Data-Driven Acceleration of the Coupled-Cluster Singles and Doubles Iterative Solver

Transferability Across Different Molecular Systems and Levels of Theory with the Data-Driven Coupled-Cluster Scheme

Machine learning has recently been introduced into the arsenal of tools that are available to computational chemists. In the past few years, we have seen an increase in the applicability of these tools on a plethora of applications, including the automated exploration of a large fraction of the chemical space, the reduction of repetitive computational tasks, the detection of outliers on large databases, and the acceleration of molecular simulations. An attractive application of machine learning in molecular electronic structure theory is the "recycling" of molecular wave functions for faster and more accurate completion of complex quantum chemical calculations. Along these lines, we have developed hybrid quantum chemical/machine learning workflows that utilize information from low-level wave functions for the accurate prediction of higher-level wave functions. The data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC) family of methods is discussed in this article together with the importance of the inclusion of physical properties in such hybrid workflows. After a short introduction to the philosophy and the capabilities of DDCC, we present our recent progress in extending its applicability to larger and more complex molecular structures and data sets. A significant advantage offered by DDCC is its transferability, with respect to different molecular systems and different excitation levels. As we show here, predicted wave functions at the coupled-cluster singles and doubles level of theory can be used for the accurate prediction of the perturbative triples of the CCSD(T) scheme. We conclude with some personal considerations with respect to future directions related to the development of the next generation of such hybrid quantum chemical/machine learning models.

On the Performance of Second-Order Polarization Propagator Methods in the Calculation of 1JFC and nJFH NMR Spin-Spin Coupling Constants

This study evaluates the performance of doubles-corrected random phase approximation (RPA) and higher random phase approximation (HRPA) approaches in predicting nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) coupling constants involving fluorine. Their performance is benchmarked against experimental data and compared with that of higher-level theoretical methods, specifically second-order polarization propagator (SOPPA) and SOPPA(CCSD). Additionally, we discuss their performance relative to density functional theory (DFT). We find that RPA(D) is severely constrained by (near) triplet instabilities, while HRPA(D) demonstrates markedly improved stability. Statistical analysis reveals stronger patterns for carbon-fluorine couplings across the methods and systems investigated compared with fluorine-hydrogen couplings. While SOPPA-based methodologies prove to be superior in accuracy, HRPA(D) shows promising performance in reducing the computational burden of these calculations, albeit with a tendency to underestimate the coupling strength. These findings highlight the potential of HRPA(D) as a practical alternative to SOPPA methods, even for such difficult properties as NMR spin-spin coupling constants involving fluorine, emphasizing its role in improving predictive accuracy and efficiency across diverse chemical environments.

In Silico Chemical Experiments in the Age of AI: From Quantum Chemistry to Machine Learning and Back

Computational chemistry is an indispensable tool for understanding molecules and predicting chemical properties. However, traditional computational methods face significant challenges due to the difficulty of solving the Schrödinger equations and the increasing computational cost with the size of the molecular system. In response, there has been a surge of interest in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to in silico experiments. Integrating AI and ML into computational chemistry increases the scalability and speed of the exploration of chemical space. However, challenges remain, particularly regarding the reproducibility and transferability of ML models. This review highlights the evolution of ML in learning from, complementing, or replacing traditional computational chemistry for energy and property predictions. Starting from models trained entirely on numerical data, a journey set forth toward the ideal model incorporating or learning the physical laws of quantum mechanics. This paper also reviews existing computational methods and ML models and their intertwining, outlines a roadmap for future research, and identifies areas for improvement and innovation. Ultimately, the goal is to develop AI architectures capable of predicting accurate and transferable solutions to the Schrödinger equation, thereby revolutionizing in silico experiments within chemistry and materials science.

Exploration of the Two-Electron Excitation Space with Data-Driven Coupled Cluster

Computational cost limits the applicability of post-Hartree-Fock methods such as coupled-cluster on larger molecular systems. The data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC) method applies machine learning to predict the coupled-cluster two-electron amplitudes (t2) using data from second-order perturbation theory (MP2). One major limitation of the DDCC models is the size of training sets that increases exponentially with the system size. Effective sampling of the amplitude space can resolve this issue. Five different amplitude selection techniques that reduce the amount of data used for training were evaluated, an approach that also prevents model overfitting and increases the portability of data-driven coupled-cluster singles and doubles to more complex molecules or larger basis sets. In combination with a localized orbital formalism to predict the CCSD t2 amplitudes, we have achieved a 10-fold error reduction for energy calculations.

