# Text-guided flow matching enables sample-efficient crystal structure generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01076 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01076/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 19 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [Crystal Diffusion Variational Autoencoder for Periodic Material Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06197/) (2021)
- [Crystal Structure Prediction by Joint Equivariant Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04475/) (2023)
- [FlowMM: Generating Materials with Riemannian Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04713/) (2024)
- [Inverse design of 3d molecular structures with conditional generative neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04824/) (2021)
- [FlowLLM: Flow Matching for Material Generation with Large Language Models as Base Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23405/) (2024)
- [MatSci-NLP: Evaluating Scientific Language Models on Materials Science Language Tasks Using Text-to-Schema Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08264/) (2023)
- [Physics Guided Deep Learning for Generative Design of Crystal Materials with Symmetry Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14352/) (2022)
- [Towards Symmetry-Aware Generation of Periodic Materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02707/) (2023)
- [A general-purpose material property data extraction pipeline from large polymer corpora using Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13136/) (2022)
- [Periodic Materials Generation using Text-Guided Joint Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00522/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crystal generators can now propose periodic structures, but their control interfaces remain poorly matched to the mixed descriptors used in materials design. Text provides a compact way to combine composition, symmetry, prototype and property cues, yet it has not been clear whether such information can steer flow-based crystal generation. Here we introduce TFMat, a text-conditioned flow-matching framework that uses structured materials language as a semantic prior for a CrystalFlow generator. Across Perov-5, Carbon-24 and MP-20 crystal structure prediction benchmarks, TFMat improves one-candidate match rates over CrystalFlow and reaches a 92.04% MP-20 match rate with 20 candidates; in de novo generation, it improves element-count and density distribution alignment while retaining coarse property consistency in composition-selected outputs. These results position structured text as an inspectable control layer for translating human-readable materials intent into candidate crystals for downstream simulation and validation.