Tomohiko Konno

Tomohiko Konno, Hodaka Kurokawa, Fuyuki Nabeshima et al.

Exploration of new superconductors still relies on the experience and intuition of experts and is largely a process of experimental trial and error. In one study, only 3% of the candidate materials showed superconductivity. Here, we report the first deep learning model for finding new superconductors. We introduced the method named "reading periodic table" which represented the periodic table in a way that allows deep learning to learn to read the periodic table and to learn the law of elements for the purpose of discovering novel superconductors that are outside the training data. It is recognized that it is difficult for deep learning to predict something outside the training data. Although we used only the chemical composition of materials as information, we obtained an $R^{2}$ value of 0.92 for predicting $T_\text{c}$ for materials in a database of superconductors. We also introduced the method named "garbage-in" to create synthetic data of non-superconductors that do not exist. Non-superconductors are not reported, but the data must be required for deep learning to distinguish between superconductors and non-superconductors. We obtained three remarkable results. The deep learning can predict superconductivity for a material with a precision of 62%, which shows the usefulness of the model; it found the recently discovered superconductor CaBi2 and another one Hf0.5Nb0.2V2Zr0.3, neither of which is in the superconductor database; and it found Fe-based high-temperature superconductors (discovered in 2008) from the training data before 2008. These results open the way for the discovery of new high-temperature superconductor families. The candidate materials list, data, and method are openly available from the link https://github.com/tomo835g/Deep-Learning-to-find-Superconductors.

Tomohiko Konno

We verified that the deep learning method named reading periodic table introduced by ref. Deep Learning Model for Finding New Superconductors, which utilizes deep learning to read the periodic table and the laws of the elements, is applicable not only for superconductors, for which the method was originally applied but also for other problems of materials by demonstrating band gap estimations. We then extended the method to learn the laws better by directly learning the cylindrical periodicity between the right- and left-most columns in the periodic table at the learning representation level, that is, by considering the left- and right-most columns to be adjacent to each other. Thus, while the original method handles the table as is, the extended method treats the periodic table as if its two edges are connected. This is achieved using novel layers named periodic convolution layers, which can handle inputs exhibiting periodicity and may be applied to other problems related to computer vision, time series, and so on for data that possess some periodicity. In the reading periodic table method, no material feature or descriptor is required as input. We demonstrated two types of deep learning estimation: methods to estimate the existence of a bandgap, and methods to estimate the value of the bandgap given when the existence of the bandgap in the materials is known. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the dataset and model evaluation method. We may be unable to distinguish good models based on the random train-test split scheme; thus, we must prepare an appropriate dataset where the training and test data are temporally separate. The code and data are open.

Tomohiko Konno, Michiaki Iwazume

We found an easy and quick post-learning method named "Icing on the Cake" to enhance a classification performance in deep learning. The method is that we train only the final classifier again after an ordinary training is done.

Tomohiko Konno, Michiaki Iwazume

Herein, we generate pseudo-features based on the multivariate probability distributions obtained from the feature maps in layers of trained deep neural networks. Further, we augment the minor-class data based on these generated pseudo-features to overcome the imbalanced data problems. The proposed method, i.e., cavity filling, improves the deep learning capabilities in several problems because all the real-world data are observed to be imbalanced.