Data-Driven Score-Based Models for Generating Stable Structures with Adaptive Crystal Cells

The discovery of new functional and stable materials is a big challenge due to its complexity. This work aims at the generation of new crystal structures with desired properties, such as chemical stability and specified chemical composition, by using machine learning generative models. Compared to the generation of molecules, crystal structures pose new difficulties arising from the periodic nature of the crystal and from the specific symmetry constraints related to the space group. In this work, score-based probabilistic models based on annealed Langevin dynamics, which have shown excellent performance in various applications, are adapted to the task of crystal generation. The novelty of the presented approach resides in the fact that the lattice of the crystal cell is not fixed. During the training of the model, the lattice is learned from the available data, whereas during the sampling of a new chemical structure, two denoising processes are used in parallel to generate the lattice along the generation of the atomic positions. A multigraph crystal representation is introduced that respects symmetry constraints, yielding computational advantages and a better quality of the sampled structures. We show that our model is capable of generating new candidate structures in any chosen chemical system and crystal group without any additional training. To illustrate the functionality of the proposed method, a comparison of our model to other recent generative models, based on descriptor-based metrics, is provided.