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In the rapidly evolving field of applied artificial intelligence (AI) for materials science, benchmarking serves as a cornerstone for evaluating model performance and guiding research trajectories. However, this paper advances a conceptual critique that unveils the inherent illusions embedded within conventional performance comparisons, which often obscure the nuanced realities of materials discovery and prediction. By synthesizing recent literature, we highlight how benchmarking practices can perpetuate misconceptions about model efficacy, generalizability, and alignment with real-world materials challenges. The critique centers on the interaction dynamics among data representations, evaluation metrics, and contextual factors, revealing feedback structures that amplify epistemic distortions. We propose a novel conceptual framework that reinterprets benchmarking as a multi-layered system of steering logics, in which trade-offs among precision, robustness, and interpretability shape the interpretive landscape of AI-driven insights into materials. This framework emphasizes systems-level insights into how illusory superiority emerges from mismatched expectations and overlooked interdependencies. Through analytical implications, we explore how recalibrating these dynamics could foster more transparent and ethically grounded performance assessments. Ultimately, the paper advocates for an integrative approach that prioritizes conceptual interpretations over superficial metrics, offering epistemic reasoning to navigate the complexities of materials AI without succumbing to benchmarking illusions. This conceptual reevaluation has the potential to refine the field's theoretical underpinnings, promoting advancements that are both innovative and reliable.

Materials artificial intelligence (MAI) has revolutionized the discovery, design, and optimization of new materials by leveraging machine learning algorithms to analyze complex datasets and predict properties with high accuracy. However, the rapid proliferation of MAI tools has raised critical questions about benchmarking practices, which are essential for evaluating model performance, ensuring reproducibility, and addressing ethical concerns. This narrative review examines current benchmarking frameworks in MAI, highlighting what is effectively measured—such as predictive accuracy and computational efficiency—and what is often overlooked —such as data bias, interpretability, fairness, and ethical implications. Drawing on recent advances in frameworks such as JARVIS-Leaderboard and Matbench, the review discusses challenges in data quality, reproducibility, and the integration of explainable AI (XAI) methods. It also explores active learning strategies for optimizing materials discovery under limited data conditions and proposes directions for more inclusive and transparent benchmarking. By synthesizing insights from diverse studies, this review aims to guide future MAI research toward robust, equitable, and ethically sound practices that accelerate innovation while mitigating risks.

The accelerating integration of artificial intelligence into materials discovery offers transformative potential for identifying novel compounds and optimizing properties at unprecedented speeds. Yet, this promise is tempered by persistent challenges in maintaining scientific rigor across computational workflows. This review employs a structured literature synthesis grounded exclusively in 35 peer-reviewed publications from 2017 to 2025, identified through targeted searches across Web of Science, Scopus, and arXiv using strings focused on scientific rigor, reproducibility in materials machine learning, reporting standards in materials informatics, methodological quality in AI-driven science, validation standards for materials AI, benchmarking in materials property prediction, replication in computational materials science, and quality assessment frameworks for AI in materials discovery, with inclusion criteria limited to studies addressing AI-assisted discovery practices and exclusion of purely experimental or non-computational works, following a PRISMA-style screening that yielded the final corpus after removing duplicates and off-topic items. Scientific rigor in this domain is understood as the systematic application of thorough, accurate, and transparent methods that ensure independent verification of AI-generated predictions while upholding honesty in reporting both positive and negative outcomes. Current practices in materials AI demonstrate growing sophistication in model development and data utilization but reveal inconsistent transparency in code and data sharing, limited replication efforts, and reliance on internal validation that falls short of broader scientific benchmarks, even as select studies begin to engage with established checklists and principles. Critical gaps emerge in the absence of tailored materials-AI rigor frameworks, the rarity of external experimental validation, and insufficient community mechanisms for enforcing completeness in reporting, which collectively risk resource misallocation and diminished confidence in AI-driven claims. Targeted recommendations for authors, reviewers, journals, and funders emphasize mandatory code and data deposition, comprehensive hyperparameter disclosure, and cultural shifts toward valuing replication and negative results to bridge these deficiencies and elevate the field’s overall integrity.

In the rapidly evolving field of computational and data-driven materials engineering, machine learning models are increasingly deployed for property prediction, inverse design, and autonomous discovery. However, the integrity of these models hinges on the quality of training datasets, which often embed subtle biases arising from construction methodologies. This manuscript explores the conceptual underpinnings of dataset construction bias in materials AI evaluation, framing it as an epistemic challenge that distorts benchmarking outcomes and impedes genuine materials discovery. We introduce the Dataset Integrity Cascade (DIC) framework, a layered conceptual model that maps data curation processes to inference distortions, incorporating feedback mechanisms to reveal how biases propagate through representation learning, model training, and validation pipelines. By synthesizing recent advances in materials informatics, graph neural networks, and uncertainty quantification, the framework highlights systemic trade-offs between dataset scale and representational fidelity. Implications extend to high-throughput computation, closed-loop experimentation, and foundation models for science, suggesting pathways for more robust computational steering in materials design. This work underscores the need for integrative approaches that align dataset architectures with the inherent complexities of materials systems, fostering epistemically sound innovation without empirical validation.