arXiv AI

oMeBench: Towards Robust Benchmarking of LLMs in Organic Mechanism Elucidation and Reasoning

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Training Chemical Plausibility-Aware Large Language Models for Single-Step Retrosynthesis

The paper introduces Top‑K prompting as a training and inference strategy to better capture the diverse, plausible predictions inherent in single‑step retrosynthesis. Using an ultra‑large dataset (CREED‑CCV‑2+USPTO‑XL) of ~45.6 million verified reactions, the authors train the Chemistry Constraint‑Consistent Language Model (C3LM). With fine‑tuning that incorporates ChemCensor‑based and novelty‑oriented rewards, C3LM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the OOD URSA‑expert‑2026 benchmark and demonstrates complementary reaction space exploration compared to conventional models, suggesting benefits for ensemble‑based retrosynthesis systems.

By Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Nikita Bondarev, Maksim Kuznetsov, Mathieu Reymond, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

A General-Purpose Framework for Chemical Reaction Representation with Atomic Correspondence and Flexible Condition Adaptation

The paper introduces Align-React, a chemical reaction representation learning framework that incorporates atomic correspondence between reactants and products, an adapter for embedding reaction conditions, and a Reaction-Center-Aware attention mechanism. These components enable the model to capture precise molecular transformations and focus on critical functional groups, leading to improved performance across a variety of organic reaction tasks. The framework outperforms existing architectures on most benchmark datasets.

By Kaipeng Zeng, Xianbin Liu, Yu Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Yaohui Jin, Yanyan Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 10

Strategy-first synthesis planning for complex natural products

arXiv:2608. 07454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The total synthesis of a complex molecule is among the most demanding intellectual and experimental feats in chemistry: a chemist must plan many steps ahead for how to assemble simple building blocks into an intricate target, devise backup strategies, and anticipate procedural challenges.

By Daniel Armstrong, Xuan-Vu Nguyen, Octavian Susanu, Gabriel Gibberd, Th\'eo A. Neukomm, Tadd\"aus Strunden, Dan Forster, Morgane Delattre, Shawn Teh, Cl\'ement Rols, John Federice, Hayden Leatherwood, M. Lavelle Barnes, Maarten R. Dobbelaere, Peter Wipf, Jon T. Njardarson, Jieping Zhu, Philippe Schwaller
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Autonomous Chemical Mechanistic Discovery through Agentic Reasoning and Validation

The paper introduces ARCHE, an autonomous system that combines a general-purpose reasoning model, a domain-specialized computational chemistry model, and a structured tool registry to automate chemical mechanism discovery. ARCHE interprets scientific questions, generates and prioritizes mechanistic hypotheses, orchestrates computational workflows, and refines conclusions in a closed loop. The authors validate the system on three challenging scenarios, including reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states, proposing a radical pathway for an unpublished reaction, and identifying a descriptor governing selectivity in nickel-catalyzed cross‑coupling reactions.

By Dong Li, Sixuan Mi, Zihao Ye, Huan Xiong, Tao XU, Tong Zhu, Aijia Zhang, Junqi Gao, Kaiyan Zhang, Shijie Wang, Bowen Zhou, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

ReactBench: A Benchmark for Topological Reasoning in MLLMs on Chemical Reaction Diagrams

ReactBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the structural reasoning abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) using chemical reaction diagrams. The dataset contains 1,618 expert‑annotated question‑answer pairs that test reasoning across four hierarchical task dimensions, from simple endpoint counting to complex topological analysis. Evaluation of 24 MLLMs shows a performance gap of more than 30% between anchor‑based tasks and holistic structural reasoning tasks, indicating that current models struggle with reasoning over branching, converging, and cyclic structures.

By Qiang Xu, Shengyuan Bai, Yu Wang, He Cao, Leqing Chen, Yuanyuan Liu, Bin Feng, Zijing Liu, Yu Li