NEP89: Universal neuroevolution potential for inorganic and organic materials across 89 elements
Abstract
While machine-learned interatomic potentials offer near-quantum-mechanical accuracy for atomistic simulations, many are material-specific or computationally intensive, limiting their broader use. Here we introduce NEP89, a foundation model based on neuroevolution potential architecture, delivering empirical-potential-like speed and high accuracy across 89 elements. A compact yet comprehensive training dataset covering inorganic and organic materials was curated through descriptor-space subsampling and iterative refinement across multiple datasets. NEP89 achieves competitive accuracy compared to representative foundation models while being three to four orders of magnitude more computationally efficient, enabling previously impractical large-scale atomistic simulations of inorganic and organic systems. In addition to its out-of-the-box applicability to diverse scenarios, including million-atom-scale compression of compositionally complex alloys, ion diffusion in solid-state electrolytes and water, rocksalt dissolution, methane combustion, and protein-ligand dynamics, NEP89 also supports fine-tuning for rapid adaptation to user-specific applications, such as mechanical, thermal, structural, and spectral properties of two-dimensional materials, metallic glasses, and organic crystals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.21286,
title = {NEP89: Universal neuroevolution potential for inorganic and organic materials across 89 elements},
author = {Ting Liang and Ke Xu and Eric Lindgren and Zherui Chen and Rui Zhao and Jiahui Liu and Esmée Berger and Benrui Tang and Bohan Zhang and Yanzhou Wang and Keke Song and Penghua Ying and Nan Xu and Haikuan Dong and Shunda Chen and Paul Erhart and Zheyong Fan and Tapio Ala-Nissila and Jianbin Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.21286},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
14 pages, 5 figures in the main text; 1 supplementary table, 11 supplementary figures in the SI