MLatom 3: Platform for machine learning-enhanced computational chemistry simulations and workflows

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly becoming a common tool in computational chemistry. At the same time, the rapid development of ML methods requires a flexible software framework for designing custom workflows. MLatom 3 is a program package designed to leverage the power of ML to enhance typical computational chemistry simulations and to create complex workflows. This open-source package provides plenty of choice to the users who can run simulations with the command line options, input files, or with scripts using MLatom as a Python package, both on their computers and on the online XACS cloud computing at XACScloud.com. Computational chemists can calculate energies and thermochemical properties, optimize geometries, run molecular and quantum dynamics, and simulate (ro)vibrational, one-photon UV/vis absorption, and two-photon absorption spectra with ML, quantum mechanical, and combined models. The users can choose from an extensive library of methods containing pre-trained ML models and quantum mechanical approximations such as AIQM1 approaching coupled-cluster accuracy. The developers can build their own models using various ML algorithms. The great flexibility of MLatom is largely due to the extensive use of the interfaces to many state-of-the-art software packages and libraries.

Learning Over Molecular Conformer Ensembles: Datasets and Benchmarks

Molecular Representation Learning (MRL) has proven impactful in numerous biochemical applications such as drug discovery and enzyme design. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are effective at learning molecular representations from a 2D molecular graph or a single 3D structure, existing works often overlook the flexible nature of molecules, which continuously interconvert across conformations via chemical bond rotations and minor vibrational perturbations. To better account for molecular flexibility, some recent works formulate MRL as an ensemble learning problem, focusing on explicitly learning from a set of conformer structures. However, most of these studies have limited datasets, tasks, and models. In this work, we introduce the first MoleculAR Conformer Ensemble Learning (MARCEL) benchmark to thoroughly evaluate the potential of learning on conformer ensembles and suggest promising research directions. MARCEL includes four datasets covering diverse molecule- and reaction-level properties of chemically diverse molecules including organocatalysts and transition-metal catalysts, extending beyond the scope of common GNN benchmarks that are confined to drug-like molecules. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study, which benchmarks representative 1D, 2D, and 3D molecular representation learning models, along with two strategies that explicitly incorporate conformer ensembles into 3D MRL models. Our findings reveal that direct learning from an accessible conformer space can improve performance on a variety of tasks and models.

Simulation Intelligence: Towards a New Generation of Scientific Methods

The original "Seven Motifs" set forth a roadmap of essential methods for the field of scientific computing, where a motif is an algorithmic method that captures a pattern of computation and data movement. We present the "Nine Motifs of Simulation Intelligence", a roadmap for the development and integration of the essential algorithms necessary for a merger of scientific computing, scientific simulation, and artificial intelligence. We call this merger simulation intelligence (SI), for short. We argue the motifs of simulation intelligence are interconnected and interdependent, much like the components within the layers of an operating system. Using this metaphor, we explore the nature of each layer of the simulation intelligence operating system stack (SI-stack) and the motifs therein: (1) Multi-physics and multi-scale modeling; (2) Surrogate modeling and emulation; (3) Simulation-based inference; (4) Causal modeling and inference; (5) Agent-based modeling; (6) Probabilistic programming; (7) Differentiable programming; (8) Open-ended optimization; (9) Machine programming. We believe coordinated efforts between motifs offers immense opportunity to accelerate scientific discovery, from solving inverse problems in synthetic biology and climate science, to directing nuclear energy experiments and predicting emergent behavior in socioeconomic settings. We elaborate on each layer of the SI-stack, detailing the state-of-art methods, presenting examples to highlight challenges and opportunities, and advocating for specific ways to advance the motifs and the synergies from their combinations. Advancing and integrating these technologies can enable a robust and efficient hypothesis-simulation-analysis type of scientific method, which we introduce with several use-cases for human-machine teaming and automated science.

Impressive computational acceleration by using machine learning for 2-dimensional super-lubricant materials discovery

The screening of novel materials is an important topic in the field of materials science. Although traditional computational modeling, especially first-principles approaches, is a very useful and accurate tool to predict the properties of novel materials, it still demands extensive and expensive state-of-the-art computational resources. Additionally, they can be often extremely time consuming. We describe a time and resource-efficient machine learning approach to create a large dataset of structural properties of van der Waals layered structures. In particular, we focus on the interlayer energy and the elastic constant of layered materials composed of two different 2-dimensional (2D) structures, that are important for novel solid lubricant and super-lubricant materials. We show that machine learning models can recapitulate results of computationally expansive approaches (i.e. density functional theory) with high accuracy.

