30 March 2026 to 1 April 2026
University of Liverpool
Europe/London timezone

MACS: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Optimization of Crystal Structures

31 Mar 2026, 12:00
2h
Teaching Hub 502 First Floor (University of Liverpool)

Teaching Hub 502 First Floor

University of Liverpool

Speaker

Elena Zamaraeva (University of Manchester, Fusion21)

Description

Geometry optimization of atomic structures is a common and crucial task in computational chemistry and materials design. Following the learning to optimize paradigm, we propose a new multi-agent reinforcement learning method called Multi-Agent Crystal Structure optimization (MACS) to address periodic crystal structure optimization. MACS treats geometry optimization as a partially observable Markov game in which atoms are agents that adjust their positions to collectively discover a stable configuration. We train MACS across various compositions of reported crystalline materials to obtain a policy that successfully optimizes structures from the training compositions as well as structures of larger
sizes and unseen compositions, confirming its excellent scalability and zero-shot transferability. We benchmark our approach against a broad range of state-of-theart optimization methods and demonstrate that MACS optimizes periodic crystal structures significantly faster, with fewer energy calculations, and the lowest failure rate.

Student No

Primary author

Elena Zamaraeva (University of Manchester, Fusion21)

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