Force field-inspired molecular representation learning for property prediction

Molecular representation learning is a crucial task to accelerate drug discovery and materials design. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach to tackle this task. However, most of them do not fully consider the intramolecular interactions, i.e. bond stretching, angle bending, torsion, and nonbonded interactions, which are critical for determining molecular property. Recently, a growing number of 3D-aware GNNs have been proposed to cope with the issue, while these models usually need large datasets and accurate spatial information. In this work, we aim to design a GNN which is less dependent on the quantity and quality of datasets. To this end, we propose a force field-inspired neural network (FFiNet), which can include all the interactions by incorporating the functional form of the potential energy of molecules. Experiments show that FFiNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various molecular property datasets including both small molecules and large protein–ligand complexes, even on those datasets which are relatively small and without accurate spatial information. Moreover, the visualization for FFiNet indicates that it automatically learns the relationship between property and structure, which can promote an in-depth understanding of molecular structure. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13321-023-00691-2.