Chemical-space completeness through iterative crystal-structure generation and model adaptation
The emergence of deep learning has brought large-scale exploration of crystalline materials closer to practical realization. Yet, universal atomistic models face a practical trade-off between chemical generality and the accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability required for intensive exploration of specific materials systems. Within a bounded chemical system, this trade-off can be relaxed by exploiting its limited chemical complexity. Guided by this intuition, we propose a chemical-system-centric strategy that couples crystal-structure generative models with machine-learned force fields (MLFFs) in an iterative generation-evaluation-refinement loop. Using Li--P--S as a test case, we generate approximately 70,000 candidate structures, including more than 10,000 stable-unique-novel structures. The diversity of near-equilibrium local environments saturates within the first few iterations, accompanied by convergence of MLFF prediction errors, providing an operational measure of chemical-space completeness within bounded systems. The exploration also recovers chemically plausible P--S motifs that are absent from the pretraining databases but supported by earlier experiments. The resulting system-adapted models and structures further enable finite-$P$--$T$ phase-stability calculations, Li-ion transport screening, and electronic-structure prediction. These results suggest that chemical-system-centric exploration provides a practical route toward data-efficient and high-fidelity modeling within bounded chemical spaces.