Integral Formulas for Vector Spherical Tensor Products

We derive integral formulas that simplify the Vector Spherical Tensor Product recently introduced by Xie et al., which generalizes the Gaunt tensor product to antisymmetric couplings. In particular, we obtain explicit closed-form expressions for the antisymmetric analogues of the Gaunt coefficients. This enables us to simulate the Clebsch-Gordan tensor product using a single Vector Spherical Tensor Product, yielding a $9\times$ reduction in the required tensor product evaluations. Our results enable efficient and practical implementations of the Vector Spherical Tensor Product, paving the way for applications of this generalization of Gaunt tensor products in $\mathrm{SO}(3)$-equivariant neural networks. Moreover, we discuss how the Gaunt and the Vector Spherical Tensor Products allow to control the expressivity-runtime tradeoff associated with the usual Clebsch-Gordan Tensor Products. Finally, we investigate low rank decompositions of the normalizations of the considered tensor products in view of their use in equivariant neural networks.

BoostMD: Accelerating molecular sampling by leveraging ML force field features from previous time-steps

Simulating atomic-scale processes, such as protein dynamics and catalytic reactions, is crucial for advancements in biology, chemistry, and materials science. Machine learning force fields (MLFFs) have emerged as powerful tools that achieve near quantum mechanical accuracy, with promising generalization capabilities. However, their practical use is often limited by long inference times compared to classical force fields, especially when running extensive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations required for many biological applications. In this study, we introduce BoostMD, a surrogate model architecture designed to accelerate MD simulations. BoostMD leverages node features computed at previous time steps to predict energies and forces based on positional changes. This approach reduces the complexity of the learning task, allowing BoostMD to be both smaller and significantly faster than conventional MLFFs. During simulations, the computationally intensive reference MLFF is evaluated only every $N$ steps, while the lightweight BoostMD model handles the intermediate steps at a fraction of the computational cost. Our experiments demonstrate that BoostMD achieves an eight-fold speedup compared to the reference model and generalizes to unseen dipeptides. Furthermore, we find that BoostMD accurately samples the ground-truth Boltzmann distribution when running molecular dynamics. By combining efficient feature reuse with a streamlined architecture, BoostMD offers a robust solution for conducting large-scale, long-timescale molecular simulations, making high-accuracy ML-driven modeling more accessible and practical.