Active learning of reactive Bayesian force fields applied to heterogeneous catalysis dynamics of H/Pt

J Vandermause and Y Xie and JS Lim and CJ Owen and B Kozinsky, NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 13, 5183 (2022).

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32294-0

Atomistic modeling of chemically reactive systems has so far relied on either expensive ab initio methods or bond-order force fields requiring arduous parametrization. Here, we describe a Bayesian active learning framework for autonomous "on-the-fly" training of fast and accurate reactive many-body force fields during molecular dynamics simulations. At each time-step, predictive uncertainties of a sparse Gaussian process are evaluated to automatically determine whether additional ab initio training data are needed. We introduce a general method for mapping trained kernel models onto equivalent polynomial models whose prediction cost is much lower and independent of the training set size. As a demonstration, we perform direct two-phase simulations of heterogeneous H-2 turnover on the Pt(111) catalyst surface at chemical accuracy. The model trains itself in three days and performs at twice the speed of a ReaxFF model, while maintaining much higher fidelity to DFT and excellent agreement with experiment. Uncertainty-aware machine learning models are used to automate the training of reactive force fields. The method is used here to simulate hydrogen turnover on a platinum surface with unprecedented accuracy.

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