ANI/EFP: Modeling Long-Range Interactions in ANI Neural Network with Effective Fragment Potentials

Deep learning Neural Networks (NN) have been developed in the field of molecular modeling for the purpose of circumventing the high computational cost of quantum-mechanical calculations while rivaling their accuracies. Although these networks have found great success, they generally lack the ability to accurately describe long-range interactions, which makes them unusable for extended molecular systems. Herein, we provide a method for partially retraining the deep learning general-use neural network ANI, in which the long-range interactions are represented via atomic electrostatic potentials. The electrostatic potentials, generated with polarizable effective fragment potentials (EFP), are used as an additional input feature for the network. This new ANI/EFP network can predict solute-solvent interaction energies on a trained data set with a kcal/mol accuracy. It also shows promise in predicting the interaction energies of a solute in solvent environments that have not been included in a training data set. The proposed protocol can be taken as an example and further developed, leading to highly accurate and transferable neural network potentials capable of handling long-range interactions and extended molecular systems.