CondMSP: Condition-Informed and Resource-Aware Inorganic Materials Synthesis Planning
Organizations: KAIST · MIT
Abstract
Materials synthesis planning (MSP) connects AI-driven materials discovery to experimental realization by proposing precursors, synthesis operations, and processing conditions for a target material. Existing approaches predict these components separately or in pairs and treat conditions only as a prediction target. Consequently, MSP remains centered on recipe prediction: it leaves unexplored how conditions can serve as process context for constructing synthesis routes, and it does not address which candidate routes should be executed under limited experimental resources. We propose CondMSP, which extends MSP from recipe prediction to execution-aware planning. CondMSP predicts temperature, time, and atmosphere by combining a joint predictor with variable-specific experts, and then uses these predictions both as process context, grounding the generation and retrieval of operation sequences, and as execution requirements, specifying which thermal stages can share a furnace run and at what cost. This specification is held fixed across all compared methods; within it, CondMSP ranks routes across precursor sets by a common utility and, under furnace budgets, jointly selects routes and allocates their thermal stages by constrained optimization. CondMSP improves condition and operation prediction and, under this shared constraint, raises reference-recipe recovery from 27.9% to 32.9% at three simulated furnace runs per target and from 34.7% to 40.0% at 30 trials, while a new evaluation set of 2,344 targets supports generalization beyond oxide-dominated training chemistry.
Figures & tables
| Temperature | Time | Atmosphere | |||
| Model | MAE | RMSE | MAE | RMSE | Macro-F1 |
| Huo et al. (2022) | 151.76 | 195.29 | 13.11 | 25.64 | N/A |
| SyntMTE ( Prein et al., 2025b ) | 171.79 ( 8.71) | 217.60 ( 11.65) | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Karpovich et al. (2023) | 144.36 ( 0.23) | 188.85 ( 0.03) | 15.35 ( 0.25) | 25.31 ( 0.34) | N/A |
| GBM experts | 143.42 | 190.88 | 12.93 | 25.47 | 54.07 |
| Joint LLM | 138.68 ( 3.72) | 203.13 ( 1.82) | 13.92 ( 0.68) | 26.58 ( 1.22) | 63.56 ( 4.47) |
| Method | Top-1 | Top-3 | Top-5 | Top-10 | Top-20 | Top-30 |
| Specialized Models | ||||||
| MPC ( He et al., 2023 ) | 3.74 ( 0.38) | 9.69 ( 0.22) | 13.58 ( 0.82) | 19.46 ( 0.38) | 25.82 ( 0.66) | 32.39 ( 0.45) |
| SPENDE ( Na, 2023 ) | 6.68 ( 0.66) | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| MSP-LLM ( Noh et al., 2026 ) | 10.71 ( 0.13) | 18.92 ( 0.23) | 22.88 ( 0.76) | 30.28 ( 0.19) | 40.23 ( 0.56) | 46.51 ( 0.29) |
| Large Language Models | ||||||
| GPT-5.4 mini (zero-shot) | 0.00 ( 0.00) | 0.05 ( 0.08) | 0.16 ( 0.23) | 2.72 ( 0.15) | 7.73 ( 1.08) | 11.00 ( 0.46) |
