arXiv AI

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challenging scenarios, including reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states, proposing a radical pathway for an unpublished reaction, and identifying a descriptor governing selectivity in nickel-catalyzed cross‑coupling reactions.

arXiv AI
Jul 10

Reaction-network reasoning with frontier models for experimentally confirmed catalyst-selectivity hypotheses

arXiv:2607. 08003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Catalysts are essential for sustainable chemical manufacturing, yet discovering novel architectures remains a bottleneck dominated by trial-and-error experimentation and computationally intensive screening.

By Sutanay Choudhury, Anwesha Banerjee, Udishnu Sanyal, Jorin Dawidowicz, Chiezugolum Ijeoma Odilinye, Jesun Firoz, Liney Arnadottir, Simone Raugei, Johannes Lercher, Arnab Dutta
arXiv AI
Sep 18

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

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
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Masked Diffusion Language Agents for Tool-Integrated Chemical Reasoning

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 AI
Aug 18

Multi-Agent Closed-Loop Reasoning for Organic Structure Elucidation from Multimodal Spectra

arXiv:2608. 14720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Following the molecular discovery and synthesis revolutions, scalable automated structure elucidation from routine spectroscopic data remains an outstanding challenge.

By Bingsen Xue, Zhuojun Jiang, Jianhao Zhang, Mingcheng Gu, Yizhe Yuan, Yongtai Zhuo, Yifan Zhang, Li Wang, Ya Su, Yue Yuan, Jiang Liu, Xueqian Kong, Cheng Jin
arXiv AI
Jun 6

AutoDFT: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous DFT Calculations

arXiv:2605. 26179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Density functional theory (DFT) serves as the basis for computational discovery in materials science and chemistry, yet each calculation demands extensive human effort: adjusting algorithms when convergence stalls, revising plans when unexpected physics emerges, and inserting steps as intermediate results reshape the problem.

By Penghui Yang, Zhonghan Zhang, Yue Li, Xinrun Wang, Yanchen Deng, Yuhao Lu, Bijun Tang, Zheng Liu, Bo An
arXiv AI
Sep 15

El Agente Potente: High-Throughput Agentic Atomistic Simulations

El Agente Potente is an agentic system that integrates typed execution graphs and a coding mode to facilitate machine‑learning interatomic potential (MLIP) driven atomistic simulations. Typed execution graphs offer structured, provenance‑aware workflows where large language models handle planning and routing while deterministic Python code performs scientific computation and validation. The coding agent builds customized workflows for tasks needing procedural flexibility, invoking existing Potente functions for supported calculations. The system is demonstrated across materials discovery, energy‑landscape exploration, adsorption, and catalytic reaction workflows, with benchmarks on reproducibility and LLM token cost.

By Tsz Wai Ko, Jiaru Bai, Thomas Swanick, Yeonghun Kang, Changhyeok Choi, Angelina Qihong Jiang, Aiwei Yin, Varinia Bernales, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 8

Accurate, Interdisciplinary and Transparent Structure-property Understanding with Deep Native Structural Reasoning

Structure-property relationships are foundational to biology, chemistry and materials science, where function, reactivity and physical response emerge from spatial, chemical and periodic organization. Mechanistically explaining these relationships requires interpreting structural evidence through scientific principles and physical constraints, from stereochemistry and bonding to symmetry, energetics and periodic order.

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