Marco Carobene | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials: Advancing Open-Source Software for Efficient and Scalable Molecular Simulation

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) enable atomistic simulations with near ab initio accuracy at significantly reduced computational cost, but their broader adoption is often limited by fragmented tooling, limited scalability, and inflexible software design. We present mlip v2, a new generation of the mlip library that advances efficient and scalable molecular simulation through a unified and extensible framework. The new release features a targeted API redesign with improved modularity and control, enabling flexible customization of training, data processing, and simulation workflows. It further integrates a new high-performance backend for equivariant operations, e3j, significantly accelerating model inference and simulations. In addition, the framework introduces a range of entirely new capabilities, including the eSEN architecture with a Mixture-of-Experts formulation for scalable training on large and diverse datasets, improved handling of electrostatics through more physically grounded charge modeling and long-range interaction treatment, and advanced simulation features such as NPT ensembles and nudged elastic band methods. Together, these extensions significantly broaden the scope of MLIP applications, enabling efficient modeling of complex, reactive, and out-of-equilibrium systems, and bridging the gap between ML research and practical molecular simulation applications. The library is available on GitHub and on PyPI under the Apache license 2.0.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2025

GeoGraph: Geometric and Graph-based Ensemble Descriptors for Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

While deep learning has revolutionized the prediction of rigid protein structures, modelling the conformational ensembles of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) remains a key frontier. Current AI paradigms present a trade-off: Protein Language Models (PLMs) capture evolutionary statistics but lack explicit physical grounding, while generative models trained to model full ensembles are computationally expensive. In this work we critically assess these limits and propose a path forward. We introduce GeoGraph, a simulation-informed surrogate trained to predict ensemble-averaged statistics of residue-residue contact-map topology directly from sequence. By featurizing coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations into residue- and sequence-level graph descriptors, we create a robust and information-rich learning target. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields representations that are more predictive of key biophysical properties than existing methods.

q-bio.BM↗