Agentic-MatriBO: Capability-Compiled Agentic Bayesian Optimization for Materials and Chemical Design
Organizations: DP Technology, Beijing, China
Abstract
Materials and chemical optimization must choose the next synthesis, characterization, or high-fidelity simulation from sequential observations under a limited budget. Large language models can use task knowledge to propose adjustments, but composing surrogates, acquisition functions, and search strategies is constrained by compatibility, parameter dependencies, and evidence requirements. We present Agentic-MatriBO, a capability-compiled agentic Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that represents BO components and selection conditions as composable capabilities. A language policy proposes BO recipes and candidate plans; a compiler checks proposals against the registered capability catalog; and a deterministic execution layer validates and commits candidates. Oracle observations are stored in research memory and inform later rounds. We compare Agentic-MatriBO with eight baselines on four offline finite candidate pools---COF, PCE10, Buchwald--Hartwig (BH), and Suzuki--Miyaura---using five seeds per condition; results are reported descriptively. Across the four tasks, Agentic-MatriBO has the best mean endpoint quality after orienting each objective so that higher is better. On COF, it reaches the tabulated optimum in all five seeds both in the end-to-end comparison and after shared initialization, where it also retains an advantage in cumulative quality. Its normalized area under the best-so-far quality curve during the BO stage (nAUC-BO) is substantially higher on COF, near parity with the best baseline on PCE10 and BH, and lower on Suzuki. COF ablations show that removing the capability compiler or evidence gate coincides with lower cumulative quality and fewer exact-optimum hits. The framework provides an inspectable interface for evidence-conditioned BO adaptation.
Figures & tables
| Role | Outputs and permissions | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Policy reasoning layer | Interprets the task and evidence; proposes recipes, candidate plans, and probes | Does not directly commit candidate IDs or generate target observations |
| Deterministic BO execution layer | Compiles the catalog, validates proposals, generates a candidate shortlist, fuses scores, and commits a candidate | Validation covers only the actual execution path; it does not generate target values |
| Advisory reviewers | Return bounded task scores and public justification for given candidates | Cannot add candidates, commit independently, or veto candidates unilaterally |
| Experiment oracle | Returns target values and related observations for submitted IDs | Does not replace target values with language-generated values |
| Research memory | Stores, links, and retrieves results, hypotheses, and reflections | Does not authorize execution or treat explanations as observations |
| Task | Input space | Candidate pool | Objective / source |
|---|---|---|---|
| COF (Xe/Kr) | 14 numerical descriptors | 605 candidates | Maximize adsorption selectivity; LABO finite table with GCMC targets [ 21 , 24 ] |
| PCE10 | 4 composition variables | 1,040 records (1,020 compositions) | Minimize photodegradation; LABO finite table |
| Buchwald–Hartwig | 4 categorical variables | 790 candidates | Maximize yield; Buchwald–sub4 table [ 25 ] |
| Suzuki–Miyaura | 5 categorical variables | 5,760 candidates | Maximize yield; reaction-condition table [ 26 ] |
| Task | Metric | Best baseline | Baseline score | Agentic-MatriBO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| COF | Best-so-far | LMABO | 17.326 1.416 | 18.476 0.000 |
