journal article·2025-07-19Open access

SLM-MATRIX: a multi-agent trajectory reasoning and verification framework for enhancing language models in materials data extraction

Xin Li, Zhixuan Huang, Shu Quan, Cheng Peng, Xiaoming Ma

npj Computational Materials· Volume 11· Issue 1

Abstract

Small Language Models offer an efficient alternative for structured information extraction. We present SLM-MATRIX , a multi-path collaborative reasoning and verification framework based on SLMs, designed to extract material names, numerical values, and physical units from materials science literature. The framework integrates three complementary reasoning paths: a multi-agent collaborative path, a generator–discriminator path, and a dual cross-verification path. SLM-MATRIX achieves an accuracy of 92.85% on the BulkModulus dataset and reaches 77.68% accuracy on the MatSynTriplet dataset, both outperforming conventional methods and single-path models. Moreover, experiments on general reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K and SVAMP validate the framework’s strong generalization capability. Ablation studies evaluate the effects of agent number, Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) depth, and discriminator design on overall performance. Overall, SLM-MATRIX presents an effective approach for high-quality material information extraction in resource-constrained and offers new insights into structured scientific text understanding tasks.
Source: openalex_inverted_index · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Machine Learning in Materials Science · Semantic Web and Ontologies · Catalysis and Hydrodesulfurization Studies

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

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