The development of new alloy materials with desired properties is a time-consuming process that requires exhaustive experimental investigations into elemental compositions and processing conditions. These investigations are traditionally carried out in a trial-and-error manner . The properties of alloys are mainly governed by their composition, phase, and by the manner individual crystalline regions known as "grains" are arranged in the microstructure. Therefore, structural variability in alloys spans multiple scales, from the atomic to the macroscale, giving rise to a myriad of possible alloy systems. Just the elemental composition alone represents a combinatorically complex problem since finding the optimal mixture requires exploring a high dimensional materials space defined by a wide range of chemical compositions and atomic configurations for each of them. Finding new compositions and microstructures for alloys with desired properties is therefore not amenable to traditional random search approaches . This simple fact has led to a situation where modern technologies only utilize a tiny fraction of potentially interesting alloys.