Open Access

ARTICLE

Deep Learning-Based Inverse Design: Exploring Latent Space Information for Geometric Structure Optimization

Nguyen Dong Phuong¹, Nanthakumar Srivilliputtur Subbiah¹, Yabin Jin², Xiaoying Zhuang^1,3,*

1 Institute of Photonics, Leibniz University Hannover, Welfengarten 1A, Hannover, 30167, Germany
2 Institute for Interdisciplinary Research of Computational Mechanics and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200437, China
3 Department of Geotechnical Engineering, College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

* Corresponding Author: Xiaoying Zhuang. Email:

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2025, 145(1), 263-303. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2025.067100

Received 25 April 2025; Accepted 06 August 2025; Issue published 30 October 2025

Abstract

Traditional inverse neural network (INN) approaches for inverse design typically require auxiliary feedforward networks, leading to increased computational complexity and architectural dependencies. This study introduces a standalone INN methodology that eliminates the need for feedforward networks while maintaining high reconstruction accuracy. The approach integrates Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) for optimized feature space learning, enabling the standalone INN to effectively capture bidirectional mappings between geometric parameters and mechanical properties. Validation using established numerical datasets demonstrates that the standalone INN architecture achieves reconstruction accuracy equal or better than traditional tandem approaches while completely eliminating the workload and training time required for Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN). These findings contribute to AI methodology development by proving that standalone invertible architectures can achieve comparable performance to complex hybrid systems with significantly improved computational efficiency.

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Keywords

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