Inverse Design of Porous Materials: A Diffusion Model Approach

The success of diffusion models in the field of image processing has propelled the creation of software such as Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which are tools used for text-to-image generations. Mapping this workflow onto materials discovery, a new diffusion model was developed for the generation of pure silica zeolite, marking it the first application of diffusion models to porous materials. Our model demonstrates the ability to generate novel crystalline porous materials that are not present in the training dataset, while exhibiting exceptional performance in inverse design tasks targeted on various chemical properties including the void fraction, Henry coefficient and heat of adsorption. Comparing our model with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) revealed that the diffusion model outperforms the GAN in terms of structure validity, exhibiting an over 2,000-fold improvement in performance. We firmly believe that diffusion models (along with other deep generative models) hold immense potential in revolutionizing the design of new materials, and anticipate the wide extension of our model to other classes of porous materials.