Space Group Constrained Crystal Generation

Crystals are the foundation of numerous scientific and industrial applications. While various learning-based approaches have been proposed for crystal generation, existing methods seldom consider the space group constraint which is crucial in describing the geometry of crystals and closely relevant to many desirable properties. However, considering space group constraint is challenging owing to its diverse and nontrivial forms. In this paper, we reduce the space group constraint into an equivalent formulation that is more tractable to be handcrafted into the generation process. In particular, we translate the space group constraint into two parts: the basis constraint of the invariant logarithmic space of the lattice matrix and the Wyckoff position constraint of the fractional coordinates. Upon the derived constraints, we then propose DiffCSP++, a novel diffusion model that has enhanced a previous work DiffCSP (Jiao et al., 2023) by further taking space group constraint into account. Experiments on several popular datasets verify the benefit of the involvement of the space group constraint, and show that our Dif-fCSP++ achieves promising performance on crystal structure prediction, ab initio crystal generation and controllable generation with customized space groups. * This work is done when Rui Jiao works as an intern in Alibaba Group.