CrystalReasoner: Reasoning and RL for Property-Conditioned Crystal Structure Generation

TL;DR

CrystalReasoner (CrysReas) is an innovative LLM framework that combines reasoning, physical priors, and reinforcement learning to generate valid, stable, and property-conditioned crystal structures from natural language instructions.

Contribution

It introduces thinking tokens with physical priors and RL-based training to improve crystal structure generation from natural language.

Findings

CrysReas outperforms prior models on multiple metrics.

It triples the S.U.N. ratio in evaluations.

It adapts reasoning length with increasing atomic complexity.

Abstract

Generative modeling has emerged as a promising approach for crystal structure discovery. However, existing LLM-based generative models struggle with low-level atomic precision, while diffusion-based methods fall short in integrating high-level scientific knowledge. As a result, generated structures are often invalid, unstable, or do not possess desirable properties. To address this gap, we propose CrystalReasoner (CrysReas), an end-to-end LLM framework that generates crystal structures from natural language instructions through reasoning and alignment. CrysReas introduces physical priors as thinking tokens, which include crystallographic symmetry, local coordination environments and predicted physical properties before generating atomic coordinates. This bridges the gap between natural language and 3D structures. CrysReas then employs reinforcement learning (RL) with a multi-objective, dense reward function to align generation with physical validity, chemical consistency, and thermodynamic stability. For property-conditioned tasks, we design task-specific reward functions and train specialized models for discrete constraints (e.g., space group) and continuous properties (e.g., elasticity, thermal expansion). Empirical results demonstrate that compared to prior works and baselines without thinking traces or RL, CrysReas obtains better performance on diverse metrics, triples S.U.N. ratio, and achieves better performance for property conditioned generation. CrysReas also exhibits adaptive reasoning, increasing reasoning lengths as the number of atoms increases. Our work demonstrates the potential of leveraging thinking traces and RL for generating valid, stable, and property-conditioned crystal structures.