How Far Can You Grow? Characterizing the Extrapolation Frontier of Graph Generative Models for Materials Science

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Hauptverfasser: Polat, Can, Serpedin, Erchin, Kurban, Mustafa, Kurban, Hasan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Polat, Can
Serpedin, Erchin
Kurban, Mustafa
Kurban, Hasan
author_facet Polat, Can
Serpedin, Erchin
Kurban, Mustafa
Kurban, Hasan
contents Every generative model for crystalline materials harbors a critical structure size beyond which its outputs become unreliable; we call this the extrapolation frontier. Despite its consequences for nanomaterial design, this frontier has never been systematically measured. We introduce RADII, a radius-resolved benchmark of ~75,000 crystal-derived nanoparticle structures (33-11,298 atoms) that treats radius as a continuous scaling knob, tracing generation quality from in- to out-of-distribution under leakage-free splits. Each model is conditioned on target composition and atom count, isolating geometric extrapolation as the evaluation variable. RADII provides frontier-specific diagnostics: per-radius error profiles pinpoint each architecture's scaling ceiling, surface-interior decomposition separates boundary from bulk failures, and cross-metric sequencing reveals which aspect of structural fidelity breaks first. Benchmarking five state-of-the-art architectures, we find that: (i) well-behaved models degrade by ~13% in global positional error beyond training radii, while divergent models show poor fidelity across scales, with local bond fidelity ranging from negligible degradation to over 2x error growth; (ii) no two architectures share a failure sequence, revealing the frontier as a multi-dimensional surface shaped by model family; and (iii) well-behaved models follow the expected geometric scaling exponent alpha ~ 1/3, whose in-distribution fit predicts out-of-distribution error, making frontiers forecastable. Scaling MatterGen to its published parameter count stabilizes sampling but does not close the frontier, while DiffCSP remains unstable at published scale. These findings establish output scale as a first-class evaluation axis for geometric generative models. Code and data: https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/RADII.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_09309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Far Can You Grow? Characterizing the Extrapolation Frontier of Graph Generative Models for Materials Science
Polat, Can
Serpedin, Erchin
Kurban, Mustafa
Kurban, Hasan
Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Machine Learning
Atomic and Molecular Clusters
Every generative model for crystalline materials harbors a critical structure size beyond which its outputs become unreliable; we call this the extrapolation frontier. Despite its consequences for nanomaterial design, this frontier has never been systematically measured. We introduce RADII, a radius-resolved benchmark of ~75,000 crystal-derived nanoparticle structures (33-11,298 atoms) that treats radius as a continuous scaling knob, tracing generation quality from in- to out-of-distribution under leakage-free splits. Each model is conditioned on target composition and atom count, isolating geometric extrapolation as the evaluation variable. RADII provides frontier-specific diagnostics: per-radius error profiles pinpoint each architecture's scaling ceiling, surface-interior decomposition separates boundary from bulk failures, and cross-metric sequencing reveals which aspect of structural fidelity breaks first. Benchmarking five state-of-the-art architectures, we find that: (i) well-behaved models degrade by ~13% in global positional error beyond training radii, while divergent models show poor fidelity across scales, with local bond fidelity ranging from negligible degradation to over 2x error growth; (ii) no two architectures share a failure sequence, revealing the frontier as a multi-dimensional surface shaped by model family; and (iii) well-behaved models follow the expected geometric scaling exponent alpha ~ 1/3, whose in-distribution fit predicts out-of-distribution error, making frontiers forecastable. Scaling MatterGen to its published parameter count stabilizes sampling but does not close the frontier, while DiffCSP remains unstable at published scale. These findings establish output scale as a first-class evaluation axis for geometric generative models. Code and data: https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/RADII.
title How Far Can You Grow? Characterizing the Extrapolation Frontier of Graph Generative Models for Materials Science
topic Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Machine Learning
Atomic and Molecular Clusters
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09309