Deep Electromagnetic Structure Design Under Limited Evaluation Budgets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical search method called PQS for electromagnetic structure design that efficiently finds high-quality designs with limited evaluation budgets, significantly reducing computational costs.

Contribution

The paper proposes PQS, a hierarchical quadtree-based search with a consistency-driven sample selection to improve EMS design under limited evaluations.

Findings

PQS outperforms baseline methods in real-world tasks.

Reduces evaluation costs by 75-85%.

Saves approximately 20-39 days in design cycle.

Abstract

Electromagnetic structure (EMS) design plays a critical role in developing advanced antennas and materials, but remains challenging due to high-dimensional design spaces and expensive evaluations. While existing methods commonly employ high-quality predictors or generators to alleviate evaluations, they are often data-intensive and struggle with real-world scale and budget constraints. To address this, we propose a novel method called Progressive Quadtree-based Search (PQS). Rather than exhaustively exploring the high-dimensional space, PQS converts the conventional image-like layout into a quadtree-based hierarchical representation, enabling a progressive search from global patterns to local details. Furthermore, to lessen reliance on highly accurate predictors, we introduce a consistency-driven sample selection mechanism. This mechanism quantifies the reliability of predictions, balancing exploitation and exploration when selecting candidate designs. We evaluate PQS on two real-world engineering tasks, i.e., Dual-layer Frequency Selective Surface and High-gain Antenna. Experimental results show that our method can achieve satisfactory designs under limited computational budgets, outperforming baseline methods. In particular, compared to generative approaches, it cuts evaluation costs by 75-85%, effectively saving 20.27-38.80 days of product designing cycle.