Distillation of atomistic foundation models across architectures and chemical domains

Machine-learned interatomic potentials have transformed computational research in the physical sciences. Recent atomistic `foundation' models have changed the field yet again: trained on many different chemical elements and domains, these potentials are widely applicable, but comparably slow and resource-intensive to run. Here we show how distillation via synthetic data can be used to cheaply transfer knowledge from atomistic foundation models to a range of different architectures, unlocking much smaller, more efficient potentials. We demonstrate speed-ups of $> 10\times$ by distilling from one graph-network architecture into another, and $> 100\times$ by leveraging the atomic cluster expansion framework. We showcase applicability across chemical and materials domains: from liquid water to hydrogen under extreme conditions; from porous silica and a hybrid halide perovskite solar-cell material to modelling organic reactions. Our work shows how distillation can support the routine and computationally efficient use of current and future atomistic foundation models in real-world scientific research.