Machine Learning Many-Body Green's Functions for Molecular Excitation Spectra

We present a machine learning (ML) framework for predicting Green's functions of molecular systems, from which photoemission spectra and quasiparticle energies at quantum many-body level can be obtained. Kernel ridge regression is adopted to predict self-energy matrix elements on compact imaginary frequency grids from static and dynamical mean-field electronic features, which gives direct access to real-frequency many-body Green's functions through analytic continuation and Dyson's equation. Feature and self-energy matrices are represented in a symmetry-adapted intrinsic atomic orbital plus projected atomic orbital basis to enforce rotational invariance. We demonstrate good transferability and high data efficiency of the proposed ML method across molecular sizes and chemical species by showing accurate predictions of density of states (DOS) and quasiparticle energies at the level of many-body perturbation theory (GW) or full configuration interaction. For the ML model trained on 48 out of 1995 molecules randomly sampled from the QM7 and QM9 data sets, we report the mean absolute errors of ML-predicted highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energies to be 0.13 and 0.10 eV, respectively, compared to GW@PBE0. We further showcase the capability of this method by applying the same ML model to predict DOS for significantly larger organic molecules with up to 44 heavy atoms.

Low-Data Deep Quantum Chemical Learning for Accurate MP2 and Coupled-Cluster Correlations

Accurate ab initio prediction of electronic energies is very expensive for macromolecules by explicitly solving post-Hartree-Fock equations. We here exploit the physically justified local correlation feature in a compact basis of small molecules and construct an expressive low-data deep neural network (dNN) model to obtain machine-learned electron correlation energies on par with MP2 and CCSD levels of theory for more complex molecules and different datasets that are not represented in the training set. We show that our dNN-powered model is data efficient and makes highly transferable predictions across alkanes of various lengths, organic molecules with non-covalent and biomolecular interactions, as well as water clusters of different sizes and morphologies. In particular, by training 800 (H2O)8 clusters with the local correlation descriptors, accurate MP2/cc-pVTZ correlation energies up to (H2O)128 can be predicted with a small random error within chemical accuracy from exact values, while a majority of prediction deviations are attributed to an intrinsically systematic error. Our results reveal that an extremely compact local correlation feature set, which is poor for any direct post-Hartree-Fock calculations, has however a prominent advantage in reserving important electron correlation patterns for making accurate transferable predictions across distinct molecular compositions, bond types, and geometries.

Machine Learning for Bridging the Gap between Density Functional Theory and Coupled Cluster Energies

Accurate electronic energies and properties are crucial for successful reaction design and mechanistic investigations. Computing energies and properties of molecular structures has proven extremely useful, and, with increasing computational power, the limits of high-level approaches (such as coupled cluster theory) are expanding to ever larger systems. However, because scaling is highly unfavorable, these methods are still not universally applicable to larger systems. To address the need for fast and accurate electronic energies of larger systems, we created a database of around 8000 small organic monomers (2000 dimers) optimized at the B3LYP-D3(BJ)/cc-pVTZ level of theory. This database also includes single-point energies computed at various levels of theory, including PBE1PBE, ωΒ97Χ, M06-2X, revTPSS, B3LYP, and BP86, for density functional theory as well as DLPNO-CCSD(T) and CCSD(T) for coupled cluster theory, all in conjunction with a cc-pVTZ basis. We used this database to train machine learning models based on graph neural networks using two different graph representations. Our models are able to make energy predictions from B3LYP-D3(BJ)/cc-pVTZ inputs to CCSD(T)/cc-pVTZ outputs with a mean absolute error of 0.78 and to DLPNO-CCSD(T)/cc-pVTZ with an mean absolute error of 0.50 and 0.18 kcal mol^-1 for monomers and dimers, respectively. The model for dimers was further validated on the S22 database, and the monomer model was tested on challenging systems, including those with highly conjugated or functionally complex molecules.

Data-Driven Refinement of Electronic Energies from Two-Electron Reduced-Density-Matrix Theory

The exponential computational cost of describing strongly correlated electrons can be mitigated by adopting a reduced-density matrix (RDM)-based description of the electronic structure. While variational two-electron RDM (v2RDM) methods can enable large-scale calculations on such systems, the quality of the solution is limited by the fact that only a subset of known necessary N-representability constraints can be applied to the 2RDM in practical calculations. Here, we demonstrate that violations of partial three-particle (T1 and T2) N-representability conditions, which can be evaluated with knowledge of only the 2RDM, can serve as physics-based features in a machine-learning (ML) protocol for improving energies from v2RDM calculations that consider only two-particle (PQG) conditions. Proof-of-principle calculations demonstrate that the model yields substantially improved energies relative to reference values from configuration-interaction-based calculations.

