Generative Hierarchical Materials Search

Published: 25 Sept 2024, Last Modified: 16 Nov 2024NeurIPS 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Generative models for materials, diffusion models, multimodality, hierarchical search
TL;DR: We propose Generative Hierarchical Materials Search, a language-to-structure generative framework that uses LLMs to generate crystal formulas, diffusion models to generate crystal structures, and hierarchical search to find the best structure.
Abstract: Generative models trained at scale can now produce novel text, video, and more recently, scientific data such as crystal structures. The ultimate goal for materials discovery, however, goes beyond generation: we desire a fully automated system that proposes, generates, and verifies crystal structures given a high-level user instruction. In this work, we formulate end-to-end language-to-structure generation as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose Generative Hierarchical Materials Search (GenMS) for controllable generation of crystal structures. GenMS consists of (1) a language model that takes high-level natural language as input and generates intermediate textual information about a crystal (e.g., chemical formulae), and (2) a diffusion model that takes intermediate information as input and generates low-level continuous value crystal structures. GenMS additionally uses a graph neural network to predict properties (e.g., formation energy) from the generated crystal structures. During inference, GenMS leverages all three components to conduct a forward tree search over the space of possible structures. Experiments show that GenMS outperforms other alternatives both in satisfying user request and in generating low-energy structures. GenMS is able to generate complex structures such as double perovskites (or elpasolites), layered structures, and spinels, solely from natural language input.
Primary Area: Machine learning for physical sciences (for example: climate, physics)
Submission Number: 18855
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