Challenges and Opportunities in Machine Learning for Light‐Emitting Polymers
Light-emitting polymers (LEPs) combine the luminescent properties of organic emitters with the structural versatility of polymers, supporting applications in solid-state display, chemical sensing, and bioimaging, owning to the efficient tuning of their performance across multiple scales, from monomer units and chain sequence to solid-state packing and solution processing. Recent strategies have expanded emission color space, improved quantum yields, and simplified design rules, evolving from traditional π-conjugated systems to mechanisms driven by aggregation and charge transfer. Yet this multiscale flexibility also creates a vast and complex design space, where the interplay of monomer choice, polymer architecture, and processing methods makes it impossible to exhaustively map their structure-property relationships by empirical means. In this perspective, we review the development of recent design strategies in LEPs, highlighting the key experimental challenges they reveal, and discuss how data-driven approaches, particularly machine learning, can help navigate this complexity and accelerate the discovery and optimization of next-generation LEPs.
Authors
- Tian Tian (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8436-7739)
- Yinyin Bao
Institutions
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- University of Alberta (CA)
- Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (CA)
- ETH Zurich (CH)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Macromolecular Rapid Communications
- Published
- 2026-01-06
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/marc.202500850
- Primary Topic
- Luminescence and Fluorescent Materials
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Helsingin Yliopisto
- University of Alberta
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
- Fondation Claude et Giuliana