Accelerated coupled cluster calculations with Procrustes orbital interpolation

The coupled cluster method is considered a gold standard in quantum chemistry, reliably giving energies that are exact within chemical accuracy (1.6 mhartree). However, even in the coupled cluster single-double (CCSD) approximation, where the cluster operator is truncated to include only single and double excitations, the method scales as O(N⁶) in the number of electrons, and the cluster operator needs to be solved for iteratively, increasing the computation time. Inspired by eigenvector continuation, we present here an algorithm making use of the Gaussian processes that provides an improved initial guess for the coupled cluster amplitudes. The cluster operator is written as a linear combination of sample cluster operators that are obtained at particular sample geometries. By reusing the cluster operators from previous calculations in that way, it is possible to obtain a start guess for the amplitudes that surpasses both MP2 guesses and "previous geometry"-guesses in terms of the number of necessary iterations. As this improved guess is very close to the exact cluster operator, it can be used directly to calculate the CCSD energy to chemical accuracy, giving approximate CCSD energies scaling as O(N⁵).

Δ-Machine Learned Potential Energy Surfaces and Force Fields

There has been great progress in developing machine-learned potential energy surfaces (PESs) for molecules and clusters with more than 10 atoms. Unfortunately, this number of atoms generally limits the level of electronic structure theory to less than the "gold standard" CCSD(T) level. Indeed, for the well-known MD17 dataset for molecules with 9-20 atoms, all of the energies and forces were obtained with DFT calculations (PBE). This Perspective is focused on a Δ-machine learning method that we recently proposed and applied to bring DFT-based PESs to close to CCSD(T) accuracy. This is demonstrated for hydronium, N-methylacetamide, acetyl acetone, and ethanol. For 15-atom tropolone, it appears that special approaches (e.g., molecular tailoring, local CCSD(T)) are needed to obtain the CCSD(T) energies. A new aspect of this approach is the extension of Δ-machine learning to force fields. The approach is based on many-body corrections to polarizable force field potentials. This is examined in detail using the TTM2.1 water potential. The corrections make use of our recent CCSD(T) datasets for 2-b, 3-b, and 4-b interactions for water. These datasets were used to develop a new fully ab initio potential for water, termed q-AQUA.

Accurate Molecular-Orbital-Based Machine Learning Energies via Unsupervised Clustering of Chemical Space

We introduce an unsupervised clustering algorithm to improve training efficiency and accuracy in predicting energies using molecular-orbital-based machine learning (MOB-ML). This work determines clusters via the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in an entirely automatic manner and simplifies an earlier supervised clustering approach [ J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2019, 15, 6668] by eliminating both the necessity for user-specified parameters and the training of an additional classifier. Unsupervised clustering results from GMM have the advantages of accurately reproducing chemically intuitive groupings of frontier molecular orbitals and exhibiting improved performance with an increasing number of training examples. The resulting clusters from supervised or unsupervised clustering are further combined with scalable Gaussian process regression (GPR) or linear regression (LR) to learn molecular energies accurately by generating a local regression model in each cluster. Among all four combinations of regressors and clustering methods, GMM combined with scalable exact GPR (GMM/GPR) is the most efficient training protocol for MOB-ML. The numerical tests of molecular energy learning on thermalized data sets of drug-like molecules demonstrate the improved accuracy, transferability, and learning efficiency of GMM/GPR over other training protocols for MOB-ML, i.e., supervised regression clustering combined with GPR (RC/GPR) and GPR without clustering. GMM/GPR also provides the best molecular energy predictions compared with ones from the literature on the same benchmark data sets. With a lower scaling, GMM/GPR has a 10.4-fold speedup in wall-clock training time compared with scalable exact GPR with a training size of 6500 QM7b-T molecules.

