From Knowledge to Action: Outcomes of the 2025 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.

Constrained Diffusion for Accelerated Structure Relaxation of Inorganic Solids with Point Defects

Point defects affect material properties by altering electronic states and modifying local bonding environments. However, high-throughput first-principles simulations of point defects are costly due to large simulation cells and complex energy landscapes. To this end, we propose a generative framework for simulating point defects, overcoming the limits of costly first-principles simulators. By leveraging a primal-dual algorithm, we introduce a constraint-aware diffusion model which outperforms existing constrained diffusion approaches in this domain. Across six defect configuration settings for Bi2Te3, the proposed approach provides state-of-the-art performance generating physically grounded structures.

KinDEL: DNA-Encoded Library Dataset for Kinase Inhibitors

DNA-Encoded Libraries (DEL) are combinatorial small molecule libraries that offer an efficient way to characterize diverse chemical spaces. Selection experiments using DELs are pivotal to drug discovery efforts, enabling high-throughput screens for hit finding. However, limited availability of public DEL datasets hinders the advancement of computational techniques designed to process such data. To bridge this gap, we present KinDEL, one of the first large, publicly available DEL datasets on two kinases: Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase 14 (MAPK14) and Discoidin Domain Receptor Tyrosine Kinase 1 (DDR1). Interest in this data modality is growing due to its ability to generate extensive supervised chemical data that densely samples around select molecular structures. Demonstrating one such application of the data, we benchmark different machine learning techniques to develop predictive models for hit identification; in particular, we highlight recent structure-based probabilistic approaches. Finally, we provide biophysical assay data, both on- and off-DNA, to validate our models on a smaller subset of molecules. Data and code for our benchmarks can be found at: https://github.com/insitro/kindel.