ReGDiff: Guided Diffusion in Regulated Latent Space for Exploring Metamaterial Voxel Geometry

Abstract

Metamaterials are artificially engineered structures whose mechanical and physical behaviors are strongly shaped by geometry rather than composition. Voxel representation provides a unified format for metamaterial geometry generation, as it can express diverse classes such as truss, shell, and porous structures within a single cubic discretization. However, voxel-based generation faces a plausibility-novelty trade-off: staying close to known geometries helps preserve geometric regularities, while moving away from them is necessary for novelty but may produce degenerate geometries. To address this challenge, we propose REGDIFF, a generative framework that couples voxel representation with latent space regulation and guided diffusion. REGDIFF introduces a repel-and-sink (RAS) mechanism to smooth the latent distribution of plausible geometries, and short-range repulsion (SRR) guidance to discourage generation overly close to known samples while maintaining geometric plausibility. We further contribute a voxel-based benchmark covering truss- and shell-type metamaterial geometries, together with an evaluation module for geometric plausibility, novelty, and diversity. Experiments show that REGDIFF outperforms voxel-based generative baselines, achieving +8.9% in geometric plausibility, +46.4% in novelty, and +128.6% in diversity on average across two datasets. These results suggest that REGDIFF is a strong geometry candidate generator for downstream evaluation. Our code is provided at https://github.com/wzhan24/ReGDiff.