Surrogate-Gated Generation and Foundation-Model Embeddings for Bayesian Materials Design

Closed-loop materials discovery iterates between proposing candidate structures and evaluating their properties, and property evaluation dominates the cost. In the generative variant, a learned prior proposes candidate crystals and a property oracle scores them; we ask whether a cheap probabilistic surrogate can triage the generator's output, and what such a surrogate must do well. Across three architecturally distinct pretrained diffusion priors (MatterGen, CrystalFlow, ADiT) and two targets (room-temperature heat capacity and bulk modulus), we insert a Gaussian process acquisition gate between structure generation and the oracle in an RL-steered generative workflow. The gate matches or exceeds ungated fine-tuning of the generative model while capping oracle calls at a fixed per-cycle budget. Budget-matched ablations isolate the mechanism. At an identical four-call budget, ranking-based selection outperforms arbitrary selection, confirming that the gain comes from the surrogate's choice; the gate comes within ~9% of exhaustive oracle spending at roughly one-fifth of the calls. A density-functional-theory check of the bulk-modulus discoveries confirms the learned oracle to within 2.5% on average and the surrogate's ranking of the generated structures at Spearman ρ = 0.94. A cross-factorial benchmark of surrogate performance spanning mechanical, electronic, and vibrational properties identifies pretrained ORB embeddings with a Gaussian process as the most reliable combination, which we adopt as the building blocks of the proposed workflow. The complete pipeline is released as open-source software.