May the Force be with You: Unified Force-Centric Pre-Training for 3D Molecular Conformations
Main Conference Track
Authors: Rui Feng, Qi Zhu, Huan Tran, Binghong Chen, Aubrey Toland, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang

Recent works have shown the promise of learning pre-trained models for 3D molecular representation.However, existing pre-training models focus predominantly on equilibrium data and largely overlook off-equilibrium conformations.It is challenging to extend these methods to off-equilibrium data because their training objective relies on assumptions ofconformations being the local energy minima. We address this gap by proposing a force-centric pretraining model for 3D molecular conformations covering both equilibrium and off-equilibrium data.For off-equilibrium data, our model learns directly from their atomic forces. For equilibrium data, we introduce zero-force regularization and forced-based denoising techniques to approximate near-equilibrium forces.We obtain a unified pre-trained model for 3D molecular representation with over 15 million diverse conformations. Experiments show that, with our pre-training objective, we increase forces accuracy by around 3 times compared to the un-pre-trained Equivariant Transformer model. By incorporating regularizations on equilibrium data, we solved the problem of unstable MD simulations in vanilla Equivariant Transformers, achieving state-of-the-art simulation performance with 2.45 times faster inference time than NequIP.  As a powerful molecular encoder, our pre-trained model achieves on-par performance with state-of-the-art property prediction tasks.