Understanding the role of predictive time delay and biased propagator in RAVE

In this work, we revisit our recent iterative machine learning (ML) -- molecular dynamics (MD) technique "Reweighted autoencoded variational Bayes for enhanced sampling (RAVE)" (Ribeiro, Bravo, Wang, Tiwary, J. Chem. Phys. 149 072301 (2018) and Wang, Ribeiro, Tiwary, Nature Commun. 10 3573 (2019)) and analyze as well as formalize some of its approximations. These including: (a) the choice of a predictive time-delay, or how far into the future should the ML try to predict the state of a given system output from MD, and (b) for short time-delays, how much of an error is made in approximating the biased propagator for the dynamics as the unbiased propagator. We demonstrate through a master equation framework as to why the exact choice of time-delay is irrelevant as long as a small non-zero value is adopted. We also derive a correction to reweight the biased propagator, and somewhat to our dissatisfaction but also to our reassurance, find that it barely makes a difference to the intuitive picture we had previously derived and used.