Rongzai agent: A Large Language Model-Based Autonomous Assistant for Rietveld Refinement of Neutron Diffraction Data

Abstract: Neutron diffraction (ND) is an indispensable technique for determining atomic positions (especially light elements) and thus serves as a critical probe for revealing microscopic structures in materials science. However, traditional Rietveld refinement of ND data relies heavily on manual operation of specialized software, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly dependent on user expertise, severely hindering automated analysis. The automation of Rietveld refinement has long been a long-standing and challenging problem in crystallography. To address this challenge, this paper presents the Dr.Sai-Rongzai agent, an autonomous refinement assistant based on a LLM, a specialist knowledge base, and the GSAS-II refinement engine, achieving for the first time an intelligent refinement that integrates knowledge-driven decision-making. The agent accomplishes a fully automated workflow from natural language task parsing to autonomous decision-making, execution of refinement strategies, and report generation. Evaluation on five representative samples shows that the Rongzai agent achieves lower Rwp values than human specialists on three samples (2.88% vs. 4.42%, 5.06% vs. 5.40%, 7.60% vs. 9.00%), while on the other two samples its results are very close to those of the specialists. The agent is currently deployed at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) and is open for external user registration, providing an intelligent and user-friendly analytical tool for materials research. This work fully leverages the cutting-edge advantages of LLM, offers a new path to solve the long-standing problem of automated refinement, takes a key step toward intelligent and fully automated crystallographic analysis, and holds great potential to accelerate AI for Science discoveries in neutron-based materials characterization.