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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2507.17448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthetic planning is a cornerstone of organic synthesis and drug discovery. Yet existing AI methods often rely on pattern matching rath...
arXiv:2607. 12771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reaction mechanisms consist of the step-by-step sequences of elementary reactions that explain chemical transformations.
BEAKER is a new benchmark for evaluating embodied actionability, knowledge, experimentation, and reasoning in self‑driving chemical laboratories. It contains 1,000 expert‑curated question‑answer pairs across 11 image and video task types, covering affordance grounding, trajectory planning, equipment and state recognition, safety, apparatus setup, operation, step reasoning, and temporal procedure reasoning. The benchmark is manually created and reviewed by chemistry and embodied AI experts, and it tests 28 different multimodal large language models in an offline, single‑turn setting.
arXiv:2510.26824v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Wide access to advanced experimental methods in materials science has given rise to an abundance of procedural knowledge, which is scattered...
arXiv:2602. 03554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress has expanded the use of large language models (LLMs) in drug discovery, including synthesis planning.
ChemBART is a BART‑based language model trained on holistic reaction expressions (Reactant > Reagent > Product) using a mask‑filling objective. It can solve diverse chemical tasks such as precursor/reagent generation, temperature‑yield regression, and property classification, and it is integrated with Monte Carlo tree search to design multi‑step synthesis routes. The model’s predictions were experimentally validated, yielding shorter synthetic pathways with over 20 % higher yield than literature benchmarks.
arXiv:2607. 01061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-assisted synthesis planning breaks target molecules into accessible precursors using large libraries of reaction rules that assign each transformation a deterministic, interpretable label.
arXiv:2608. 02595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are playing an increasingly important role in laboratory science, performing tasks such as experiment planning, execution, and post-hoc analysis.
SynAgent is a framework that uses large language model agents to run autonomous experiments while building an explicit, revisable understanding of the synthesis process. Unlike traditional black‑box optimizers, SynAgent generates analysis skills on the fly and reasons multimodally over data such as X‑ray diffraction patterns and electron micrographs. In an 18‑experiment campaign on LiCoO₂ thin‑film deposition, SynAgent produced highly crystalline films and uncovered a sharp temperature threshold and optimal growth window (650–690 °C) for crystallization.