GEM-2: Next Generation Molecular Property Prediction Network by Modeling Full-range Many-body Interactions

Molecular property prediction is a fundamental task in the drug and material industries. Physically, the properties of a molecule are determined by its own electronic structure, which is a quantum many-body system and can be exactly described by the Schrödinger equation. Full-range many-body interactions between electrons have been proven effective in obtaining an accurate solution of the Schrödinger equation by classical computational chemistry methods, although modeling such interactions consumes an expensive computational cost. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have also demonstrated their competence in molecular property prediction tasks. Inspired by the classical computational chemistry methods, we design a novel method, namely GEM-2, which comprehensively considers full-range many-body interactions in molecules. Multiple tracks are utilized to model the full-range interactions between the many-bodies with different orders, and a novel axial attention mechanism is designed to approximate the full-range interaction modeling with much lower computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of GEM-2 over multiple baseline methods in quantum chemistry and drug discovery tasks. The ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of the full-range many-body interactions.