Machine learning of charges and long-range interactions from energies and forces

Accurate modeling of long-range forces is critical in atomistic simulations, as they play a central role in determining the properties of material and chemical systems. However, standard machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) often rely on short-range approximations, limiting their applicability to systems with significant electrostatics and dispersion forces. We recently introduced the Latent Ewald Summation (LES) method, which captures long-range electrostatics without explicitly learning atomic charges or charge equilibration. We benchmark LES on diverse and challenging systems, including charged molecules, ionic liquids, electrolyte solutions, polar dipeptides, surface adsorption, electrolyte/solid interfaces, and solid-solid interfaces. Here we show that LES can reproduce the exact atomic charges for classical systems with fixed charges and can infer dipole and quadrupole moments, as well as the dipole derivative with respect to atomic positions, for quantum mechanical systems. Moreover, LES can achieve better accuracy in energy and force predictions compared to methods that explicitly learn from charges.