Retro-Rank-In: A Ranking-Based Approach for Inorganic Materials Synthesis Planning

Retrosynthesis strategically plans the synthesis of a chemical target compound from simpler, readily available precursor compounds. This process is critical for synthesizing novel inorganic materials, yet traditional methods in inorganic chemistry continue to rely on trial-and-error experimentation. Emerging machine-learning approaches struggle to generalize to entirely new reactions due to their reliance on known precursors, as they frame retrosynthesis as a multi-label classification task. To address these limitations, we propose Retro-Rank-In, a novel framework that reformulates the retrosynthesis problem by embedding target and precursor materials into a shared latent space and learning a pairwise ranker on a bipartite graph of inorganic compounds. We evaluate Retro-Rank-In's generalizability on challenging retrosynthesis dataset splits designed to mitigate data duplicates and overlaps. For instance, for Cr2AlB2, it correctly predicts the verified precursor pair CrB + Al despite never seeing them in training, a capability absent in prior work. Extensive experiments show that Retro-Rank-In sets a new state-of-the-art, particularly in out-of-distribution generalization and candidate set ranking, offering a powerful tool for accelerating inorganic material synthesis.

JAX-SPH: A Differentiable Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Framework

Particle-based fluid simulations have emerged as a powerful tool for solving the Navier-Stokes equations, especially in cases that include intricate physics and free surfaces. The recent addition of machine learning methods to the toolbox for solving such problems is pushing the boundary of the quality vs. speed tradeoff of such numerical simulations. In this work, we lead the way to Lagrangian fluid simulators compatible with deep learning frameworks, and propose JAX-SPH - a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework implemented in JAX. JAX-SPH builds on the code for dataset generation from the LagrangeBench project (Toshev et al., 2023) and extends this code in multiple ways: (a) integration of further key SPH algorithms, (b) restructuring the code toward a Python library, (c) verification of the gradients through the solver, and (d) demonstration of the utility of the gradients for solving inverse problems as well as a Solver-in-the-Loop application. Our code is available at https://github.com/tumaer/jax-sph.

Neural SPH: Improved Neural Modeling of Lagrangian Fluid Dynamics

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is omnipresent in modern engineering and scientific disciplines. SPH is a class of Lagrangian schemes that discretize fluid dynamics via finite material points that are tracked through the evolving velocity field. Due to the particle-like nature of the simulation, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as appealing and successful surrogates. However, the practical utility of such GNN-based simulators relies on their ability to faithfully model physics, providing accurate and stable predictions over long time horizons - which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we identify particle clustering originating from tensile instabilities as one of the primary pitfalls. Based on these insights, we enhance both training and rollout inference of state-of-the-art GNN-based simulators with varying components from standard SPH solvers, including pressure, viscous, and external force components. All neural SPH-enhanced simulators achieve better performance, often by orders of magnitude, than the baseline GNNs, allowing for significantly longer rollouts and significantly better physics modeling. Code available under (https://github.com/tumaer/neuralsph).

LagrangeBench: A Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics Benchmarking Suite

Machine learning has been successfully applied to grid-based PDE modeling in various scientific applications. However, learned PDE solvers based on Lagrangian particle discretizations, which are the preferred approach to problems with free surfaces or complex physics, remain largely unexplored. We present LagrangeBench, the first benchmarking suite for Lagrangian particle problems, focusing on temporal coarse-graining. In particular, our contribution is: (a) seven new fluid mechanics datasets (four in 2D and three in 3D) generated with the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method including the Taylor-Green vortex, lid-driven cavity, reverse Poiseuille flow, and dam break, each of which includes different physics like solid wall interactions or free surface, (b) efficient JAX-based API with various recent training strategies and neighbors search routine, and (c) JAX implementation of established Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) like GNS and SEGNN with baseline results. Finally, to measure the performance of learned surrogates we go beyond established position errors and introduce physical metrics like kinetic energy MSE and Sinkhorn distance for the particle distribution. Our codebase is available under the URL: https://github.com/tumaer/lagrangebench

Learning Lagrangian Fluid Mechanics with E($3$)-Equivariant Graph Neural Networks

We contribute to the vastly growing field of machine learning for engineering systems by demonstrating that equivariant graph neural networks have the potential to learn more accurate dynamic-interaction models than their non-equivariant counterparts. We benchmark two well-studied fluid-flow systems, namely 3D decaying Taylor-Green vortex and 3D reverse Poiseuille flow, and evaluate the models based on different performance measures, such as kinetic energy or Sinkhorn distance. In addition, we investigate different embedding methods of physical-information histories for equivariant models. We find that while currently being rather slow to train and evaluate, equivariant models with our proposed history embeddings learn more accurate physical interactions.

E($3$) Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Particle-Based Fluid Mechanics

We contribute to the vastly growing field of machine learning for engineering systems by demonstrating that equivariant graph neural networks have the potential to learn more accurate dynamic-interaction models than their non-equivariant counterparts. We benchmark two well-studied fluid flow systems, namely the 3D decaying Taylor-Green vortex and the 3D reverse Poiseuille flow, and compare equivariant graph neural networks to their non-equivariant counterparts on different performance measures, such as kinetic energy or Sinkhorn distance. Such measures are typically used in engineering to validate numerical solvers. Our main findings are that while being rather slow to train and evaluate, equivariant models learn more physically accurate interactions. This indicates opportunities for future work towards coarse-grained models for turbulent flows, and generalization across system dynamics and parameters.

On the Relationships between Graph Neural Networks for the Simulation of Physical Systems and Classical Numerical Methods

Recent developments in Machine Learning approaches for modelling physical systems have begun to mirror the past development of numerical methods in the computational sciences. In this survey, we begin by providing an example of this with the parallels between the development trajectories of graph neural network acceleration for physical simulations and particle-based approaches. We then give an overview of simulation approaches, which have not yet found their way into state-of-the-art Machine Learning methods and hold the potential to make Machine Learning approaches more accurate and more efficient. We conclude by presenting an outlook on the potential of these approaches for making Machine Learning models for science more efficient.