cs.LGApr 10, 2026

EquiformerV3: Scaling Efficient, Expressive, and General SE(3)-Equivariant Graph Attention Transformers

Authors: Yi-Lun Liao, Alexander J. Hoffman, Sabrina C. Shen, Alexandre Duval, Sam Walton Norwood, Tess Smidt

Organizations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) · Mirror Physics · Entalpic

Abstract

As SE(3)SE(3)-equivariant graph neural networks mature as a core tool for 3D atomistic modeling, improving their efficiency, expressivity, and physical consistency has become a central challenge for large-scale applications. In this work, we introduce EquiformerV3, the third generation of the SE(3)SE(3)-equivariant graph attention Transformer, designed to advance all three dimensions: efficiency, expressivity, and generality. Building on EquiformerV2, we have the following three key advances. First, we optimize the software implementation, achieving 1.75×1.75\times speedup. Second, we introduce simple and effective modifications to EquiformerV2, including equivariant merged layer normalization, improved feedforward network hyper-parameters, and attention with smooth radius cutoff. Third, we propose SwiGLU-S2S^2 activations to incorporate many-body interactions for better theoretical expressivity and to preserve strict equivariance while reducing the complexity of sampling S2S^2 grids. Together, SwiGLU-S2S^2 activations and smooth-cutoff attention enable accurate modeling of smoothly varying potential energy surfaces (PES), generalizing EquiformerV3 to tasks requiring energy-conserving simulations and higher-order derivatives of PES. With these improvements, EquiformerV3 trained with the auxiliary task of denoising non-equilibrium structures (DeNS) achieves state-of-the-art results on OC20, OMat24, and Matbench Discovery.

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