LEIA: Learned Environment for Interactive Architected Materials
For engineers designing architected materials, LEIA provides an interactive, real-time simulation tool that accelerates design exploration, though it is domain-specific and incremental over existing world models.
LEIA is a world model that enables real-time interactive simulation of deformation and stress in architected materials, handling large 3D unstructured meshes. It outperforms four baselines on the MicroPlate benchmark and enables efficient surrogate-guided design search with stress-accurate candidate ranking validated by finite element ground truth.
World models have enabled interactive exploration of game environments and robotic manipulation, but physical engineering remains beyond their reach: real materials exhibit nonlinear constitutive laws, carry history-dependent internal state, undergo inertial dynamics, and may possess hierarchical structures spanning multiple length scales. We present LEIA (Learned Environment for Interactive Architected materials), a world model that lets engineers apply boundary conditions step by step and observe the resulting deformation and stress fields in real time. LEIA handles large three-dimensional unstructured meshes and generates autoregressive responses to user-specified loading. We introduce MicroPlate, a benchmark of architected plates spanning two regimes of microstructure modeling: architected lattices that resolve microstructure explicitly through three-dimensional geometry, and a homogeneous plate where microstructural change is modeled implicitly through internal degrees of freedom. MicroPlate is used to assess LEIA alongside four baseline methods across both regimes. Finally, we demonstrate that LEIA enables efficient candidate generation and ranking for fast surrogate-guided search for de novo designs of architected materials, with stress-accurate candidate ranking validated by finite element ground truth.