Geometry-enhanced graph neural network for learning the smoothness of glassy dynamics from static structure

Abstract: Understanding the dynamic processes of the glassy system continues to be challenging. Recent advances have shown the power of graph neural networks (GNNs) for determining the correlation between structure and dynamics in the glassy system. These methods treat the glassy system as a topological graph. However, the inherent "smoothness" property of the dynamics on the graph (variation of dynamics over the graph) is ignored, resulting in a deteriorated performance of GNN for dynamic predictions over various time scales. In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation assessing the smoothness patterns of particle dynamics from the graph perspective. The results indicate that the long-time dynamics exhibit a smoother property on the graph, while the short-time dynamics reveal a distinctly non-smooth pattern. To establish the relationship between the static structure and dynamics with different smoothness patterns, we propose a novel geometry-enhanced graph neural network (Geo-GNN) model. The Geo-GNN architecture consists of a geometry feature encoder that incorporates rotation-invariant distances and angles to enhance geometric feature learning and a geometry-enhanced aggregation block that can adaptively learn the underlying smoothness patterns during message passing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to capture the inherent smoothness pattern of particles and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predicting the dynamics across all time scales. A subsequent study has revealed that geometric features are critical for the model to accurately capture smoothness patterns in dynamics. Our research not only refines the method for predicting glassy dynamics but also provides a new lens through which to investigate the issue of causality regarding dynamical heterogeneity in glasses.