ParticleGrid: Enabling Deep Learning using 3D Representation of Materials

From AlexNet to Inception, autoencoders to diffusion models, the development of novel and powerful deep learning models and learning algorithms has proceeded at breakneck speeds. In part, we believe that rapid iteration of model architecture and learning techniques by a large community of researchers over a common representation of the underlying entities has resulted in transferable deep learning knowledge. As a result, model scale, accuracy, fidelity, and compute performance have dramatically increased in computer vision and natural language processing. On the other hand, the lack of a common representation for chemical structure has hampered similar progress. To enable transferable deep learning, we identify the need for a robust 3-dimensional representation of materials such as molecules and crystals. The goal is to enable both materials property prediction and materials generation with 3D structures. While computationally costly, such representations can model a large set of chemical structures. We propose $\textit{ParticleGrid}$, a SIMD-optimized library for 3D structures, that is designed for deep learning applications and to seamlessly integrate with deep learning frameworks. Our highly optimized grid generation allows for generating grids on the fly on the CPU, reducing storage and GPU compute and memory requirements. We show the efficacy of 3D grids generated via $\textit{ParticleGrid}$ and accurately predict molecular energy properties using a 3D convolutional neural network. Our model is able to get 0.006 mean square error and nearly match the values calculated using computationally costly density functional theory at a fraction of the time.