CrysGNN: Distilling Pre-trained Knowledge to Enhance Property Prediction for Crystalline Materials

In recent years, graph neural network (GNN) based approaches have emerged as a powerful technique to encode complex topological structure of crystal materials in an enriched repre- sentation space. These models are often supervised in nature and using the property-specific training data, learn relation- ship between crystal structure and different properties like formation energy, bandgap, bulk modulus, etc. Most of these methods require a huge amount of property-tagged data to train the system which may not be available for different prop- erties. However, there is an availability of a huge amount of crystal data with its chemical composition and structural bonds. To leverage these untapped data, this paper presents CrysGNN, a new pre-trained GNN framework for crystalline materials, which captures both node and graph level structural information of crystal graphs using a huge amount of unla- belled material data. Further, we extract distilled knowledge from CrysGNN and inject into different state of the art prop- erty predictors to enhance their property prediction accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments to show that with distilled knowledge from the pre-trained model, all the SOTA algo- rithms are able to outperform their own vanilla version with good margins. We also observe that the distillation process provides significant improvement over the conventional ap- proach of finetuning the pre-trained model. We will release the pre-trained model along with the large dataset of 800K crys- tal graph which we carefully curated; so that the pre-trained model can be plugged into any existing and upcoming models to enhance their prediction accuracy.