MOFTransformer: A Multi-modal Pre-training Transformer for Universal Transfer Learning in Metal-Organic Frameworks

In this work, we introduce MOFTransformer, a multi-model Transformer encoder pre-trained with 1 million hypothetical MOFs. The multi-modal model uses an integrated atom-based graph and energy-grid embeddings to capture both the local and global features of the MOFs, respectively. By fine-tuning the pre-trained model with small datasets (from 5,000 to 20,000), our model outperforms all other machine learning models across various properties that include gas adsorption, diffusion, electronic properties, and even text mined data. Beyond its universal transfer learning capabilities, MOFTransformer generates chemical insight by analyzing feature importance from attention scores within the self-attention layers. As such, this model can serve as a bedrock platform for other MOF researchers that seek to develop new machine learning models for their work.