| (a) Trial budget (number of syntheses tried) | (b) Furnace budget (runs hours) | |||||||||||||||
| Method | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 1 run | 2 runs | 3 runs | 5 runs | 10 runs | 12 h | 24 h | 48 h | 96 h | |
| GPT-5.4 mini (end-to-end, 100-shot) | 5.99 ( 0.31) | 8.71 ( 0.46) | 9.91 ( 0.31) | 12.20 ( 0.00) | 15.14 ( 0.31) | 16.72 ( 0.85) | 10.84 ( 0.39) | 11.66 ( 0.15) | 13.24 ( 0.54) | 14.87 ( 0.69) | 16.50 ( 0.69) | 5.45 ( 0.15) | 9.91 ( 0.00) | 13.51 ( 0.31) | 15.09 ( 0.85) | |
| GPT-5.4 mini (PP SOP, 100-shot) | 7.19 ( 0.31) | 8.61 ( 0.31) | 9.97 ( 0.54) | 12.69 ( 0.08) | 15.80 ( 0.31) | 18.08 ( 0.31) | 12.64 ( 0.77) | 12.31 ( 0.00) | 14.81 ( 0.00) | 17.27 ( 0.54) | 18.08 ( 0.31) | 6.37 ( 0.39) | 11.22 ( 0.77) | 15.31 ( 0.08) | 17.27 ( 0.39) | |
| GPT-4o mini (end-to-end, fine-tuned) | 7.55 ( 0.31) | 8.46 ( 0.67) | 10.20 ( 0.33) | 14.56 ( 0.77) | 20.26 ( 0.98) | 21.57 ( 1.04) | 11.73 ( 0.23) | 15.94 ( 1.06) | 19.39 ( 1.00) | 21.24 ( 1.00) | 21.53 ( 1.09) | 6.64 ( 0.11) | 13.36 ( 0.38) | 18.23 ( 0.62) | 20.73 ( 1.14) | |
| GPT-4o mini (PP SOP, fine-tuned) | 8.21 ( 0.25) | 8.79 ( 0.25) | 9.84 ( 0.33) | 13.65 ( 0.69) | 19.72 ( 0.58) | 21.60 ( 0.54) | 11.51 ( 1.11) | 15.98 ( 0.45) | 19.21 ( 0.74) | 21.53 ( 0.41) | 21.60 ( 0.54) | 6.32 ( 0.11) | 12.82 ( 0.27) | 18.05 ( 0.35) | 20.73 ( 0.77) | |
| Candidate construction route selection | ||||||||||||||||
| (a) Trial budget | (b) Furnace budget | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Number of syntheses tried | Runs | Hours | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Single-ref. | Multi-ref. | Single-ref. | Multi-ref. | Single-ref. | Multi-ref. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Method | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 12 | 24 | 48 | 96 | 12 | 24 | 48 | 96 |
| GPT-5.4 mini (end-to-end, 100-shot) | 3.94 ( 0.19) | 5.64 ( 0.19) | 6.42 ( 0.22) | 7.87 ( 0.19) | 9.73 ( 0.28) | 10.73 ( 0.13) | 15.74 ( 2.62) | 17.59 ( 3.93) | 20.37 ( 2.62) | 25.00 ( 2.62) | 25.93 ( 2.62) | 30.09 ( 1.96) | 6.48 ( 0.38) | 7.76 ( 0.09) | 8.99 ( 0.06) | 10.00 ( 0.09) | 10.51 ( 0.25) | 24.07 ( 0.00) | 26.85 ( 1.31) | 27.78 ( 1.31) | 28.24 ( 1.96) | 29.63 ( 1.31) | 2.71 ( 0.35) | 5.50 ( 0.25) | 8.32 ( 0.06) | 9.97 ( 0.25) | 6.48 ( 1.31) | 12.04 ( 2.62) | 20.83 ( 3.27) | 28.24 ( 1.96) |
| GPT-5.4 mini (PP SOP, 100-shot) | 4.18 ( 0.03) | 5.64 ( 0.06) | 7.09 ( 0.41) | 9.68 ( 0.35) | 12.61 ( 0.19) | 14.53 ( 0.38) | 15.28 ( 0.65) | 18.98 ( 1.96) | 27.31 ( 1.96) | 30.56 ( 0.00) | 37.04 ( 1.31) | 40.74 ( 1.31) | 8.70 ( 0.09) | 9.48 ( 0.06) | 12.14 ( 0.09) | 14.33 ( 0.28) | 14.53 ( 0.38) | 25.46 ( 1.96) | 31.48 ( 1.31) | 34.72 ( 0.65) | 40.74 ( 1.31) | 40.74 ( 1.31) | 3.18 ( 0.13) | 7.00 ( 0.16) | 10.64 ( 0.44) | 13.37 ( 0.57) | 9.26 ( 0.00) | 14.81 ( 1.31) | 26.85 ( 0.00) | 36.57 ( 0.65) |
