When Do Quantum Mechanical Descriptors Help Graph Neural Networks to Predict Chemical Properties?

Deep graph neural networks are extensively utilized to predict chemical reactivity and molecular properties. However, because of the complexity of chemical space, such models often have difficulty extrapolating beyond the chemistry contained in the training set. Augmenting the model with quantum mechanical (QM) descriptors is anticipated to improve its generalizability. However, obtaining QM descriptors often requires CPU-intensive computational chemistry calculations. To identify when QM descriptors help graph neural networks predict chemical properties, we conduct a systematic investigation of the impact of atom, bond, and molecular QM descriptors on the performance of directed message passing neural networks (D-MPNNs) for predicting 16 molecular properties. The analysis surveys computational and experimental targets, as well as classification and regression tasks, and varied data set sizes from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of data points. Our results indicate that QM descriptors are mostly beneficial for D-MPNN performance on small data sets, provided that the descriptors correlate well with the targets and can be readily computed with high accuracy. Otherwise, using QM descriptors can add cost without benefit or even introduce unwanted noise that can degrade model performance. Strategic integration of QM descriptors with D-MPNN unlocks potential for physics-informed, data-efficient modeling with some interpretability that can streamline de novo drug and material designs. To facilitate the use of QM descriptors in machine learning workflows for chemistry, we provide a set of guidelines regarding when and how to best leverage QM descriptors, a high-throughput workflow to compute them, and an enhancement to Chemprop, a widely adopted open-source D-MPNN implementation for chemical property prediction.