengths of our approach is being self-consistent and semi-automatic, exploiting a variational criterion to iteratively optimize a neural-network-based parametrization of the committor, which uses a set of physical descriptors as input. Here, we further automate this procedure by combining our previous method with the expressive power of graph neural networks, which can directly process atomic coordinates rather than descriptors. Besides applications on benchmark systems, we highlight the advantages of a graph-based approach in describing the role of solvent molecules in systems, such as ion pair dissociation or ligand binding.
title Committors without Descriptors
topic Computational Physics
Statistical Mechanics
Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18018