Machine Learning of Coupled Cluster (T)-Energy Corrections via Delta (Δ)-Learning

Accurate thermochemistry is essential in many chemical disciplines, such as astro-, atmospheric, or combustion chemistry. These areas often involve fleetingly existent intermediates whose thermochemistry is difficult to assess. Whenever direct calorimetric experiments are infeasible, accurate computational estimates of relative molecular energies are required. However, high-level computations, often using coupled cluster theory, are generally resource-intensive. To expedite the process using machine learning techniques, we generated a database of energies for small organic molecules at the CCSD(T)/cc-pVDZ, CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pVDZ, and CCSD(T)/cc-pVTZ levels of theory. Leveraging the power of deep learning by employing graph neural networks, we are able to predict the effect of perturbatively included triples (T), that is, the difference between CCSD and CCSD(T) energies, with a mean absolute error of 0.25, 0.25, and 0.28 kcal mol^-1 (R² of 0.998, 0.997, and 0.998) with the cc-pVDZ, aug-cc-pVDZ, and cc-pVTZ basis sets, respectively. Our models were further validated by application to three validation sets taken from the S22 Database as well as to a selection of known theoretically challenging cases.

Active Learning Configuration Interaction for Excited-State Calculations of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

We present the active learning configuration interaction (ALCI) method for multiconfigurational calculations based on large active spaces. ALCI leverages the use of an active learning procedure to find important electronic configurations among the full configurational space generated within an active space. We tested it for the calculation of singlet-singlet excited states of acenes and pyrene using different machine learning algorithms. The ALCI method yields excitation energies within 0.2-0.3 eV from those obtained by traditional complete active-space configuration interaction (CASCI) calculations (affordable for active spaces up to 16 electrons in 16 orbitals) by including only a small fraction of the CASCI configuration space in the calculations. For larger active spaces (we tested up to 26 electrons in 26 orbitals), not affordable with traditional CI methods, ALCI captures the trends of experimental excitation energies. Overall, ALCI provides satisfactory approximations to large active-space wave functions with up to 10 orders of magnitude fewer determinants for the systems presented here. These ALCI wave functions are promising and affordable starting points for the subsequent second-order perturbation theory or pair-density functional theory calculations.

Machine Learning for Electronically Excited States of Molecules

Electronically excited states of molecules are at the heart of photochemistry, photophysics, as well as photobiology and also play a role in material science. Their theoretical description requires highly accurate quantum chemical calculations, which are computationally expensive. In this review, we focus on not only how machine learning is employed to speed up such excited-state simulations but also how this branch of artificial intelligence can be used to advance this exciting research field in all its aspects. Discussed applications of machine learning for excited states include excited-state dynamics simulations, static calculations of absorption spectra, as well as many others. In order to put these studies into context, we discuss the promises and pitfalls of the involved machine learning techniques. Since the latter are mostly based on quantum chemistry calculations, we also provide a short introduction into excited-state electronic structure methods and approaches for nonadiabatic dynamics simulations and describe tricks and problems when using them in machine learning for excited states of molecules.

Computational Discovery of Transition-metal Complexes: From High-throughput Screening to Machine Learning

Transition-metal complexes are attractive targets for the design of catalysts and functional materials. The behavior of the metal-organic bond, while very tunable for achieving target properties, is challenging to predict and necessitates searching a wide and complex space to identify needles in haystacks for target applications. This review will focus on the techniques that make high-throughput search of transition-metal chemical space feasible for the discovery of complexes with desirable properties. The review will cover the development, promise, and limitations of "traditional" computational chemistry (i.e., force field, semiempirical, and density functional theory methods) as it pertains to data generation for inorganic molecular discovery. The review will also discuss the opportunities and limitations in leveraging experimental data sources. We will focus on how advances in statistical modeling, artificial intelligence, multiobjective optimization, and automation accelerate discovery of lead compounds and design rules. The overall objective of this review is to showcase how bringing together advances from diverse areas of computational chemistry and computer science have enabled the rapid uncovering of structure-property relationships in transition-metal chemistry. We aim to highlight how unique considerations in motifs of metal-organic bonding (e.g., variable spin and oxidation state, and bonding strength/nature) set them and their discovery apart from more commonly considered organic molecules. We will also highlight how uncertainty and relative data scarcity in transition-metal chemistry motivate specific developments in machine learning representations, model training, and in computational chemistry. Finally, we will conclude with an outlook of areas of opportunity for the accelerated discovery of transition-metal complexes.

