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.

Autonomous Multi-Agent AI for High-Throughput Polymer Informatics: From Property Prediction to Generative Design Across Synthetic and Bio-Polymers

We present an integrated multiagent AI ecosystem for polymer discovery that unifies high-throughput materials workflows, artificial intelligence, and computational modeling within a single Polymer Research Lifecycle (PRL) pipeline. The system orchestrates specialized agents powered by state-of-the-art large language models (DeepSeek-V2 and DeepSeek-Coder) to retrieve and reason over scientific resources, invoke external tools, execute domain-specific code, and perform metacognitive self-assessment for robust end-to-end task execution. We demonstrate three practical capabilities: a high-fidelity polymer property prediction and generative design pipeline, a fully automated multimodal workflow for biopolymer structure characterization, and a metacognitive agent framework that can monitor performance and improve execution strategies over time. On a held-out test set of 1,251 polymers, our PolyGNN agent achieves strong predictive accuracy, reaching R2 = 0.89 for glass-transition temperature (Tg ), R2 = 0.82 for tensile strength, R2 = 0.75 for elongation, and R2 = 0.91 for density. The framework also provides uncertainty estimates via multiagent consensus and scales with linear complexity to at least 10,000 polymers, enabling high-throughput screening at low computational cost. For a representative workload, the system completes inference in 16.3 s using about 2 GB of memory and 0.1 GPU hours, at an estimated cost of about $0.08. On a dedicated Tg benchmark, our approach attains R2 = 0.78, outperforming strong baselines including single-LLM prediction (R2 = 0.67), group-contribution methods (R2 = 0.71), and ChemCrow (R2 = 0.66). We further demonstrate metacognitive control in a polystyrene case study, where the system not only produces domain-level scientific outputs but continually monitors and optimizes its own behavior through tactical, strategic, and meta-strategic self-assessment.

Quantum-Aware Generative AI for Materials Discovery: A Framework for Robust Exploration Beyond DFT Biases

Conventional generative models for materials discovery are predominantly trained and validated using data from Density Functional Theory (DFT) with approximate exchange-correlation functionals. This creates a fundamental bottleneck: these models inherit DFT's systematic failures for strongly correlated systems, leading to exploration biases and an inability to discover materials where DFT predictions are qualitatively incorrect. We introduce a quantum-aware generative AI framework that systematically addresses this limitation through tight integration of multi-fidelity learning and active validation. Our approach employs a diffusion-based generator conditioned on quantum-mechanical descriptors and a validator using an equivariant neural network potential trained on a hierarchical dataset spanning multiple levels of theory (PBE, SCAN, HSE06, CCSD(T)). Crucially, we implement a robust active learning loop that quantifies and targets the divergence between low- and high-fidelity predictions. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies to deconstruct the contribution of each component, perform detailed failure mode analysis, and benchmark our framework against state-of-the-art generative models (CDVAE, GNoME, DiffCSP) across several challenging material classes. Our results demonstrate significant practical gains: a 3-5x improvement in successfully identifying potentially stable candidates in high-divergence regions (e.g., correlated oxides) compared to DFT-only baselines, while maintaining computational feasibility. This work provides a rigorous, transparent framework for extending the effective search space of computational materials discovery beyond the limitations of single-fidelity models.