| GPT-4o mini (end-to-end, fine-tuned) | 4.01 ( 0.07) | 4.22 ( 0.11) | 4.76 ( 0.14) | 7.53 ( 0.07) | 13.07 ( 0.83) | 17.68 ( 1.52) | 15.74 ( 0.00) | 16.05 ( 0.53) | 17.28 ( 0.53) | 20.06 ( 1.93) | 30.25 ( 3.85) | 37.65 ( 3.74) | 5.38 ( 0.17) | 9.21 ( 0.27) | 14.52 ( 0.68) | 17.49 ( 1.43) | 17.68 ( 1.52) | 19.14 ( 0.53) | 22.84 ( 1.07) | 33.95 ( 4.66) | 37.65 ( 3.74) | 37.65 ( 3.74) | 2.50 ( 0.04) | 6.51 ( 0.31) | 11.55 ( 0.60) | 14.88 ( 0.74) | 5.25 ( 1.41) | 13.58 ( 1.07) | 25.00 ( 1.85) | 33.64 ( 3.25) |
| (a) Synthesis Condition Prediction (SCP) | |||||||
| Temperature | Time | Atmosphere | |||||
| Model | Joint | GBM | MAE | RMSE | MAE | RMSE | Macro-F1 |
| (A) Separate LLMs | ✗ | ✗ | 141.42 | 207.30 | 14.01 | 26.33 | 60.90 |
| (B) Separate LLMs + GBM | ✗ | ✓ | 132.03 | 186.17 | 12.48 | 24.72 | 62.46 |
| (C) GBM experts only | ✗ | ✓ | 143.42 | 190.88 | 12.93 | 25.47 | 54.07 |
| (D) Joint LLM | ✓ | ✗ | 138.68 | 203.13 | 13.92 | 26.58 | 63.56 |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Budget | Target–seed cases | Median (s) | 95th percentile (s) |
| 3 runs | 2,754 | 0.0109 | 0.0292 |
| 20 runs | 2,754 | 0.0464 | 0.1337 |
| 48 h | 2,754 | 0.0155 | 0.0597 |
| Observed annotations | Records | Share (%) |
| Temperature | 25,963 | 95.77 |
| Time | 24,023 | 88.61 |
| Atmosphere | 13,058 | 48.17 |
| All three conditions | 11,277 | 41.60 |
| Original train | Original test (918) | New all refs. | New single refs. | New multi refs. | |
| Recipes | 8,295 | 918 | 2,482 | 2,236 | 246 |
| Oxide (%) | 92.5 | 92.4 | 32.6 | 33.9 | 21.1 |
| All-elemental precursors (%) | 6.6 | 6.3 | 64.6 | 63.2 | 77.6 |
| Mean operation count | 4.17 | 4.31 | 2.71 | 2.72 | 2.66 |
| One-operation recipes (%) | 3.1 | 1.6 | 23.5 | 23.4 | 24.4 |
| Mean precursor count | 3.23 | 3.31 | 3.56 | 3.58 | 3.39 |
| Dataset (targets) | Ranking | Top-1 | Top-2 | Top-3 | Top-5 | Top-10 |
| Original test (918) | Original beams | 74.29 | 84.10 | 88.34 | 91.83 | 94.55 |
| Distinct sets | 74.29 | 84.42 | 88.78 | 92.16 | 94.55 | |
| New targets (2,344) | Original beams | 83.19 | 87.41 | 89.93 | 91.68 | 93.90 |
| Distinct sets | 83.19 | 87.93 | 90.32 | 91.98 | 93.90 |
| Temperature | ||||
| Model | Training data | Rows | MAE | RMSE |
| Huo et al. (2022) | Original split | 6,228 | 152.84 | 197.16 |
| Huo et al. (2022) | + raw corpus | 11,331 | 151.76 | 195.29 |
| SyntMTE | Original split | 6,228 | 171.79 ( 8.71) | 217.60 ( 11.65) |
| SyntMTE | + raw corpus | 11,331 | 173.07 ( 2.83) | 219.20 ( 2.53) |
| SyntMTE | Literature + LLM data | 30,762 | 180.85 ( 5.72) | 228.02 ( 10.78) |
| NED similarity | LCS-F1 | Multiset-F1 | ||||
| Method | Top-10 | Top-30 | Top-10 | Top-30 | Top-10 | Top-30 |
| Specialized models | ||||||
| MPC | ||||||
| SPENDE | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| MSP-LLM | ||||||
