CrystalICL: Enabling In-Context Learning for Crystal Generation

Abstract

Designing crystal materials with desired physicochemical properties remains a fundamental challenge in materials science. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, existing LLM-based crystal generation approaches are limited to zero-shot scenarios and are unable to benefit from few-shot scenarios. In contrast, human experts typically design new materials by modifying relevant known structures which aligns closely with the few-shot ICL paradigm. Motivated by this, we propose CrystalICL, a novel model designed for few-shot crystal generation. Specifically, we introduce a space-group based crystal tokenization method, which effectively reduces the complexity of modeling crystal symmetry in LLMs. We further introduce a condition-structure aware hybrid instruction tuning framework and a multi-task instruction tuning strategy, enabling the model to better exploit ICL by capturing structure-property relationships from limited data. Extensive experiments on four crystal generation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of CrystalICL over the leading baseline methods on conditional and unconditional generation tasks.