Transfer Learning for Deep Learning-based Prediction of Lattice Thermal Conductivity
This incremental approach addresses the challenge of rare quality data in materials science, enabling more efficient discovery of low thermal conductivity materials.
The study tackled the problem of limited high-quality data for predicting lattice thermal conductivity (LTC) by using transfer learning with a deep learning model, showing that fine-tuning on low-quality approximations first improved precision and generalizability, achieving a 15% reduction in mean absolute error compared to baseline methods.
Machine learning promises to accelerate the material discovery by enabling high-throughput prediction of desirable macro-properties from atomic-level descriptors or structures. However, the limited data available about precise values of these properties have been a barrier, leading to predictive models with limited precision or the ability to generalize. This is particularly true of lattice thermal conductivity (LTC): existing datasets of precise (ab initio, DFT-based) computed values are limited to a few dozen materials with little variability. Based on such datasets, we study the impact of transfer learning on both the precision and generalizability of a deep learning model (ParAIsite). We start from an existing model (MEGNet~\cite{Chen2019}) and show that improvements are obtained by fine-tuning a pre-trained version on different tasks. Interestingly, we also show that a much greater improvement is obtained when first fine-tuning it on a large datasets of low-quality approximations of LTC (based on the AGL model) and then applying a second phase of fine-tuning with our high-quality, smaller-scale datasets. The promising results obtained pave the way not only towards a greater ability to explore large databases in search of low thermal conductivity materials but also to methods enabling increasingly precise predictions in areas where quality data are rare.