With the increasing complexity of the application environment of antenna arrays and the increasing requirements for antenna array radiation patterns, efficient optimisation methods of antenna array radiation pattern synthesis have always been the challenges of the research. This paper proposes a method of utilising a multi‐layer perceptron network to optimise the radiation patterns of antenna array. The optimisation requirements of the antenna array radiation pattern are described by defining the objective mask function, which is designed to shape the target radiation pattern by desired features. Simulation experiments have been designed with a variety of antenna array layouts, of which the radiation patterns with different requirements were successfully synthesised and optimised. The results show that the proposed method has high efficiency and satisfactory optimisation effect in dealing with the problem of complex radiation pattern requirements.