
Neural-Network Solutions to Real-Space Charge Density and Generalization
Abstract
Ground-state charge density determines ground-state observables, but conventional Kohn-Sham density functional theory requires iterative self-consistent-field calculations. We introduce AIDEN, an Atomic-Interaction Density Equivariant Network for continuous real-space charge-density prediction. AIDEN separates element-dependent one-center density from environment-induced density redistribution, models the latter with atom- and edge-centered tensor correlations, and reconstructs density at arbitrary coordinates through a continuous low-rank Gaussian decoder. The model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on periodic crystal benchmarks, remains competitive for molecular systems, and exhibits zero-shot transfer across structurally distinct out-of-distribution cases. Its grid-independent reuse of atomic encodings also enables substantially faster inference than baseline models and full self-consistent-field calculations.








