Bridging Text and Crystal Structures: Literature-driven Contrastive Learning for Materials Science
This addresses the problem for materials scientists by providing a more intuitive way to explore materials space, though it is incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning methods applied to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating human-friendly embedding spaces for crystal structures by introducing Contrastive Language-Structure Pre-training (CLaSP), which bridges crystal structures with texts using over 400,000 published structures and corresponding publication records, enabling intuitive text-based retrieval and visualization.
Understanding structure-property relationships is an essential yet challenging aspect of materials discovery and development. To facilitate this process, recent studies in materials informatics have sought latent embedding spaces of crystal structures to capture their similarities based on properties and functionalities. However, abstract feature-based embedding spaces are human-unfriendly and prevent intuitive and efficient exploration of the vast materials space. Here we introduce Contrastive Language--Structure Pre-training (CLaSP), a learning paradigm for constructing crossmodal embedding spaces between crystal structures and texts. CLaSP aims to achieve material embeddings that 1) capture property- and functionality-related similarities between crystal structures and 2) allow intuitive retrieval of materials via user-provided description texts as queries. To compensate for the lack of sufficient datasets linking crystal structures with textual descriptions, CLaSP leverages a dataset of over 400,000 published crystal structures and corresponding publication records, including paper titles and abstracts, for training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CLaSP through text-based crystal structure screening and embedding space visualization.