Dongzhan Zhou
Publications
An SO(3)-equivariant reciprocal-space neural potential for long-range interactions
Long-range electrostatic and polarization interactions play a central role in molecular and condensed-phase systems, yet remain fundamentally incompatible with locality-based machine-learning interatomic potentials. Although modern SO(3)-equivariant neural potentials achieve high accuracy for short-range chemistry, they cannot represent the anisotropic, slowly decaying multipolar correlations governing realistic materials, while existing long-range extensions either break SO(3) equivariance or fail to maintain energy-force consistency. Here we introduce EquiEwald, a unified neural interatomic potential that embeds an Ewald-inspired reciprocal-space formulation within an irreducible SO(3)-equivariant framework. By performing equivariant message passing in reciprocal space through learned equivariant k-space filters and an equivariant inverse transform, EquiEwald captures anisotropic, tensorial long-range correlations without sacrificing physical consistency. Across periodic and aperiodic benchmarks, EquiEwald captures long-range electrostatic behavior consistent with ab initio reference data and consistently improves energy and force accuracy, data efficiency, and long-range extrapolation. These results establish EquiEwald as a physically principled paradigm for long-range-capable machine-learning interatomic potentials.
Discovery of Interpretable Physical Laws in Materials via Language-Model-Guided Symbolic Regression
Discovering interpretable physical laws from high-dimensional data is a fundamental challenge in scientific research. Traditional methods, such as symbolic regression, often produce complex, unphysical formulas when searching a vast space of possible forms. We introduce a framework that guides the search process by leveraging the embedded scientific knowledge of large language models, enabling efficient identification of physical laws in the data. We validate our approach by modeling key properties of perovskite materials. Our method mitigates the combinatorial explosion commonly encountered in traditional symbolic regression, reducing the effective search space by a factor of approximately $10^5$. A set of novel formulas for bulk modulus, band gap, and oxygen evolution reaction activity are identified, which not only provide meaningful physical insights but also outperform previous formulas in accuracy and simplicity.
P1-VL: Bridging Visual Perception and Scientific Reasoning in Physics Olympiads
The transition from symbolic manipulation to science-grade reasoning represents a pivotal frontier for Large Language Models (LLMs), with physics serving as the critical test anchor for binding abstract logic to physical reality. Physics demands that a model maintain physical consistency with the laws governing the universe, a task that fundamentally requires multimodal perception to ground abstract logic in reality. At the Olympiad level, diagrams are often constitutive rather than illustrative, containing essential constraints, such as boundary conditions and spatial symmetries, that are absent from the text. To bridge this visual-logical gap, we introduce P1-VL, a family of open-source vision-language models engineered for advanced scientific reasoning. Our method harmonizes Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, which employs progressive difficulty expansion to stabilize post-training, with Agentic Augmentation, enabling iterative self-verification at inference. Evaluated on HiPhO, a rigorous benchmark of 13 exams from 2024-2025, our flagship P1-VL-235B-A22B becomes the first open-source Vision-Language Model (VLM) to secure 12 gold medals and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the open-source models. Our agent-augmented system achieves the No.2 overall rank globally, trailing only Gemini-3-Pro. Beyond physics, P1-VL demonstrates remarkable scientific reasoning capacity and generalizability, establishing significant leads over base models in STEM benchmarks. By open-sourcing P1-VL, we provide a foundational step toward general-purpose physical intelligence to better align visual perceptions with abstract physical laws for machine scientific discovery.