Experimentally Accurate Graph Neural Network Predictions of Core-Electron Binding Energies

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fouda, Adam E. A., Zhou, Joshua, Ferreira, Rodrigo, Phillips, Patrick, Agarawal, Valay, Jangid, Bhavnesh, Wardzala, Jacob J., Ding, Rui, Chen, Junhong, Tebaldi, Nicole, Ho, Phay J., Gagliardi, Laura, Young, Linda
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910177846886400
author Fouda, Adam E. A.
Zhou, Joshua
Ferreira, Rodrigo
Phillips, Patrick
Agarawal, Valay
Jangid, Bhavnesh
Wardzala, Jacob J.
Ding, Rui
Chen, Junhong
Tebaldi, Nicole
Ho, Phay J.
Gagliardi, Laura
Young, Linda
author_facet Fouda, Adam E. A.
Zhou, Joshua
Ferreira, Rodrigo
Phillips, Patrick
Agarawal, Valay
Jangid, Bhavnesh
Wardzala, Jacob J.
Ding, Rui
Chen, Junhong
Tebaldi, Nicole
Ho, Phay J.
Gagliardi, Laura
Young, Linda
contents Graph neural network architectures are advantageous for predicting core-electron binding energies which depend on local bond environment effects, as the number of message passing layers defines the topological (bond) radius of the model's receptive field. This provides an interpretable connection between the model's architecture and the definition of locality in the considered environment. Here we present a graph neural network model for predicting carbon 1s core-electron binding energies in organic molecules. The model is trained with multiconfiguration pair-density functional theory on 8637 carbon atoms in 2116 molecules with 4-16 atoms and evaluated against 570 experimental values in 113 different molecules containing 3-45 atoms. Previous work benchmarked a mean absolute error of 0.27 eV to experiment for the training data level of theory [J. Phys. Chem. A 2025, 129, 36, 8419-8431] and the present model demonstrates an experimental evaluation error of 0.33 eV with good size transferability to larger systems. By examining the effect of the number of message passing layers on the performance, we show that two chemically informed node features, the atomic binding energy and environment electronegativity, encode molecule-specific information when normalized across the graph and capture beyond nearest-neighbor environment effects outside the receptive field. A case study on the 45 atom avobenzone tautomers demonstrates the model's ability for instant and precise analysis of complex molecules. Finally, the model's E(3)-equivariance is shown to out-perform an invariant model on non-equilibrium geometries from a methanol C-O bond stretch. The software and data are provided by the open-source AugerNet package at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19689244.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27070
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Experimentally Accurate Graph Neural Network Predictions of Core-Electron Binding Energies
Fouda, Adam E. A.
Zhou, Joshua
Ferreira, Rodrigo
Phillips, Patrick
Agarawal, Valay
Jangid, Bhavnesh
Wardzala, Jacob J.
Ding, Rui
Chen, Junhong
Tebaldi, Nicole
Ho, Phay J.
Gagliardi, Laura
Young, Linda
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
Graph neural network architectures are advantageous for predicting core-electron binding energies which depend on local bond environment effects, as the number of message passing layers defines the topological (bond) radius of the model's receptive field. This provides an interpretable connection between the model's architecture and the definition of locality in the considered environment. Here we present a graph neural network model for predicting carbon 1s core-electron binding energies in organic molecules. The model is trained with multiconfiguration pair-density functional theory on 8637 carbon atoms in 2116 molecules with 4-16 atoms and evaluated against 570 experimental values in 113 different molecules containing 3-45 atoms. Previous work benchmarked a mean absolute error of 0.27 eV to experiment for the training data level of theory [J. Phys. Chem. A 2025, 129, 36, 8419-8431] and the present model demonstrates an experimental evaluation error of 0.33 eV with good size transferability to larger systems. By examining the effect of the number of message passing layers on the performance, we show that two chemically informed node features, the atomic binding energy and environment electronegativity, encode molecule-specific information when normalized across the graph and capture beyond nearest-neighbor environment effects outside the receptive field. A case study on the 45 atom avobenzone tautomers demonstrates the model's ability for instant and precise analysis of complex molecules. Finally, the model's E(3)-equivariance is shown to out-perform an invariant model on non-equilibrium geometries from a methanol C-O bond stretch. The software and data are provided by the open-source AugerNet package at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19689244.
title Experimentally Accurate Graph Neural Network Predictions of Core-Electron Binding Energies
topic Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27070