| nAUC-BO | LMABO | 0.868 0.076 | 0.970 0.039 | |
| EF40 | LMABO | 0.938 0.077 | 1.000 0.000 | |
| Late nAUC | LMABO | 0.898 0.075 | 0.991 0.015 | |
| PCE10 | Best-so-far | CAKE | 0.0034 0.0040 | 0.00162 0.00000 |
| nAUC-BO | Reasoning BO | 0.9963 0.0062 | 0.9964 0.0021 |
| Method | Best-so-far | nAUC-BO | EF40 | Late nAUC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HEBO | 16.550 1.184 | 0.818 0.032 | 0.896 0.064 | 0.861 0.010 |
| CAKE | 17.875 0.531 | 0.823 0.118 | 0.967 0.029 | 0.868 0.127 |
| LMABO | 13.618 5.286 | 0.662 0.224 | 0.737 0.287 | 0.698 0.256 |
| BORA | 15.953 2.955 | 0.769 0.107 | 0.863 0.160 | 0.845 0.148 |
| Agentic-MatriBO | 18.476 0.000 | 0.923 0.038 | 1.000 0.000 | 0.982 0.026 |
| Ablation group | Condition | Best-so-far | nAUC-BO | Late nAUC | Global optimum hits | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warm start | Full (agentic) | 18.476 0.000 | 0.970 0.039 | 0.991 0.015 | 13.4 [5/5] | — |
| Random | 18.476 0.000 | 0.888 0.048 | 0.967 0.045 | 23.4 [5/5] | — | |
| Component | Full | 18.476 0.000 | 0.888 0.048 | 0.967 0.045 | 23.4 [5/5] | 5/5 |
| No review | 18.300 0.171 | 0.865 0.082 | 0.963 0.046 | 20.0 [5/5] | 0/5 | |
| Fixed GP+UCB | 14.773 3.573 | 0.696 0.189 | 0.753 0.192 | 35.0 [2/5] | — | |
| Harness | Full | 18.476 0.000 | 0.923 0.038 | 0.982 0.026 | 19.6 [5/5] | 5/5 |
| Model | Init. best | Early nAUC (10–20) | nAUC-BO (10–40) | Late nAUC (20–40) | Optimum hits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek 4.0 Flash | 16.128 2.777 | 0.9266 | 0.9698 0.0395 | 0.9914 0.0151 | 5/5 |
| DeepSeek 4.0 Pro | 17.281 1.860 | 0.9560 | 0.9817 0.0308 | 0.9946 0.0083 | 5/5 |
| Qwen3-Max | 18.113 0.000 | 0.9837 | 0.9910 0.0063 | 0.9947 0.0081 | 3/5 |
| GPT-5.6-sol | 18.113 0.000 | 0.9849 | 0.9912 0.0066 | 0.9944 0.0070 | 5/5 |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | Method | Best-so-far | nAUC-BO | EF40 | Late-stage nAUC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COF | Vanilla BO | ||||
| HEBO | |||||
| LABO | |||||
| CAKE | |||||
| LMABO | |||||
| BORA |
| Dataset | Method | Best-so-far | nAUC-BO | EF40 | Late-stage nAUC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| COF | Vanilla BO | ||||
| HEBO | |||||
| LABO | |||||
| CAKE | |||||
| LMABO | |||||
| BORA |
| Ablation group | Condition | Best-so-far | nAUC-BO | EF40 | Late nAUC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warm start | Full (agentic) | 13.4 [5/5] | ||||
| Random | 23.4 [5/5] | |||||
| Component | Full | 23.4 [5/5] | ||||
| No review | 20.0 [5/5] | |||||
| Fixed GP+UCB | 35.0 [2/5] | |||||
| Harness | Full | 19.6 [5/5] |
| Model | Best init. value | Early nAUC (10–20) | nAUC-BO (10–40) | Late-stage nAUC (20–40) | Exact-optimum hits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek 4.0 Flash | 16.128 2.777 | 0.9266 | 0.9698 0.0395 | 0.9914 0.0151 | 5/5, latest at evaluation 28 |
| DeepSeek 4.0 Pro | 17.281 1.860 | 0.956 | 0.9817 0.0308 | 0.9946 0.0083 | 5/5, latest at evaluation 26 |
| Qwen3-Max | 18.113 0.000 | 0.9837 | 0.9910 0.0063 | 0.9947 0.0081 | 3/5, reached at evaluations 15–23 |
| GPT-5.6-sol | 18.113 0.000 | 0.9849 | 0.9912 0.0066 | 0.9944 0.0070 | 5/5, latest at evaluation 39 |
| Metric | Definition | Direction | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best-so-far | Task-dependent | The best observed objective value at the end of the budget, retaining the original physical units. | |
| nAUC-BO | The normalized incumbent area over evaluations 10–40, measuring cumulative search quality during the BO stage. | ||
| EF40 | Full-table min–max-normalized endpoint quality; 1 denotes the best table value. Exact candidate-ID hits are counted separately. | ||
