ChemVTS-Bench is a domain-authentic benchmark that evaluates Visual‑Textual‑Symbolic reasoning in multimodal large language models for chemistry. It presents diverse chemical problems—organic molecules, inorganic materials, and 3D crystal structures—in three input modes: visual-only, visual‑text hybrid, and SMILES-based symbolic. The benchmark includes an automated agent workflow for inference, answer verification, and failure diagnosis, and shows that visual-only inputs and structural chemistry remain challenging for current models.
By Zhiyuan Huang, Baichuan Yang, Zikun He, Yanhong Wu, Fang Hongyu, Zhenhe Liu, Lin Dongsheng, Bing Su
arXiv:2606. 03660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as chemistry assistants, yet most chemistry benchmarks still score only final answers.
By Hongyu Guo, Hao Li, He Cao, Gongbo Zhang, Li Yuan
oMeBench is a large-scale, expert-curated benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on organic mechanism reasoning. It contains over 10,000 annotated mechanistic steps, including reaction type labels, intermediate structures, and difficulty ratings, and introduces the oMeS scoring framework to assess logical consistency and chemical structural similarity. Evaluation shows that while current LLMs display promising chemical intuition, they often fail to produce correct and consistent multi-step reasoning, though prompting and fine-tuning can bring smaller models up to the level of closed‑source frontier models.
By Ruiling Xu, Yifan Zhang
The paper introduces ChemDiffAgent, a masked diffusion language agent designed for tool‑integrated chemical reasoning. Unlike traditional autoregressive agents, it treats reasoning as iterative denoising over interleaved reasoning and tool‑use trajectories, allowing joint decision making under full‑trajectory context. A two‑stage post‑training framework further refines tool use and reasoning, and the authors benchmark the model on six chemistry tasks, reporting a ~20% performance gain over autoregressive baselines and competitive results against larger models.
By Mengdi Liu, Chenghao Jia, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan
arXiv:2610.20012v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Chemistry evaluation has moved past multiple-choice probes toward open-ended expert problems, yet the benchmarks that define the current frontier still...
By Hanyao Guo, Mo Cui, Zihan Tan, Leixin Sun, Yichun Wang, Yinan Shen, Guojun Zhu, Jia Jiang, Erhao Chen, Zui Chen, Wenzhe Gao, Zhihao Yu, Qijun Wang, Yetian Zhu, Jiande Chen, Chuhang Pei, Yao Jiang, Yichen Fan, Pinhan Wang, Xiaorui Pan, Qianyi Zhu, Yang Liu, Mang Ye, Guancheng Wan
arXiv:2508. 10967v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to infer the reactant molecules based on a given product molecule, which is a fundamental task in chemical synthesis.
By Xinyi Li, Sai Wang, Yutian Lin, Yu Wu
arXiv:2607. 12771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reaction mechanisms consist of the step-by-step sequences of elementary reactions that explain chemical transformations.
By Xingyu Dang, Haocheng Tang, Junmei Wang, Yanjun Li
arXiv:2610.20459v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Chemical chain-of-thought can contain hallucinated structural and property claims. We thereby introduce MolLean, a process-verifiable language that gro...
By Jiatong Li, Yatao Bian
The paper introduces a multitask large reasoning model for molecular science that incorporates chemical knowledge via a multispecialist architecture, chain-of-thought supervision, and molecule-informed reinforcement learning. It coordinates prediction and inference specialists across ten molecular tasks—including description, generation, nomenclature translation, property prediction, and reaction prediction—using task-conditioned routing. The model surpasses more than 20 general-purpose and molecular large language models, improving aggregate performance by 50.3% and outperforming leading multitask baselines on most tasks, while maintaining interpretable chemical inference and demonstrating a workflow for CNS candidate generation and retrosynthetic planning.
By Pengfei Liu, Shuang Ge, Xiaobo Wang, Xin Liu, Jun Tao, Yan Li, Chao Liu, Ling Chen, Zhixiang Ren
Chemical reasoning language models are expected to produce faithful chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations when answering chemistry tasks, but across four model families and twelve tasks, hallucinations are widespread and largely independent of answer correctness. Attribution analyses reveal that these models use a shared scratchpad function: Chem‑R and ether‑0 rely on fragmented SMILES drafts, while ChemDFM‑R emphasizes scaffold, positional, and naming cues. Perturbing Chem‑R’s SMILES sketches degrades generation, indicating that structural drafts can be causally load‑bearing even when verbal structural claims are largely inert.
By Jiatong Li, Yuxuan Ren, Weida Wang, Xiaoyong Wei, Yatao Bian
arXiv:2610.19906v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLMs have achieved strong performance on chemical prediction benchmarks. However, existing evaluation methods typically provide target entity identity...
By Yanyi Su, Yu Zeng, Hongshuai Wang, Chenyan Wang, Zhifeng Gao, Xiaohui Yang
arXiv:2607. 19935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large metal-organic framework (MOF) databases support simulation, screening, and machine learning through crystallographic information files (CIFs).
By Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Diandian Guo, Kun Peng, Fangfang Yuan, Cong Cao, Chaozhuo Li, Zhiyuan Ma, Yanbing Liu, Guobin Zhao