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Optimization of atomic structures presents a challenging problem, due to their highly rough and non-convex energy landscape, with wide applications in the fields of drug design, materials discovery, and mechanics. Here, we present a graph reinforcement learning approach, StriderNET, that learns a policy to displace the atoms towards low energy configurations. We evaluate the performance of StriderNET on three complex atomic systems, namely, binary Lennard-Jones particles, calcium silicate hydrates gel, and disordered silicon. We show that StriderNET outperforms all classical optimization algorithms and enables the discovery of a lower energy minimum. In addition, StriderNET exhibits a higher rate of reaching minima with energies, as confirmed by the average over multiple realizations. Finally, we show that StriderNET exhibits inductivity to unseen system sizes that are an order of magnitude different from the training system.

Learning the structure--dynamics correlation in disordered systems is a long-standing problem. Here, we use unsupervised machine learning employing graph neural networks (GNN) to investigate the local structures in disordered systems. We test our approach on 2D binary A65B35 LJ glasses and extract structures corresponding to liquid, supercooled and glassy states at different cooling rates. The neighborhood representation of atoms learned by a GNN in an unsupervised fashion, when clustered, reveal local structures with varying potential energies. These clusters exhibit dynamical heterogeneity in the structure in congruence with their local energy landscape. Altogether, the present study shows that unsupervised graph embedding can reveal the structure--dynamics correlation in disordered structures., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures