CrystalMO-TuRBO: Multi-Objective Trust-Region Bayesian Optimization for High-precision Joint Crystal Structure Refinement

Joseph Agada; Yishu Wang; Arpan Biswas

cs.LGSep 17, 2026

CrystalMO-TuRBO: Multi-Objective Trust-Region Bayesian Optimization for High-precision Joint Crystal Structure Refinement

Authors: Joseph Agada, Yishu Wang, Arpan Biswas

Organizations: University of Tennessee - Oak Ridge Innovation Institute University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996 · Department of Materials Science and Engineering University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996

Abstract

Crystal structure refinement is a fundamental inverse problem in materials characterization, where structural parameters are optimized to reproduce experimental diffraction data. Conventional approaches, such as least-squares and likelihood-based optimization, rely on local search and often struggle with non-convex, noisy, and highly correlated parameter landscapes, particularly when integrating multiple diffraction modalities. Joint refinement of X-ray and neutron data is especially challenging due to their complementary but competing sensitivities, which are typically combined through scalarized objectives requiring manual weighting and leading to suboptimal solutions. We propose CrystalMO-TuRBO, a multi-objective trust region Bayesian optimization architecture for joint crystal structure refinement. The method models X-ray and neutron discrepancies as separate objectives and transforms the problem into a normalized maximization setting. A two-phase optimization strategy is introduced: Phase 1 performs global exploration using parallel trust-region Bayesian optimization across multiple scalarizations to identify promising regions of the parameter space, while Phase 2 conducts localized refinement within a shrinking region to achieve high-precision solutions. This design explicitly separates global search from fine-grained optimization, addressing the unique accuracy requirements of refinement tasks. We evaluate the proposed method on experimentally collected X-ray and neutron diffraction data from single-crystal Ho2Ti2O7. Results demonstrate improved convergence, robustness, and parameter precision compared to classical refinement methods and Bayesian optimization baselines on refinement of a single-crystal pyrochlore material system.

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