Exploration of crystal chemical space using text-guided generative artificial intelligence
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Park, Hyunsoo
Onwuli, Anthony
Walsh, Aron
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The vastness of chemical space presents a long-standing challenge for the exploration of new compounds with pre-determined properties. In materials science, crystal structure prediction has become a mature tool for mapping from composition to structure based on global optimisation techniques. Generative artificial intelligence now offers the means to efficiently navigate larger regions of crystal chemical space informed by structure-property datasets of materials. Here, we introduce a model, named Chemeleon, designed to generate chemical compositions and crystal structures by learning from both textual descriptions and three-dimensional structural data. The model employs denoising diffusion techniques for compound generation using textual inputs aligned with structural data via cross-modal contrastive learning. The potential of this approach is demonstrated for multi-component compound generation, including the Zn-Ti-O ternary space, and the prediction of stable phases in the Li-P-S-Cl quaternary space of relevance to solid-state batteries.
Date Issued
2025-05-12
Date Acceptance
2025-04-25
Citation
Nature Communications, 2025, 16
ISSN
2041-1723
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Nature Communications
Volume
16
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Identifier
10.1038/s41467-025-59636-y
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
4379
Date Publish Online
2025-05-12