Unified Graph Neural Network Force-field for the Periodic Table

Graph neural networks (GNN) have been shown to provide substantial performance improvements for atomistic material representation and modeling compared with descriptor-based machine learning models. While most existing GNN models for atomistic predictions are based on atomic distance information, they do not explicitly incorporate bond angles, which are critical for distinguishing many atomic structures. Furthermore, many material properties are known to be sensitive to slight changes in bond angles. We present an Atomistic Line Graph Neural Network (ALIGNN), a GNN architecture that performs message passing on both the interatomic bond graph and its line graph corresponding to bond angles. We demonstrate that angle information can be explicitly and efficiently included, leading to improved performance on multiple atomistic prediction tasks for both scalar and vector value data. Moreover, we develop a unified atomistic line graph neural network-based force-field (ALIGNN-FF) that can model both structurally and chemically diverse materials with any combination of 89 elements from the periodic table. To train the ALIGNN-FF model, we use the JARVIS-DFT dataset which contains around 75000 materials and 4 million energy-force entries, out of which 307113 are used in the training. We demonstrate the applicability of this method for fast optimization atomic structures in the crystallography open database and by predicting accurate crystal structures using genetic algorithm for alloys.