AI-driven inverse design of materials: Past, present and future
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Abstract (arXiv)
The discovery of advanced materials is the cornerstone of human technological development and progress. The structures of materials and their corresponding properties are essentially the result of a complex interplay of multiple degrees of freedom such as lattice, charge, spin, symmetry, and topology. This poses significant challenges for the inverse design methods of materials. Humans have long explored new materials through a large number of experiments and proposed corresponding theoretical systems to predict new material properties and structures. With the improvement of computational power, researchers have gradually developed various electronic structure calculation methods, such as the density functional theory and high-throughput computational methods. Recently, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology in the field of computer science has enabled the effective characterization of the implicit association between material properties and structures, thus opening up an efficient paradigm for the inverse design of functional materials. A significant progress has been made in inverse design of materials based on generative and discriminative models, attracting widespread attention from researchers. Considering this rapid technological progress, in this survey, we look back on the latest advancements in AI-driven inverse design of materials by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream technological development routes. In addition, we summarize the remaining issues for future directions. This survey provides the latest overview of AI-driven inverse design of materials, which can serve as a useful resource for researchers.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 93 of its 418 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.
Builds on
93 of 418 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 8; 2026: 2.
10 papers.
- 2025A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Toolscited by 7
- 2025InvDesFlow-AL: active learning-based workflow for inverse design of functional materialscited by 4
- 2025Generative Models for Crystalline Materialscited by 3
- 2025PhononBench:A Large-Scale Phonon-Based Benchmark for Dynamical Stability in Crystal Generationcited by 3
- 2025Enhancing Materials Discovery with Valence Constrained Design in Generative Modelingcited by 2
- 2025Toward Knowledge-Guided AI for Inverse Design in Manufacturing: A Perspective on Domain, Physics, and Human-AI Synergycited by 1
- 2025Perovskite-R1: a domain-specialized large language model for intelligent discovery of precursor additives and experimental designcited by 1
- 2025High-temperature superconductivity in Li2AuH6 mediated by strong electron-phonon coupling under ambient pressurecited by 0
- 2026Probing Non-Equilibrium Grain Boundary Dynamics with XPCS and Domain-Adaptive Machine Learningcited by 0
- 2026LEAP: A closed-loop framework for perovskite precursor additive discoverycited by 0
- 2026LEAP: A closed-loop framework for perovskite precursor additive discovery18 May 2026
- 2026Probing Non-Equilibrium Grain Boundary Dynamics with XPCS and Domain-Adaptive Machine Learning12 May 2026
- 2025PhononBench:A Large-Scale Phonon-Based Benchmark for Dynamical Stability in Crystal Generation24 Dec 2025
- 2025Generative Models for Crystalline Materials27 Nov 2025
- 2025Enhancing Materials Discovery with Valence Constrained Design in Generative Modeling26 Jul 2025
- 2025Perovskite-R1: a domain-specialized large language model for intelligent discovery of precursor additives and experimental design22 Jul 2025
- 2025A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Tools25 Jun 2025
- 2025Toward Knowledge-Guided AI for Inverse Design in Manufacturing: A Perspective on Domain, Physics, and Human-AI Synergy29 May 2025
- 2025InvDesFlow-AL: active learning-based workflow for inverse design of functional materials14 May 2025
- 2025High-temperature superconductivity in Li2AuH6 mediated by strong electron-phonon coupling under ambient pressure21 Jan 2025