Machine learning-assisted high-entropy alloy discovery: a perspective

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted extensive attention due to their exceptional mechanical, physical, and chemical properties, making them promising candidates for extreme environments. Understanding the complex structure-property relationships in these multi-principal element systems is crucial for discovering and designing high-performance HEAs. However, their vast compositional space and high-dimensional chemical complexity pose major challenges to traditional trial-and-error design. Machine learning (ML) offers a transformative strategy to overcome these barriers by enabling data-driven exploration. This perspective first reviews the critical challenges currently limiting HEA development, then summarizes recent ML breakthroughs in phase formation prediction, multi-objective optimization, and accelerated atomistic simulations. Finally, we discuss ongoing challenges and propose future opportunities for integrating ML with experimental and computational methods to create more interpretable, data-efficient, and autonomous ML-driven HEA design frameworks.