Implicitly Guided Design with PropEn: Match your Data to Follow the Gradient

Across scientific domains, generating new models or optimizing existing ones while meeting specific criteria is crucial. Traditional machine learning frameworks for guided design use a generative model and a surrogate model (discriminator), requiring large datasets. However, real-world scientific applications often have limited data and complex landscapes, making data-hungry models inefficient or impractical. We propose a new framework, PropEn, inspired by matching'', which enables implicit guidance without training a discriminator. By matching each sample with a similar one that has a better property value, we create a larger training dataset that inherently indicates the direction of improvement.