MatRIS: Toward Reliable and Efficient Pretrained Machine Learning Interaction Potentials

Universal MLIPs (uMLIPs) demonstrate broad applicability across diverse material systems and have emerged as a powerful and transformative paradigm in chemical and computational materials science. Equivariant uMLIPs achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in a wide range of benchmarks by incorporating equivariant inductive bias. However, the reliance on tensor products and high-degree representations makes them computationally costly. This raises a fundamental question: as quantum mechanical-based datasets continue to expand, can we develop a more compact model to thoroughly exploit high-dimensional atomic interactions? In this work, we present MatRIS (Materials Representation and Interaction Simulation), an invariant uMLIP that introduces attention-based modeling of three-body interactions. MatRIS leverages a novel separable attention mechanism with linear complexity $O(N)$, enabling both scalability and expressiveness. MatRIS delivers accuracy comparable to that of leading equivariant models on a wide range of popular benchmarks (Matbench-Discovery, MatPES, MDR phonon, Molecular dataset, etc). Taking Matbench-Discovery as an example, MatRIS achieves an F1 score of up to 0.847 while improving training efficiency by 13.0–13.5$\times$ at comparable accuracy. The work indicates that our carefully designed invariant models can match or exceed the accuracy of equivariant models at a fraction of the cost, shedding light on the development of accurate and efficient uMLIPs.