AutoREC: A reinforcement learning platform for equivalent circuit model generation

arXiv:2604.27266v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces AutoREC, an open-source Python platform for developing, training and evaluating reinforcement learning (RL) agents that automatically generate equivalent circuit models (ECMs) from electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) data. Although ECMs are widely used to interpret EIS measurements, their identification typically relies on manual trial-and-error, requiring domain expertise and limiting scalability, particularly in autonomous experimental pipelines such as self-driving laboratories. In AutoREC, ECM generation is formulated as a Markov decision process in which an RL agent sequentially modifies a circuit topology based on the current state, available actions and feedback from the resulting model. The platform supports an end-to-end workflow encompassing EIS preprocessing with selectable impedance representations, agent setup and training, ECM generation for new measurements and visualization-based evaluation and analysis of agent decision-making. AutoREC implements a configurable Double Deep Q-Network agent with prioritized experience replay and a dedicated deadloop mitigation strategy for navigating the complex circuit-generation action space efficiently. To demonstrate the platform, we trained a representative agent on 1350 synthetic spectra from five reference circuit families, evaluated it on 150 held-out synthetic spectra and applied it to 32 previously unseen experimental spectra from battery, corrosion, oxygen evolution reaction and CO2 reduction systems. These case studies illustrate the end-to-end capabilities of AutoREC while revealing challenges associated with experimental complexity and limited training-data coverage. The demonstrated agent serves as a reference implementation; AutoREC provides an extensible foundation through which users can develop and evaluate agents tailored to their specific electrochemical systems and research objectives.