MolecularRNN: Generating realistic molecular graphs with optimized properties

Designing new molecules with a set of predefined properties is a core problem in modern drug discovery and development. There is a growing need for de-novo design methods that would address this problem. We present MolecularRNN, the graph recurrent generative model for molecular structures. Our model generates diverse realistic molecular graphs after likelihood pretraining on a big database of molecules. We perform an analysis of our pretrained models on large-scale generated datasets of 1 million samples. Further, the model is tuned with policy gradient algorithm, provided a critic that estimates the reward for the property of interest. We show a significant distribution shift to the desired range for lipophilicity, drug-likeness, and melting point outperforming state-of-the-art works. With the use of rejection sampling based on valency constraints, our model yields 100% validity. Moreover, we show that invalid molecules provide a rich signal to the model through the use of structure penalty in our reinforcement learning pipeline.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for De-Novo Drug Design

We propose a novel computational strategy for de novo design of molecules with desired properties termed ReLeaSE (Reinforcement Learning for Structural Evolution). Based on deep and reinforcement learning approaches, ReLeaSE integrates two deep neural networks - generative and predictive - that are trained separately but employed jointly to generate novel targeted chemical libraries. ReLeaSE employs simple representation of molecules by their SMILES strings only. Generative models are trained with stack-augmented memory network to produce chemically feasible SMILES strings, and predictive models are derived to forecast the desired properties of the de novo generated compounds. In the first phase of the method, generative and predictive models are trained separately with a supervised learning algorithm. In the second phase, both models are trained jointly with the reinforcement learning approach to bias the generation of new chemical structures towards those with the desired physical and/or biological properties. In the proof-of-concept study, we have employed the ReLeaSE method to design chemical libraries with a bias toward structural complexity or biased toward compounds with either maximal, minimal, or specific range of physical properties such as melting point or hydrophobicity, as well as to develop novel putative inhibitors of JAK2. The approach proposed herein can find a general use for generating targeted chemical libraries of novel compounds optimized for either a single desired property or multiple properties.

Less is more: sampling chemical space with active learning

The development of accurate and transferable machine learning (ML) potentials for predicting molecular energetics is a challenging task. The process of data generation to train such ML potentials is a task neither well understood nor researched in detail. In this work, we present a fully automated approach for the generation of datasets with the intent of training universal ML potentials. It is based on the concept of active learning (AL) via Query by Committee (QBC), which uses the disagreement between an ensemble of ML potentials to infer the reliability of the ensemble's prediction. QBC allows the presented AL algorithm to automatically sample regions of chemical space where the ML potential fails to accurately predict the potential energy. AL improves the overall fitness of ANAKIN-ME (ANI) deep learning potentials in rigorous test cases by mitigating human biases in deciding what new training data to use. AL also reduces the training set size to a fraction of the data required when using naive random sampling techniques. To provide validation of our AL approach we develop the COMP6 benchmark (publicly available on GitHub), which contains a diverse set of organic molecules. Through the AL process, it is shown that the AL-based potentials perform as well as the ANI-1 potential on COMP6 with only 10% of the data, and vastly outperforms ANI-1 with 25% the amount of data. Finally, we show that our proposed AL technique develops a universal ANI potential (ANI-1x) that provides accurate energy and force predictions on the entire COMP6 benchmark. This universal ML potential achieves a level of accuracy on par with the best ML potentials for single molecule or materials, while remaining applicable to the general class of organic molecules comprised of the elements CHNO.

ANI-1: A data set of 20M off-equilibrium DFT calculations for organic molecules

One of the grand challenges in modern theoretical chemistry is designing and implementing approximations that expedite ab initio methods without loss of accuracy. Machine learning (ML), in particular neural networks, are emerging as a powerful approach to constructing various forms of transferable atomistic potentials. They have been successfully applied in a variety of applications in chemistry, biology, catalysis, and solid-state physics. However, these models are heavily dependent on the quality and quantity of data used in their fitting. Fitting highly flexible ML potentials comes at a cost: a vast amount of reference data is required to properly train these models. We address this need by providing access to a large computational DFT database, which consists of 20M conformations for 57,454 small organic molecules. We believe it will become a new standard benchmark for comparison of current and future methods in the ML potential community.