NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
EngiBench: A Framework for Data-Driven Engineering Design Research
- Florian Felten
- Gabriel Apaza
- Gerhard Bräunlich
- Cashen Diniz
- Xuliang Dong
- Arthur Drake
- Milad Habibi
- Nathaniel Hoffman
Engineering design optimization seeks to automatically determine the shapes, topologies, or parameters of components that maximize performance under given conditions. This process often depends on physics-based simulations, which are difficult to install, computationally expensive, and require domain-specific expertise. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce EngiBench, the first open‐source library and datasets spanning diverse domains for data‐driven engineering design. EngiBench provides a unified API and a curated set of benchmarks---covering aeronautics, heat conduction, photonics, and more---that enable fair, reproducible comparisons of optimization and machine learning algorithms, such as generative or surrogate models. We also release EngiOpt, a companion library offering a collection of such algorithms compatible with the EngiBench interface. Both libraries are modular, letting users plug in novel algorithms or problems, automate end-to-end experiment workflows, and leverage built-in utilities for visualization, dataset generation, feasibility checks, and performance analysis. We demonstrate their versatility through experiments comparing state-of-the-art techniques across multiple engineering design problems, an undertaking that was previously prohibitively time-consuming to perform. Finally, we show that these problems pose significant challenges for standard machine learning methods due to highly sensitive and constrained design manifolds.