A Tutorial Review of Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Processes to Accelerate Stationary Point Searches

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1. Verfasser: Goswami, Rohit
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Goswami, Rohit
author_facet Goswami, Rohit
contents Building local surrogates to accelerate stationary point searches on potential energy surfaces spans decades of effort. Done correctly, surrogates can reduce the number of expensive electronic structure evaluations by roughly an order of magnitude while preserving the accuracy of the underlying theory, with the gain depending on oracle cost, search distance, and the availability of analytical forces. We present a unified Bayesian optimization view of minimization, single-point saddle searches, and double-ended path searches: all three share one six-step surrogate loop and differ only in the inner optimization target and the acquisition criterion. The framework uses Gaussian process regression with derivative observations, inverse-distance kernels, and active learning, and we develop optional extensions for production use, including farthest-point sampling with the Earth Mover's Distance, MAP regularization, an adaptive trust radius, and random Fourier features for scaling. Accompanying pedagogical Rust code demonstrates that all three applications use the same Bayesian optimization loop, bridging the gap between theoretical formulation and practical execution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_10992
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tutorial Review of Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Processes to Accelerate Stationary Point Searches
Goswami, Rohit
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
Building local surrogates to accelerate stationary point searches on potential energy surfaces spans decades of effort. Done correctly, surrogates can reduce the number of expensive electronic structure evaluations by roughly an order of magnitude while preserving the accuracy of the underlying theory, with the gain depending on oracle cost, search distance, and the availability of analytical forces. We present a unified Bayesian optimization view of minimization, single-point saddle searches, and double-ended path searches: all three share one six-step surrogate loop and differ only in the inner optimization target and the acquisition criterion. The framework uses Gaussian process regression with derivative observations, inverse-distance kernels, and active learning, and we develop optional extensions for production use, including farthest-point sampling with the Earth Mover's Distance, MAP regularization, an adaptive trust radius, and random Fourier features for scaling. Accompanying pedagogical Rust code demonstrates that all three applications use the same Bayesian optimization loop, bridging the gap between theoretical formulation and practical execution.
title A Tutorial Review of Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Processes to Accelerate Stationary Point Searches
topic Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10992