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Overcoming systematic softening in universal machine learning interatomic potentials by fine-tuning

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arxiv 2405.07105 v1 pith:6GOSTSQL submitted 2024-05-11 cond-mat.mtrl-sci cs.AIcs.LG

classification cond-mat.mtrl-scics.AIcs.LG
keywords mlipssofteningatomicfine-tuninglearningmachinesystematicuniversal
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Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have introduced a new paradigm for atomic simulations. Recent advancements have seen the emergence of universal MLIPs (uMLIPs) that are pre-trained on diverse materials datasets, providing opportunities for both ready-to-use universal force fields and robust foundations for downstream machine learning refinements. However, their performance in extrapolating to out-of-distribution complex atomic environments remains unclear. In this study, we highlight a consistent potential energy surface (PES) softening effect in three uMLIPs: M3GNet, CHGNet, and MACE-MP-0, which is characterized by energy and force under-prediction in a series of atomic-modeling benchmarks including surfaces, defects, solid-solution energetics, phonon vibration modes, ion migration barriers, and general high-energy states. We find that the PES softening behavior originates from a systematic underprediction error of the PES curvature, which derives from the biased sampling of near-equilibrium atomic arrangements in uMLIP pre-training datasets. We demonstrate that the PES softening issue can be effectively rectified by fine-tuning with a single additional data point. Our findings suggest that a considerable fraction of uMLIP errors are highly systematic, and can therefore be efficiently corrected. This result rationalizes the data-efficient fine-tuning performance boost commonly observed with foundational MLIPs. We argue for the importance of a comprehensive materials dataset with improved PES sampling for next-generation foundational MLIPs.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Phase Stability and Transformations in Lead Mixed Halide Perovskites from Machine Learning Force Fields

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Machine-learned force fields predict that methylammonium suppresses the beta-to-gamma transition in mixed lead-halide perovskites unless the organic cations rearrange, while formamidinium stabilizes a cubic low-temper...

  2. Fast and Fourier Features for Transfer Learning of Interatomic Potentials

    physics.comp-ph 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Using random Fourier features on top of frozen graph neural network descriptors gives a fast and data-efficient way to adapt pretrained interatomic potentials to new systems.

  3. Data-driven atomistic modelling of hybrid halide perovskite passivation

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2026-07 accept novelty 5.0 of 10

    A continual fine-tuning protocol for machine-learned interatomic potentials enables large-scale simulation of amino-silane passivation at hybrid perovskite surfaces, revealing coverage-dependent lattice disruption.

  4. Egret-1: Pretrained Neural Network Potentials for Efficient and Accurate Bioorganic Simulation

    physics.chem-ph 2025-04 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Egret-1, a MACE-based neural network potential trained on public organic-chemistry datasets, reaches small-basis DFT-level accuracy on several zero-shot benchmarks and reveals dataset diversity tradeoffs that hurt gra...

  5. AutoPot: Automated and massively parallelized construction of Machine-Learning Potentials

    physics.comp-ph 2026-01 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    AutoPot automates active-learning construction of moment tensor potentials, demonstrated on W and Mo-Ta, but its on-the-fly abort logic is unreachable and the claimed 'couple of hours' runtime is never measured.

  6. A Study on the Fine-Tuning Performance of Universal Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials (U-MLIPs)

    physics.comp-ph 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning universal MACE potentials on targeted datasets generally improves accuracy and convergence speed, though data selection, not the foundation model alone, determines success.

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