| Large language models | ||||||
| Oxide | Non-oxide | Elemental precursors | |||||||
| Method | 1 | 10 | 30 | 1 | 10 | 30 | 1 | 10 | 30 |
| MSP-LLM | 6.23 ( 0.45) | 20.10 ( 0.56) | 30.30 ( 0.64) | 3.71 ( 0.55) | 8.81 ( 0.18) | 17.47 ( 1.33) | 3.61 ( 0.57) | 8.72 ( 0.22) | 17.59 ( 1.34) |
| GPT-4o mini (end-to-end, fine-tuned) | 5.93 ( 0.07) | 13.83 ( 0.13) | 21.25 ( 1.79) | 3.86 ( 0.07) | 5.25 ( 0.28) | 17.27 ( 1.56) | 3.97 ( 0.10) | 5.35 ( 0.29) | 17.81 ( 1.59) |
| GPT-4o mini (PP SOP, fine-tuned) | 5.68 ( 0.32) | 10.84 ( 0.58) | 18.57 ( 0.13) | 3.13 ( 0.06) | 4.61 ( 0.17) | 16.59 ( 0.87) | 3.14 ( 0.07) | 4.59 ( 0.17) | 16.88 ( 0.91) |
| GPT-5.4 mini (end-to-end, zero-shot) | 0.06 ( 0.09) | 1.28 ( 0.18) | 4.74 ( 0.18) | 0.58 ( 0.18) | 2.21 ( 0.14) | 4.29 ( 0.09) | 0.60 ( 0.19) | 2.27 ( 0.09) | 4.41 ( 0.09) |
| GPT-5.4 mini (end-to-end, 100-shot) | 5.19 ( 0.45) | 13.25 ( 0.45) | 18.44 ( 0.36) | 4.13 ( 0.23) | 6.37 ( 0.14) | 8.22 ( 0.14) | 4.21 ( 0.28) | 6.09 ( 0.09) | 7.83 ( 0.28) |
| Comparison | Top-1 | Top-3 | Top-5 | Top-10 | Top-20 | Top-30 |
| CondMSP CondMSP (w/o conditions) | +0.29 [ 0.33, +0.91] | +0.98 [ 0.04, +2.00] | +0.44 [ 0.51, +1.42] | +1.60 [+0.29, +2.94] | +1.56 [+0.40, +2.76] | +2.03 [+0.65, +3.41] |
| CondMSP MSP-LLM | +0.69 [+0.00, +1.42] | +1.20 [+0.07, +2.36] | +1.92 [+0.65, +3.27] | +3.96 [+2.29, +5.63] | +3.49 [+1.96, +5.05] | +2.54 [+0.98, +4.14] |
| Inference input | Top-10 | Top-30 |
| Conditions removed | ||
| Conditions shuffled across targets | ||
| Target-matched conditions |
| Method | 30-trial recovery (%) |
| CondMSP (w/o conditions) | |
| CondMSP | |
| Difference (pp) [95% CI] | +2.14 [0.91, 3.41] |
| Trials | Runs | Hours | ||||||||
| Test set | Variant | 1 | 10 | 30 | 1 | 3 | 10 | 12 | 48 | 96 |
| Original | end-to-end | 0.00 ( 0.00) | 0.93 ( 0.08) | 3.59 ( 0.31) | 3.27 ( 0.15) | 1.53 ( 0.15) | 3.49 ( 0.31) | 1.58 ( 0.08) | 2.72 ( 0.00) | 3.05 ( 0.15) |
| Original | PP SOP | 0.00 ( 0.00) | 2.23 ( 0.08) | 7.30 ( 0.31) | 6.54 ( 0.15) | 1.53 ( 0.31) | 7.24 ( 0.23) | 2.89 ( 0.39) | 4.58 ( 0.15) | 6.10 ( 0.15) |
| New (single) | end-to-end | 0.36 ( 0.13) | 1.63 ( 0.16) | 3.94 ( 0.06) | 2.42 ( 0.00) | 1.97 ( 0.06) | 3.49 ( 0.13) | 1.01 ( 0.03) | 2.57 ( 0.03) | 2.91 ( 0.06) |
| New (single) | PP SOP | 0.11 ( 0.03) | 2.59 ( 0.25) | 8.27 ( 0.13) | 5.75 ( 0.09) | 2.21 ( 0.28) | 8.25 ( 0.09) | 1.59 ( 0.16) | 4.85 ( 0.22) | 6.28 ( 0.47) |
| New (multi) | end-to-end | 1.39 ( 0.65) | 7.41 ( 0.00) | 14.81 ( 1.31) | 9.72 ( 1.96) | 10.65 ( 1.96) | 12.50 ( 0.65) | 4.63 ( 0.00) | 9.26 ( 1.31) | 10.19 ( 0.00) |
Materials Science
Materials science studies how composition, structure, processing, and defects determine material properties and how to design useful materials.
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