ArtiSAN: navigating the complexity of material structures with deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

Finding low-energy atomic ordering in compositionally complex materials is one of the hardest problems in materials discovery, the solution of which can lead to breakthroughs in functional materials—from alloys to ceramics. In this work, we present the Artificial Structure Arranging Net (ArtiSAN)—a reinforcement learning agent utilizing graph representation that is trained to find low-energy atomic configurations of multicomponent systems through a series of atomic switch operations. ArtiSAN is trained on small alloy supercells ranging from binary to septenary. Strikingly, ArtiSAN generalizes to much larger systems of more than a thousand atoms, which are inaccessible with state-of-the-art methods due to the combinatorially larger search space. The performance of the current ArtiSAN agent is tested and deployed on several compositions that can be correlated with known experimental and high-fidelity computational structures. ArtiSAN demonstrates transfer across size and composition and finds physically meaningful structures using no energy evaluation calls once fully trained. While ArtiSAN will require further modifications to capture all variability in structure search, it is a remarkable step towards solving the structural part of the problem of disordered materials discovery.