Image super-resolution inspired electron density prediction
Abstract
Predicting ground-state electron densities of chemical systems has recently received growing attention in machine learning quantum chemistry, given their fundamental importance as highlighted by the Hohenberg-Kohn theorem. Drawing inspiration from the domain of image super-resolution, we view the electron density as a 3D grayscale image and use a convolutional residual network to transform a crude and trivially generated guess of the molecular density into an accurate ground-state quantum mechanical density. Here we show that this model produces more accurate predictions than all prior density prediction approaches. Due to its simplicity, the model is directly applicable to unseen molecular conformations and chemical elements. We show that fine-tuning on limited new data provides high accuracy even in challenging cases of exotic elements and charge states.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025.
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Acknowledgement
This work was primarily supported by the United States Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division, FWP LANLE3F2 awarded to Los Alamos National Laboratory under Triad National Security, LLC (‘Triad’) contract grant no. 89233218CNA000001, subaward C2448 to the California Institute of Technology for C.L., O.S., S.Y., and G.K.C. Additional support for G.K.C was provided by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation via a grant from the program “Machine Learning in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering". G.K.C is a Simons Investigator in Physics. The authors disclose the use of the GPT-4 (OpenAI) model during the writing of the first draft of the article. The artificial intelligence model was used to polish the language, and the generated text was carefully inspected, validated, and edited by the authors.
Data Availability
The DFT density data and molecular geometries are available at Refs. 80,81,82. Source data for the Figures are provided with this paper. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code Availability
Implementation and minimal examples can be found at Ref. 83 Pre-trained models can be found in https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25365508.
Conflict of Interest
G.K.C. is a part owner of QSimulate Inc. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC12102193
- United States Department of Energy
- FWP LANLE3F2
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- 89233218CNA000001
- United States Department of Energy
- C2448
- Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation
- Simons Foundation
- Accepted
-
2025-05-07
- Caltech groups
- Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (CCE), Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS)
- Publication Status
- Published