Fast, Modular, and Differentiable Framework for Machine Learning-Enhanced Molecular Simulations

📄 Abstract

Abstract: We present an end-to-end differentiable molecular simulation framework (DIMOS) for molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations. DIMOS easily integrates machine-learning-based interatomic potentials and implements classical force fields including an efficient implementation of particle-mesh Ewald. Thanks to its modularity, both classical and machine-learning-based approaches can be easily combined into a hybrid description of the system (ML/MM). By supporting key molecular dynamics features such as efficient neighborlists and constraint algorithms for larger time steps, the framework makes steps in bridging the gap between hand-optimized simulation engines and the flexibility of a \verb|PyTorch| implementation. We show that due to improved linear instead of quadratic scaling as function of system size DIMOS is able to obtain speed-up factors of up to $170\times$ for classical force field simulations against another fully differentiable simulation framework. The advantage of differentiability is demonstrated by an end-to-end optimization of the proposal distribution in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation based on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). Using these optimized simulation parameters a $3\times$ acceleration is observed in comparison to ad-hoc chosen simulation parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/nec-research/DIMOS.