Machine Learning for Electronically Excited States of Molecules

Electronically excited states of molecules are at the heart of photochemistry, photophysics, as well as photobiology and also play a role in material science. Their theoretical description requires highly accurate quantum chemical calculations, which are computationally expensive. In this review, we focus on not only how machine learning is employed to speed up such excited-state simulations but also how this branch of artificial intelligence can be used to advance this exciting research field in all its aspects. Discussed applications of machine learning for excited states include excited-state dynamics simulations, static calculations of absorption spectra, as well as many others. In order to put these studies into context, we discuss the promises and pitfalls of the involved machine learning techniques. Since the latter are mostly based on quantum chemistry calculations, we also provide a short introduction into excited-state electronic structure methods and approaches for nonadiabatic dynamics simulations and describe tricks and problems when using them in machine learning for excited states of molecules.

Perspective on integrating machine learning into computational chemistry and materials science

Machine learning (ML) methods are being used in almost every conceivable area of electronic structure theory and molecular simulation. In particular, ML has become firmly established in the construction of high-dimensional interatomic potentials. Not a day goes by without another proof of principle being published on how ML methods can represent and predict quantum mechanical properties-be they observable, such as molecular polarizabilities, or not, such as atomic charges. As ML is becoming pervasive in electronic structure theory and molecular simulation, we provide an overview of how atomistic computational modeling is being transformed by the incorporation of ML approaches. From the perspective of the practitioner in the field, we assess how common workflows to predict structure, dynamics, and spectroscopy are affected by ML. Finally, we discuss how a tighter and lasting integration of ML methods with computational chemistry and materials science can be achieved and what it will mean for research practice, software development, and postgraduate training.

A Ranked-Orbital Approach to Select Active Spaces for High-Throughput Multireference Computation

The past decade has seen a great increase in the application of high-throughput computation to a variety of important problems in chemistry. However, one area which has been resistant to the high-throughput approach is multireference wave function methods, in large part due to the technicalities of setting up these calculations and in particular the not always intuitive challenge of active space selection. As we look toward a future of applying high-throughput computation to all areas of chemistry, it is important to prepare these methods for large-scale automation. Here, we propose a ranked-orbital approach to select active spaces with the goal of standardizing multireference methods for high-throughput computation. This method allows for the meaningful comparison of different active space selection schemes and orbital localizations, and we demonstrate the utility of this approach across 1120 multireference calculations for the excitation energies of small molecules. Our results reveal that it is helpful to distinguish the method used to generate orbitals from the method of ranking orbitals in terms of importance for the active space. Additionally, we propose our own orbital ranking scheme that estimates the importance of an orbital for the active space through a pair-interaction framework from orbital energies and features of the Hartree-Fock exchange matrix. We call this new scheme the "approximate pair coefficient" (APC) method and we show that it performs quite well for the test systems presented.

Accelerating coupled cluster calculations with nonlinear dynamics and supervised machine learning

In this paper, the iteration scheme associated with single reference coupled cluster theory has been analyzed using nonlinear dynamics. The phase space analysis indicates the presence of a few significant cluster amplitudes, mostly involving valence excitations, that dictate the dynamics, while all other amplitudes are enslaved. Starting with a few initial iterations to establish the inter-relationship among the cluster amplitudes, a supervised machine learning scheme with a polynomial kernel ridge regression model has been employed to express each of the enslaved amplitudes uniquely in terms of the former set of amplitudes. The subsequent coupled cluster iterations are restricted solely to determine those significant excitations, and the enslaved amplitudes are determined through the already established functional mapping. We will show that our hybrid scheme leads to a significant reduction in the computational time without sacrificing the accuracy.

Quantum Information and Algorithms for Correlated Quantum Matter

Discoveries in quantum materials, which are characterized by the strongly quantum-mechanical nature of electrons and atoms, have revealed exotic properties that arise from correlations. It is the promise of quantum materials for quantum information science superimposed with the potential of new computational quantum algorithms to discover new quantum materials that inspires this Review. We anticipate that quantum materials to be discovered and developed in the next years will transform the areas of quantum information processing including communication, storage, and computing. Simultaneously, efforts toward developing new quantum algorithmic approaches for quantum simulation and advanced calculation methods for many-body quantum systems enable major advances toward functional quantum materials and their deployment. The advent of quantum computing brings new possibilities for eliminating the exponential complexity that has stymied simulation of correlated quantum systems on high-performance classical computers. Here, we review new algorithms and computational approaches to predict and understand the behavior of correlated quantum matter. The strongly interdisciplinary nature of the topics covered necessitates a common language to integrate ideas from these fields. We aim to provide this common language while weaving together fields across electronic structure theory, quantum electrodynamics, algorithm design, and open quantum systems. Our Review is timely in presenting the state-of-the-art in the field toward algorithms with nonexponential complexity for correlated quantum matter with applications in grand-challenge problems. Looking to the future, at the intersection of quantum information science and algorithms for correlated quantum matter, we envision seminal advances in predicting many-body quantum states and describing excitonic quantum matter and large-scale entangled states, a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity, and quantifying open quantum system dynamics.

