Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Tools

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2506.20743 v1 pith:2IQCX44V submitted 2025-06-25 cs.LG cs.CE

A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Tools

classification cs.LG cs.CE
keywords modelsdatafoundationmaterialsdatasetsdiscoverymultimodalresearch
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Foundation models (FMs) are catalyzing a transformative shift in materials science (MatSci) by enabling scalable, general-purpose, and multimodal AI systems for scientific discovery. Unlike traditional machine learning models, which are typically narrow in scope and require task-specific engineering, FMs offer cross-domain generalization and exhibit emergent capabilities. Their versatility is especially well-suited to materials science, where research challenges span diverse data types and scales. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of foundation models, agentic systems, datasets, and computational tools supporting this growing field. We introduce a task-driven taxonomy encompassing six broad application areas: data extraction, interpretation and Q\&A; atomistic simulation; property prediction; materials structure, design and discovery; process planning, discovery, and optimization; and multiscale modeling. We discuss recent advances in both unimodal and multimodal FMs, as well as emerging large language model (LLM) agents. Furthermore, we review standardized datasets, open-source tools, and autonomous experimental platforms that collectively fuel the development and integration of FMs into research workflows. We assess the early successes of foundation models and identify persistent limitations, including challenges in generalizability, interpretability, data imbalance, safety concerns, and limited multimodal fusion. Finally, we articulate future research directions centered on scalable pretraining, continual learning, data governance, and trustworthiness.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. General-purpose LLMs as Constrained Crystal Composition Generators

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    General-purpose LLMs recover 96% of low-energy Elpasolites via iterative in-context learning, surpassing task-specific models on an established benchmark.

  2. SciAgentGym: Benchmarking Multi-Step Scientific Tool-use in LLM Agents

    cs.CL 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    SciAgent-8B, fine-tuned on trajectories synthesized from a tool dependency graph, outperforms Qwen3-VL-235B-Instruct on SciAgentBench, a new 259-task benchmark for multi-step scientific tool-use.

  3. RECIPER: A Dual-View Retrieval Pipeline for Procedure-Oriented Materials Question Answering

    eess.SP 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    RECIPER improves procedure-oriented retrieval from materials papers by combining paragraph-level dense retrieval with LLM-extracted procedural summaries and lightweight reranking, yielding average gains of +3.73 Recal...

  4. An Encoder-Decoder Foundation Chemical Language Model for Generative Polymer Design

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2025-10 conditional novelty 5.0

    A T5-based polymer language model pre-trained on 100 million hypothetical polymers predicts thermal, electronic, and solubility properties and generates polymers conditioned on a target glass-transition temperature, w...

  5. The evolution of AI from image interpretation toward scientific inference in nanoparticle electron microscopy

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2026-07 conditional novelty 3.5

    AI for nanoparticle TEM/STEM has progressed from detection and segmentation to physics-informed restoration, 2D-to-3D inference, and spatiotemporal analysis of in situ dynamics, with remaining gaps in benchmarking and...

  6. Property Prediction of Stacked Bilayer Materials: A Multimodal Learning Approach

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A multimodal AI approach is introduced to predict properties arising from stacking dissimilar 2D material layers.