Machine Learning-Empowered Electromagnetic Wave Absorbing Materials: From Forward Prediction to Generative Inverse Design

Electromagnetic wave absorbing materials are important for electromagnetic protection, radar stealth, wireless communication, and advanced electronic systems. However, traditional design methods mainly rely on repeated experiments and full-wave simulations, which are time-consuming and inefficient when dealing with complex compositions, microstructures, and multilayer structures. Machine learning provides a new route to accelerate the design of high-performance absorbers by learning the relationship among material composition, structure, electromagnetic parameters, and absorption performance. This review summarizes recent progress in machine-learning-empowered electromagnetic wave absorbing materials. First, the basic physical principles of electromagnetic wave absorption are introduced, including reflection loss, impedance matching, attenuation, and physical limits such as the Rozanov and Snoek limits. Then, typical machine learning models are discussed, including classical machine learning, deep learning, generative models, physics-informed models, large language models, and artificial-intelligence (AI) Agents. Their applications are further summarized from forward property prediction, high-throughput screening, inverse design, electromagnetic parameter decoupling, physics-informed modeling, explainability, multi-objective optimization, and data augmentation. Finally, the main challenges and future directions are discussed, including data standardization, physics-guided learning, foundation models, autonomous laboratories, and engineering-scale validation. This review shows that machine learning is changing absorber research from experience-driven trial-and-error to data-driven and knowledge-driven design, and provides a useful reference for developing next-generation electromagnetic wave absorbing materials.