3D Computer Vision Models Predict DFT-Level HOMO-LUMO Gap Energies from Force-Field-Optimized Geometries

We investigate 3D deep learning methods for predicting quantum mechanical energies at high-theory-level accuracy from inexpensive, rapidly computed molecular geometries. Using space-filled volumetric representations (voxels), we explore the effects of radial decay from atom centers and rotational data augmentation on learnability. We test several published computer vision models for 3D shape learning, and construct our own architecture based on 3D inception networks with physically meaningful kernels. We provide a framework for further studies and propose a modeling challenge for the computer vision and molecular machine learning communities.