Artificial Neural Networks Applied as Molecular Wave Function Solvers

We use artificial neural networks (ANNs) based on the Boltzmann machine (BM) architectures as an encoder of ab initio molecular many-electron wave functions represented with the complete active space configuration interaction (CAS-CI) model. As first introduced by the work of Carleo and Troyer for physical systems, the coefficients of the electronic configurations in the CI expansion are parametrized with the BMs as a function of their occupancies that act as descriptors. This ANN-based wave function ansatz is referred to as the neural-network quantum state (NQS). The machine learning is used for training the BMs in terms of finding a variationally optimal form of the ground-state wave function on the basis of the energy minimization. It is relevant to reinforcement learning and does not use any reference data nor prior knowledge of the wave function, while the Hamiltonian is given based on a user-specified chemical structure in the first-principles manner. Carleo and Troyer used the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), which has hidden units, for the neural network architecture of NQS, while, in this study, we further introduce its replacement with the BM that has only visible units but with different orders of connectivity. For this hidden-node free BM, the second- and third-order BMs based on quadratic and cubic energy functions, respectively, were implemented. We denote these second- and third-order BMs as BM2 and BM3, respectively. The pilot implementation of the NQS solver into an exact diagonalization module of the quantum chemistry program was made to assess the capability of variants of the BM-based NQS. The test calculations were performed by determining the CAS-CI wave functions of illustrative molecular systems, indocyanine green, and dinitrogen dissociation. The simulated energies have been shown to converge to CAS-CI energy in most cases by improving RBM with an increasing number of hidden nodes. BM3 systematically yields lower energies than BM2, reproducing the CAS-CI energies of dinitrogen across potential energy curves within an error of 50 μE_h.

Psi4 1.4: Open-source software for high-throughput quantum chemistry

PSI4 is a free and open-source ab initio electronic structure program providing implementations of Hartree-Fock, density functional theory, many-body perturbation theory, configuration interaction, density cumulant theory, symmetry-adapted perturbation theory, and coupled-cluster theory. Most of the methods are quite efficient, thanks to density fitting and multi-core parallelism. The program is a hybrid of C++ and Python, and calculations may be run with very simple text files or using the Python API, facilitating post-processing and complex workflows; method developers also have access to most of PSI4's core functionalities via Python. Job specification may be passed using The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) QCSCHEMA data format, facilitating interoperability. A rewrite of our top-level computation driver, and concomitant adoption of the MolSSI QCARCHIVE INFRASTRUCTURE project, makes the latest version of PSI4 well suited to distributed computation of large numbers of independent tasks. The project has fostered the development of independent software components that may be reused in other quantum chemistry programs.

Quantum Chemistry in the Age of Machine Learning

As the quantum chemistry (QC) community embraces machine learning (ML), the number of new methods and applications based on the combination of QC and ML is surging. In this Perspective, a view of the current state of affairs in this new and exciting research field is offered, challenges of using machine learning in quantum chemistry applications are described, and potential future developments are outlined. Specifically, examples of how machine learning is used to improve the accuracy and accelerate quantum chemical research are shown. Generalization and classification of existing techniques are provided to ease the navigation in the sea of literature and to guide researchers entering the field. The emphasis of this Perspective is on supervised machine learning.

Unifying machine learning and quantum chemistry with a deep neural network for molecular wavefunctions

Machine learning advances chemistry and materials science by enabling large-scale exploration of chemical space based on quantum chemical calculations. While these models supply fast and accurate predictions of atomistic chemical properties, they do not explicitly capture the electronic degrees of freedom of a molecule, which limits their applicability for reactive chemistry and chemical analysis. Here we present a deep learning framework for the prediction of the quantum mechanical wavefunction in a local basis of atomic orbitals from which all other ground-state properties can be derived. This approach retains full access to the electronic structure via the wavefunction at force-field-like efficiency and captures quantum mechanics in an analytically differentiable representation. On several examples, we demonstrate that this opens promising avenues to perform inverse design of molecular structures for targeting electronic property optimisation and a clear path towards increased synergy of machine learning and quantum chemistry.