arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond Benchmark Accuracy: A Diagnostic Test for LLM Chemical Prediction

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 Machine Learning
Jun 5

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606. 05693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained.

By Joey Chan, Wonbin Kweon, Ashley Shin, Niharika Bhattacharjee, Pengcheng Jiang, Yue Guo, Jiawei Han
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Tool-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Domain Adaptation in Sequence-Based Omics Tasks

The paper introduces OmicsBench, a new reasoning benchmark for multi‑omics sequences that includes 1,160 expert‑validated questions across DNA regulation, RNA processing, and protein function tasks, requiring traceable evidence chains. Evaluation of 17 large language models shows that scientific LLMs, while more accurate in classification, often lack valid evidence, suggesting shortcut learning. To address this, the authors propose tool‑augmented on‑policy distillation (TA‑OPD), a post‑training method that improves both evidence grounding and predictive performance across five Qwen3.5 models of varying sizes.

By Jie Ying, Zhefan Wang, Zihong Chen, Zhengqing Li, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jian Liu, Fang Hu, Tao Luo, Zhonghang Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Stan Z. Li, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

In-Context Molecular Property Prediction with LLMs: A Blinding Study on Memorization and Knowledge Conflicts

arXiv:2603. 25857v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have expanded beyond natural language processing to scientific prediction tasks, including molecular property prediction.

By Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Sviatlana V. Lamaka, Mikhail L. Zheludkevich, Christian J. Cyron, Christian Feiler, Roland C. Aydin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

A Multitask Large Reasoning Model for Molecular Science

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