Beyond Order: Perspectives on Leveraging Machine Learning for Disordered Materials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disordered structures, characterized by their lack of periodicity, present significant challenges in fields such as materials science and biology. Conventional methods often fall short of capturing the intricate properties and behaviors of these complex systems. For example, the prediction of material properties in amorphous polymers and high‐entropy alloys has historically been inaccurate due to their inherent disorder, which arises from the probabilistic nature of structural defects and nonuniform atomic arrangements. However, the rise of machine learning (ML) offers a revolutionary approach to understanding and predicting the behavior of disordered materials. This perspective article explores how ML techniques, including neural networks and generative models, provide unprecedented insights into materials with inherent disorder, driving advances in industries such as energy storage, drug discovery, and structural engineering. By leveraging powerful algorithms, researchers can now predict structural properties, identify hidden patterns, and accelerate the discovery of novel materials. Case studies illustrate the ability of ML to overcome data scarcity, enhance model reliability, and enable real‐time analysis of disordered structures. While challenges such as data quality and computational costs remain, the integration of ML with traditional methods marks a transformative leap in our ability to navigate the disordered landscape, setting the stage for ground‐breaking discoveries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".