Relational Invariant Learning for Robust Solvation Free Energy Prediction

Abstract

Predicting the solvation free energy of molecules using graph neural networks holds significant potential for advancing drug discovery and the design of novel materials. While previous methods have demonstrated success on independent and identically distributed (IID) datasets, their performance in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios remains largely unexplored. We propose a novel Relational Invariant Learning framework (RILOOD) to enhance OOD generalization in solvation free energy prediction. RILOOD comprises three key components: (i) a mixup-based conditional modeling module that integrates diverse environments, (ii) a novel multi-granularity refinement strategy that extends beyond core substructures to enable context-aware representation learning for capturing multi-level interactions, and (iii) an invariant learning mechanism that identifies robust patterns generalizable to unseen environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RILOOD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various distribution shifts, highlighting its effectiveness in improving solvation free energy prediction under diverse conditions.