UniMat: Unifying Materials Embeddings through Multi-modal Learning

Materials science datasets are inherently heterogeneous and are available in different modalities such as characterization spectra, atomic structures, microscopic images, and text-based synthesis conditions. The advancements in multi-modal learning, particularly in vision and language models, have opened new avenues for integrating data in different forms. In this work, we evaluate common techniques in multi-modal learning (alignment and fusion) in unifying some of the most important modalities in materials science: atomic structure, X-ray diffraction patterns (XRD), and composition. We show that structure graph modality can be enhanced by aligning with XRD patterns. Additionally, we show that aligning and fusing more experimentally accessible data formats, such as XRD patterns and compositions, can create more robust joint embeddings than individual modalities across various tasks. This lays the groundwork for future studies aiming to exploit the full potential of multi-modal data in materials science, facilitating more informed decision-making in materials design and discovery.

The Role of Reference Points in Machine-Learned Atomistic Simulation Models

This paper introduces the Chemical Environment Modeling Theory (CEMT), a novel, generalized framework designed to overcome the limitations inherent in traditional atom-centered Machine Learning Force Field (MLFF) models, widely used in atomistic simulations of chemical systems. CEMT demonstrated enhanced flexibility and adaptability by allowing reference points to exist anywhere within the modeled domain and thus, enabling the study of various model architectures. Utilizing Gaussian Multipole (GMP) featurization functions, several models with different reference point sets, including finite difference grid-centered and bond-centered models, were tested to analyze the variance in capabilities intrinsic to models built on distinct reference points. The results underscore the potential of non-atom-centered reference points in force training, revealing variations in prediction accuracy, inference speed and learning efficiency. Finally, a unique connection between CEMT and real-space orbital-free finite element Density Functional Theory (FE-DFT) is established, and the implications include the enhancement of data efficiency and robustness. It allows the leveraging of spatially-resolved energy densities and charge densities from FE-DFT calculations, as well as serving as a pivotal step towards integrating known quantum-mechanical laws into the architecture of ML models.

Persistent homology advances interpretable machine learning for nanoporous materials

Machine learning for nanoporous materials design and discovery has emerged as a promising alternative to more time-consuming experiments and simulations. The challenge with this approach is the selection of features that enable universal and interpretable materials representations across multiple prediction tasks. We use persistent homology to construct holistic representations of the materials structure. We show that these representations can also be augmented with other generic features such as word embeddings from natural language processing to capture chemical information. We demonstrate our approach on multiple metal-organic framework datasets by predicting a variety of gas adsorption targets. Our results show considerable improvement in both accuracy and transferability across targets compared to models constructed from commonly used manually curated features. Persistent homology features allow us to locate the pores that correlate best to adsorption at different pressures, contributing to understanding atomic level structure-property relationships for materials design.