ECD: A Machine Learning Benchmark for Predicting Enhanced-Precision Electronic Charge Density in Crystalline Inorganic Materials

Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Pin Chen, Zexin Xu, Qing Mo, Hongjin Zhong, Fengyang Xu, Yutong Lu

Abstract

Supervised machine learning techniques are increasingly being adopted to speed up electronic structure predictions, serving as alternatives to first-principles methods like Density Functional Theory (DFT). Although current DFT datasets mainly emphasize chemical properties and atomic forces, the precise prediction of electronic charge density is essential for accurately determining a system's total energy and ground state properties. In this study, we introduce a novel electronic charge density dataset named ECD, which encompasses 140,646 stable crystal geometries with medium-precision Perdew–Burke–Ernzerhof (PBE) functional data. Within this dataset, a subset of 7,147 geometries includes high-precision electronic charge density data calculated using the Heyd–Scuseria–Ernzerhof (HSE) functional in DFT. By designing various benchmark tasks for crystalline materials and emphasizing training with large-scale PBE data while fine-tuning with a smaller subset of high-precision HSE data, we demonstrate the efficacy of current machine learning models in predicting electronic charge densities.The ECD dataset and baseline models are open-sourced to support community efforts in developing new methodologies and accelerating materials design and applications.