Diffusion models promise to accelerate material design by directly generating novel structures with desired properties, but existing approaches typically require expensive and substantial labeled data (>10,000) and lack adaptability. Here we present MatInvent, a general and efficient reinforcement learning workflow that optimizes diffusion models for goal-directed crystal generation. For single-objective designs, MatInvent rapidly converges to target values within 60 iterations (∼ 1,000 property evaluations) across electronic, magnetic, mechanical, thermal, and physicochemical properties. Furthermore, MatInvent achieves robust optimization in design tasks with multiple conflicting properties, successfully proposing low-supply-chain-risk magnets and high-κ dielectrics. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, MatInvent exhibits superior generation performance under specified property constraints while dramatically reducing the demand for property computation by up to 378-fold. Compatible with diverse diffusion model architectures and property constraints, MatInvent could offer broad applicability in materials discovery.
@article{arxiv.2511.03112,
title = {Accelerating inverse materials design using generative diffusion models with reinforcement learning},
author = {Junwu Chen and Jeff Guo and Edvin Fako and Philippe Schwaller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03112},
year = {2025}
}