Multimodal Machine Learning for Soft High-k Elastomers under Data Scarcity

Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With rapid advances in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a growing need for high-performance dielectric elastomers. However, developing soft elastomers that simultaneously exhibit high dielectric constants (k) and low Young's moduli (E) remains a major challenge. Although individual elastomer designs have been reported, structured datasets that systematically integrate molecular sequence, dielectric, and mechanical properties are largely unavailable. To address this gap, we curate a compact, high-quality dataset of acrylate-based dielectric elastomers by aggregating experimental results from the past decade. Building on this dataset, we propose a multimodal learning framework leveraging large-scale pretrained polymer representations. These pretrained embeddings transfer chemical and structural knowledge from vast polymer corpora, enabling accurate few-shot prediction of dielectric and mechanical properties and accelerating data-efficient discovery of soft high-k dielectric elastomers. Our data and implementation are publicly available at: https://github.com/HySonLab/Polymers