Learning Inter-Atomic Potentials without Explicit Equivariance

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission21963 Authors

Keywords: Interatomic potentials, force fields

Abstract: Accurate and scalable machine-learned inter-atomic potentials (MLIPs) are essential for molecular simulations ranging from drug discovery to new material design. Current state-of-the-art models enforce roto-translational symmetries through equivariant neural network architectures, a hard-wired inductive bias that can often lead to reduced flexibility, computational efficiency, and scalability. In this work, we introduce \textbf{TransIP}: \textbf{Trans}former-based \textbf{I}nter-Atomic \textbf{P}otentials, a novel training paradigm for interatomic potentials achieving symmetry compliance without explicit architectural constraints. Our approach guides a generic non-equivariant Transformer-based model to learn $\mathrm{SO}(3)$-equivariance by optimizing its representations in the embedding space. Trained on the recent Open Molecules (OMol25) collection, a large and diverse molecular dataset built specifically for MLIPs and covering different types of molecules (including small organics, biomolecular fragments, and electrolyte-like species), TransIP attains comparable performance in machine-learning force fields versus state-of-the-art equivariant baselines. Further, compared to a data augmentation baseline, TransIP achieves 40\% to 60\% improvement in performance across varying OMol25 dataset sizes. More broadly, our work shows that learned equivariance can be a powerful and efficient alternative to equivariant or augmentation-based MLIP models.

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

Submission Number: 21963