Artificial Intelligence for Direct Prediction of Molecular Dynamics Across Chemical Space

Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) is a powerful tool for exploring the behavior of atomistic systems, but its reliance on sequential numerical integration limits simulation efficiency. We present MDtrajNet-1, a foundational AI model that directly generates MD trajectories across chemical space, bypassing force calculations and integration. This approach accelerates simulations by up to two orders of magnitude compared to traditional MD, even those enhanced by machine-learning interatomic potentials. MDtrajNet-1 combines equivariant neural networks with a Transformer-based architecture to achieve strong accuracy and transferability in predicting long-time trajectories for both known and unseen systems. Remarkably, the errors of the trajectories generated by MDtrajNet-1 for various molecular systems are close to those of the conventional ab initio MD. The model's flexible design supports diverse application scenarios, including different statistical ensembles, boundary conditions, and interaction types. By overcoming the intrinsic speed barrier of conventional MD, MDtrajNet-1 opens new frontiers in efficient and scalable atomistic simulations.