| Late-stage nAUC | The normalized incumbent area over evaluations 20–40, describing cumulative quality in the second half of the run. |
| Source label and reference | Implementation source and registered version | Implementation and adaptation scope |
|---|---|---|
| Vanilla BO [3–5] | In-house implementation | Numerical GP baseline |
| HEBO [29] | huawei-noah/HEBO , ee6112d39d1a | Finite-table adapter with unqueried-candidate mapping; quasi-random fallback after repeated failure (see B.2.5) |
| LABO [23] | Xinzhe309/LABO , c97d5615ebe8 | Low-fidelity prediction and candidate selection through the upstream adapter |
| CAKE [19] | richardcsuwandi/cake , ece5cbc04b3e | Kernel search and finite-table selection through the upstream adapter |
| LMABO [21] | giang-n-ngo/lmabo , b1671f5ad79f | Adapted acquisition selection; parse failures raise explicit errors instead of silent UCB fallback |
| BORA [18] | Ablatif6c/bora-the-explorer , 83b2ebf86f4f | Region guidance and finite-table candidate handling |
| Task | Rows and unique input combinations | Processing and protocol boundary |
|---|---|---|
| BH | 790 rows; 790 unique combinations | Fixed-product Buchwald_sub4 background with four variable categorical fields; the benchmark excludes the 35 cross-product training priors |
| Suzuki | 5,760 rows; 5,760 unique combinations | Five categorical fields; the 29/5,731 train/test split in the data description is not equivalent to the 10+30 query budget reported here |
| Object | Current mechanism |
|---|---|
| Method hypothesis METHOD | States the claim, prediction, and falsification condition; does not include a domain contrast |
| Domain main-effect and interaction hypotheses | Must declare domain_contrast, including comparison arms, controlled factors, and a threshold; both types share the evaluator |
| Contrast evaluation | Uses observed records only; exact-control matching by default (optional tolerance). Judgments derive from group counts, thresholds, and direction |
| Per-hypothesis reflection | SUPPORT/REFUTE/INCONCLUSIVE, with evidence and a public rationale; missing an explicit verdict that may be cited is downgraded to uncertain; DIFFERENT propositions are handled under their own threshold rule when sufficient groups exist |
| Hypothesis state | Stores supporting/opposing citations, evaluation counts, and state changes, which feed the subsequent Policy |
| Playbook | Citations are resolved to experimental events in the current run and deduplicated by round and candidate; it may be activated by default when at least two supporting items exist and no resolved experimental counterevidence exists; counterevidence in unresolved citations is outside this judgment |
| Stage | Declaration protocol | Current implementation |
|---|---|---|
| Atomic admission | The complete combination satisfies the conditions for the current round | Primarily checks atomic changes in CHANGE and retains atoms that can continue execution |
| Supporting material | The required support list is non-empty | Verifies list non-emptiness only; citation validity and premise entailment unverified |
| Portfolio | Each acquisition capability and the final surrogate are compatible and satisfy admission | Filters BLOCKED IDs and verifies interfaces; partial binding for NEEDS_EVIDENCE; zero-quota keys still checked |
| CHANGE KEEP | Recheck the candidate plan under the final formulation | Candidate plan validated pre-guard; deferred components bypass re-validation |
| Candidate and fusion | Bounded candidates, valid reviews, deterministic submission | Decoupled quotas/slots; falls back to numerical utility if valid review dimensions are absent |
| Research feedback | Public state is available for subsequent retrieval | Typed hypotheses, reflections, and retrieval rules are saved |