Physics-Aligned Electronic Ground-State Learning Improves Generalization
This study addresses the limited out-of-distribution generalization of machine learning interatomic potentials and their inherent trade-off between computational cost and accuracy by proposing a physics-aligned electronic ground-state descriptor model. Methodologically, Kohn-Sham density functional theory constraints are embedded into the learning architecture, and three techniques—ON-Loss, GROOT, and ROCKET—are introduced to eliminate unphysical degrees of freedom and enable label-free self-consistent fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that energy and force prediction errors are reduced by over 95%, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.07 mHa on the QMugs dataset, with reaction chemistry errors falling below chemical accuracy thresholds. These improvements significantly enhance the cross-scale generalization performance of the model.