Accurate prediction of crystal properties remains a key challenge in computational materials science. While graph neural networks (GNNs) such as CGCNN, MEGNet, ALIGNN, and SchNet have shown strong performance, they primarily represent crystals at the atomic level and implicitly learn local chemical environments through message passing. However, many material properties are governed by coordination polyhedra, the fundamental structural units formed by atoms and their neighboring atoms. To address this limitation, we propose the Coordination Polyhedron Graph Network (CPGN), a multi-scale GNN that jointly learns atomic, bond, and coordination-polyhedron representations.
CPGN constructs three coupled graphs: an atom graph encoding elemental and bonding information, a line graph capturing angular interactions, and a coordination polyhedron graph describing Voronoi-derived local environments through corner-, edge-, and face-sharing relationships. Physically meaningful geometric descriptors are incorporated for each polyhedron, while an interleaved message-passing mechanism with bidirectional cross-attention enables effective information exchange across structural levels. Extensive evaluations on the Materials Project, JARVIS-DFT, and QM9 benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPGN outperforms existing state-of-the-art GNN models. It achieves a formation-energy MAE of 0.060 eV/atom and a band-gap MAE of 0.292 eV on the Materials Project, while providing competitive multi-property prediction on JARVIS-DFT and superior HOMO prediction on QM9. The results highlight that explicit modeling of coordination polyhedra improves crystal representation learning and enables accurate, physically interpretable prediction of material properties.
Blogger's Review: The introduction of CPGN offers a novel and effective approach for predicting crystal materials by capturing complex atomic and coordination relationships through multi-scale graph structures, significantly enhancing prediction accuracy, which is of great practical significance in materials science applications. Future research could further optimize the model architecture to improve its performance on larger datasets.