MOFSimBench: evaluating universal machine learning interatomic potentials in metal-organic framework molecular modeling

Universal machine learning interatomic potentials (uMLIPs) have emerged as powerful tools for accelerating atomistic simulations, offering scalable and efficient modeling with accuracy close to quantum calculations. However, their reliability and effectiveness in practical, real-world applications remain an open question. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and related nanoporous materials are highly porous crystals with critical relevance in carbon capture, energy storage, and catalysis applications. Modeling nanoporous materials presents distinct challenges for uMLIPs due to their diverse chemistry, structural complexity, including porosity and coordination bonds, and the absence from existing training datasets. Here, we introduce MOFSimBench, a benchmark for evaluating uMLIPs on key materials modeling tasks for nanoporous materials, including structural optimization, molecular dynamics (MD) stability, bulk property prediction, and host-guest interactions. Evaluating 20 models from various architectures, we find that top-performing uMLIPs consistently outperform classical force fields and fine-tuned machine learning potentials across all tasks, demonstrating their readiness for deployment in nanoporous materials modeling. Our analysis highlights that data quality plays a more critical role than model architecture in determining performance across all evaluated uMLIPs. We release our modular and extensible benchmarking framework at https://github.com/AI4ChemS/mofsim-bench, providing an open resource to guide the adoption for nanoporous materials modeling and further development of uMLIPs.