CrysToGraph: A Comprehensive Predictive Model for Crystal Material
Properties and the Benchmark
Abstract
The bonding across the lattice and ordered structures endow crystals
with unique symmetry and determine their macroscopic properties.
Crystals with unique properties such as low-dimensional materials,
metal-organic frameworks, and defected crystals, in particular, exhibit
different structures from bulk crystals and possess exotic physical
properties, making them intriguing subjects for investigation. To
accurately predict the physical and chemical properties of crystals, it
is crucial to consider long-range orders. While GNN excels at capturing
the local environment of atoms in crystals, they often face challenges
in effectively capturing longer-ranged interactions due to their limited
depth. In this paper, we propose CrysToGraph ( Crystals with
Transformers on Graph), a novel and robust
transformer-based geometric graph network designed for unconventional
crystalline systems, and UnconvBench, a comprehensive benchmark to
evaluate models’ predictive performance on multiple categories of
crystal materials. CrysToGraph effectively captures short-range
interactions with transformer-based graph convolution blocks as well as
long-range interactions with graph-wise transformer blocks. CrysToGraph
proofs its effectiveness in modelling all types of crystal materials in
multiple tasks, and moreover, it outperforms most existing methods,
achieving new state-of-the-art results on two benchmarks. This work
enhances the development of novel crystal materials in various fields,
including the anodes, cathodes, and solid-state electrolytes.