Fundamental Limits of Crystalline Equivariant Graph Neural Networks: A Circuit Complexity Perspective
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a core paradigm for learning on relational data. In materials science, equivariant GNNs (EGNNs) have emerged as a compelling backbone for crystalline-structure prediction, owing to their ability to respect Euclidean symmetries and periodic boundary conditions. Despite strong empirical performance, their expressive power in periodic, symmetry-constrained settings remains poorly understood. This work characterizes the intrinsic computational and expressive limits of EGNNs for crystalline-structure prediction through a circuit-complexity lens. We analyze the computations carried out by EGNN layers acting on node features, atomic coordinates, and lattice matrices, and prove that, under polynomial precision, embedding width $d=O(n)$ for $n$ nodes, $O(1)$ layers, and $O(1)$-depth, $O(n)$-width MLP instantiations of the message/update/readout maps, these models admit a simulation by a uniform $\mathsf{TC}^0$ threshold-circuit family of polynomial size (with an explicit constant-depth bound). Situating EGNNs within $\mathsf{TC}^0$ provides a concrete ceiling on the decision and prediction problems solvable by such architectures under realistic resource constraints and clarifies which architectural modifications (e.g., increased depth, richer geometric primitives, or wider layers) are required to transcend this regime. The analysis complements Weisfeiler-Lehman style results that do not directly transfer to periodic crystals, and offers a complexity-theoretic foundation for symmetry-aware graph learning on crystalline systems.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Graph LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
StrainTensorNet: Predicting crystal structure elastic properties using SE(3)-equivariant graph neural networks
Accurately predicting the elastic properties of crystalline solids is vital for computational materials science. However, traditional atomistic scale ab initio approaches are computationally intensive, especially for stu…
Equivariant Networks for Crystal Structures
Supervised learning with deep models has tremendous potential for applications in materials science. Recently, graph neural networks have been used in this context, drawing direct inspiration from models for molecules. H…
Property PredictionEquivariant Quantum Graph Circuits
We investigate quantum circuits for graph representation learning, and propose equivariant quantum graph circuits (EQGCs), as a class of parameterized quantum circuits with strong relational inductive bias for learning o…
Graph Representation LearningInductive BiasRepresentation LearningCrystalite: A Lightweight Transformer for Efficient Crystal Modeling
Generative models for crystalline materials often rely on equivariant graph neural networks, which capture geometric structure well but are costly to train and slow to sample. We present Crystalite, a lightweight diffusi…
Learning Ordering in Crystalline Materials with Symmetry-Aware Graph Neural Networks
Graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have become a machine learning workhorse for screening the chemical space of crystalline materials in fields such as catalysis and energy storage, by predicting properties from…