Computational high-throughput studies, especially in research on high-entropy materials and catalysts, are hampered by high-dimensional composition spaces and myriad structural microstates. They present bottlenecks to the conventional use of density functional theory calculations, and consequently, the use of machine-learned potentials is becoming increasingly prevalent in atomic structure simulations. In this communication, we show the results of adjusting and fine-tuning the pretrained EquiformerV2 model from the Open Catalyst Project to infer adsorption energies of *OH and *O on the out-of-domain high-entropy alloy Ag-Ir-Pd-Pt-Ru. By applying an energy filter based on the local environment of the binding site the zero-shot inference is markedly improved and through few-shot fine-tuning the model yields state-of-the-art accuracy. It is also found that EquiformerV2, assuming the role of general machine learning potential, is able to inform a smaller, more focused direct inference model. This knowledge distillation setup boosts performance on complex binding sites. Collectively, this shows that foundational knowledge learned from ordered intermetallic structures, can be extrapolated to the highly disordered structures of solid-solutions. With the vastly accelerated computational throughput of these models, hitherto infeasible research in the high-entropy material space is now readily accessible.
Foundation models have been transformational in machine learning fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. Similar success in atomic property prediction has been limited due to the challenges of training effective models across multiple chemical domains. To address this, we introduce Joint Multi-domain Pre-training (JMP), a supervised pre-training strategy that simultaneously trains on multiple datasets from different chemical domains, treating each dataset as a unique pre-training task within a multi-task framework. Our combined training dataset consists of $\sim$120M systems from OC20, OC22, ANI-1x, and Transition-1x. We evaluate performance and generalization by fine-tuning over a diverse set of downstream tasks and datasets including: QM9, rMD17, MatBench, QMOF, SPICE, and MD22. JMP demonstrates an average improvement of 59% over training from scratch, and matches or sets state-of-the-art on 34 out of 40 tasks. Our work highlights the potential of pre-training strategies that utilize diverse data to advance property prediction across chemical domains, especially for low-data tasks.
Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the minimum binding energy - the adsorption energy - for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations more accurately and efficiently. Our algorithm provides a spectrum of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration, within a 0.1 eV threshold, 86.63% of the time, while achieving a 1387x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 87,045 unique configurations.