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.

FedDBL: Communication and Data Efficient Federated Deep-Broad Learning for Histopathological Tissue Classification

Histopathological tissue classification is a fundamental task in computational pathology. Deep learning-based models have achieved superior performance but centralized training with data centralization suffers from the privacy leakage problem. Federated learning (FL) can safeguard privacy by keeping training samples locally, but existing FL-based frameworks require a large number of well-annotated training samples and numerous rounds of communication which hinder their practicability in the real-world clinical scenario. In this paper, we propose a universal and lightweight federated learning framework, named Federated Deep-Broad Learning (FedDBL), to achieve superior classification performance with limited training samples and only one-round communication. By simply associating a pre-trained deep learning feature extractor, a fast and lightweight broad learning inference system and a classical federated aggregation approach, FedDBL can dramatically reduce data dependency and improve communication efficiency. Five-fold cross-validation demonstrates that FedDBL greatly outperforms the competitors with only one-round communication and limited training samples, while it even achieves comparable performance with the ones under multiple-round communications. Furthermore, due to the lightweight design and one-round communication, FedDBL reduces the communication burden from 4.6GB to only 276.5KB per client using the ResNet-50 backbone at 50-round training. Since no data or deep model sharing across different clients, the privacy issue is well-solved and the model security is guaranteed with no model inversion attack risk. Code is available at https://github.com/tianpeng-deng/FedDBL.