CrystalGym: A New Benchmark for Materials Discovery Using Reinforcement Learning

In silico design and optimization of new materials primarily relies on high-accuracy atomic simulators that perform density functional theory (DFT) calculations. While recent works showcase the strong potential of machine learning to accelerate the material design process, they mostly consist of generative approaches that do not use direct DFT signals as feedback to improve training and generation mainly due to DFT's high computational cost. To aid the adoption of direct DFT signals in the materials design loop through online reinforcement learning (RL), we propose CrystalGym, an open-source RL environment for crystalline material discovery. Using CrystalGym, we benchmark common value- and policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms for designing various crystals conditioned on target properties. Concretely, we optimize for challenging properties like the band gap, bulk modulus, and density, which are directly calculated from DFT in the environment. While none of the algorithms we benchmark solve all CrystalGym tasks, our extensive experiments and ablations show different sample efficiencies and ease of convergence to optimality for different algorithms and environment settings. Additionally, we include a case study on the scope of fine-tuning large language models with reinforcement learning for improving DFT-based rewards. Our goal is for CrystalGym to serve as a test bed for reinforcement learning researchers and material scientists to address these real-world design problems with practical applications. We therefore introduce a novel class of challenges for reinforcement learning methods dealing with time-consuming reward signals, paving the way for future interdisciplinary research for machine learning motivated by real-world applications.