ChargeNet: E(3) Equivariant Graph Attention Network for Atomic Charge Prediction

Atomic charge is a fundamental quantum chemical property essential for advancing drug design and discovery. Although quantum mechanics (QM) methods offer the highest level of accuracy, their computational demands scale quadratically with the number of atoms, limiting their practicality for large-scale applications. In light of this, empirical and semiempirical methods have been introduced to improve computational efficiency, albeit often at the expense of accuracy. The advent of artificial intelligence has witnessed a growing application of machine learning (ML) techniques to accelerate atomic charge predictions. However, existing ML models often suffer from low accuracy and limited generalization capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce an advanced equivariant graph attention neural network specifically engineered to model long-range atomic electrostatic interactions with high precision. This model introduces a sophisticated global graph attention mechanism, enabling it to capture charge contributions across multiple scales. By utilizing a combination of structural symmetry-preserving transformations and multiscale attention, our approach not only preserves the inherent symmetries of molecular structures but also substantially improves the model's accuracy, generalization, and robustness in complex scenarios. Our empirical analyses demonstrate that, compared to leading baseline models, the proposed model improves charge prediction accuracy by over 40% on average across various charge-calculation schemes. Remarkably, the model achieves superior performance on the external RESP (restrained electrostatic potential) test data sets, with a 54.6% improvement over the baseline. Additionally, we evaluated our charge model under the setting of virtual screening, where it outperforms both the OPLS3 charges and baseline deep learning models across all evaluation metrics, highlighting its extensive potential for scientific discovery.