Differentiable sampling of molecular geometries with uncertainty-based adversarial attacks

Neural network (NN) interatomic potentials provide fast prediction of potential energy surfaces, closely matching the accuracy of the electronic structure methods used to produce the training data. However, NN predictions are only reliable within well-learned training domains, and show volatile behavior when extrapolating. Uncertainty quantification methods can flag atomic configurations for which prediction confidence is low, but arriving at such uncertain regions requires expensive sampling of the NN phase space, often using atomistic simulations. Here, we exploit automatic differentiation to drive atomistic systems towards high-likelihood, high-uncertainty configurations without the need for molecular dynamics simulations. By performing adversarial attacks on an uncertainty metric, informative geometries that expand the training domain of NNs are sampled. When combined with an active learning loop, this approach bootstraps and improves NN potentials while decreasing the number of calls to the ground truth method. This efficiency is demonstrated on sampling of kinetic barriers, collective variables in molecules, and supramolecular chemistry in zeolite-molecule interactions, and can be extended to any NN potential architecture and materials system. Neural Networks are known to perform poorly outside of their training domain. Here the authors propose an inverse sampling strategy to train neural network potentials enabling to drive atomistic systems towards high-likelihood and high-uncertainty configurations without the need for molecular dynamics simulations.