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arXiv · 2503.05771

A Materials Foundation Model via Hybrid Invariant-Equivariant Architectures

Abstract

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) can predict energy, force, and stress of materials and enable a wide range of downstream discovery tasks. A key design choice in MLIPs involves the trade-off between invariant and equivariant architectures. Invariant models offer computational efficiency but may not perform as well, especially when predicting high-order outputs. In contrast, equivariant models can capture high-order symmetries, but are computationally expensive. In this work, we propose HIENet, a hybrid invariant-equivariant materials interatomic potential model that integrates both invariant and equivariant message passing layers, while provably satisfying key physical constraints. HIENet achieves state-of-the-art performance with considerable computational speedups over prior models. Experimental results on both common benchmarks and downstream materials discovery tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of HIENet.

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Keqiang Yan, Montgomery Bohde, Andrii Kryvenko, Ziyu Xiang, Kaiji Zhao, Siya Zhu, Saagar Kolachina, Doğuhan Sarıtürk, Jianwen Xie, Raymundo Arroyave, Xiaoning Qian, Xiaofeng Qian, Shuiwang Ji. 2025-05-29. A Materials Foundation Model via Hybrid Invariant-Equivariant Architectures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05771

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