Learning Hamiltonian Flow Maps: Mean Flow Consistency for Large-Timestep Molecular Dynamics

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Authors: Winfried Ripken, Michael Plainer, Gregor Lied, Thorben Frank, Oliver T. Unke, Stefan Chmiela, Frank Noé, Klaus Robert Müller
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Simulating the long-time evolution of Hamiltonian systems is limited by the small timesteps required for stable numerical integration. To overcome this constraint, we introduce a framework to learn Hamiltonian Flow Maps by predicting the mean phase-space evolution over a chosen time span, enabling stable large-timestep updates far beyond the stability limits of classical integrators. To this end, we impose a Mean Flow consistency condition for time-averaged Hamiltonian dynamics. Unlike prior approaches, this allows training on independent phase-space samples without access to future states, avoiding expensive trajectory generation. Validated across diverse Hamiltonian systems, our method in particular improves upon molecular dynamics simulations using machine-learned force fields (MLFF). Our models maintain comparable training and inference cost, but support significantly larger integration timesteps while trained directly on widely-available trajectory-free MLFF datasets.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Model Reduction and Neural Networks Numerical methods for differential equations Machine Learning in Materials Science

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
29 January 2026
Document type
Preprint