Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of
discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural
sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural
phenomena at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a new
area of research known as AI for science (AI4Science). Being an emerging
research paradigm, AI4Science is unique in that it is an enormous and highly
interdisciplinary area. Thus, a unified and technical treatment of this field
is needed yet challenging. This paper aims to provide a technically thorough
account of a subarea of AI4Science; namely, AI for quantum, atomistic, and
continuum systems. These areas aim at understanding the physical world from the
subatomic (wavefunctions and electron density), atomic (molecules, proteins,
materials, and interactions), to macro (fluids, climate, and subsurface) scales
and form an important subarea of AI4Science. A unique advantage of focusing on
these areas is that they largely share a common set of challenges, thereby
allowing a unified and foundational treatment. A key common challenge is how to
capture physics first principles, especially symmetries, in natural systems by
deep learning methods. We provide an in-depth yet intuitive account of
techniques to achieve equivariance to symmetry transformations. We also discuss
other common technical challenges, including explainability,
out-of-distribution generalization, knowledge transfer with foundation and
large language models, and uncertainty quantification. To facilitate learning
and education, we provide categorized lists of resources that we found to be
useful. We strive to be thorough and unified and hope this initial effort may
trigger more community interests and efforts to further advance AI4Science.

本文为 AI4Science 领域中的一个子领域 —— 量子、原子和连续系统的 AI 提供了技术上的全面介绍，重点在于探讨诸如如何采用深度学习方法捕捉自然系统物理第一性原理、特别是对称性等挑战。