In some embodiments, techniques for optimizing a design for a physical device to be fabricated by a fabrication system is provided. A computing system receives an initial design. The computing system uses a fabrication model to determine structural parameters based on the initial design, wherein using the fabrication model includes applying one or more morphological transformations to the initial design that are predicted to be introduced by the fabrication system. The computing system obtains a performance metric by simulating performance of the structural parameters. The computing system determines a loss metric based on the performance metric. The computing system backpropagates a gradient of the loss metric to generate an updated design.