Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels.
arXiv:2607. 02834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular optimization often starts from a pretrained generative model that captures a broad prior over valid molecular structures.
By Trevor Chen, Ariel Dai, Jason Yang, Riccardo De Santi, Daniel Khalil, Wenda Chu, Nate Gruver, Pranav Murugan, Alexander F. G. Goldberg, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Yisong Yue
arXiv:2607. 19044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for molecular generation has shown remarkable potential in chemical and drug design.
By Mingxuan Ouyang, Hao Lan, Wanyu Lin
arXiv:2609.00189v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Goal-directed optimization is essential for steering molecular generators to propose candidates with desired properties. However, it is often implement...
By Shiyun Wa, Yifei Wang, Anna G. Green, Simone Sciabola, Ye Wang
arXiv:2506. 07459v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protein generative models have shown remarkable promise in protein design, yet their success rates remain constrained by reliance on curated sequence-structure datasets and by misalignment between supervised objectives and real design goals.
By Ziwen Wang, Jiajun Fan, Ruihan Guo, Thao Nguyen, Heng Ji, Ge Liu
The paper explores how large language models (LLMs) can be trained for small-molecule drug design by using synthetic tasks that are cheaper to evaluate. By employing a curriculum that gradually increases task difficulty, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can learn design strategies that outperform larger models on structure-based lead optimization. This approach shows that scaling post‑training with synthetic tasks can effectively adapt LLMs to high‑cost experimental scenarios that are otherwise infeasible to train on directly.
By Frank Hu, Shriram Chennakesavalu, Zichen Wang, Patricia Suriana, Bodhi Vani, Kirill Shmilovich, Kangway Chuang, Colin Grambow
arXiv:2608. 15669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery often involves optimising expensive-to-evaluate objectives over vast, structured, and open-ended hypothesis spaces, such as molecules, protein sequences, and computer programs.
By Zhongwei Yu, Yan Song, Xue Yan, Anjie Liu, Xingyu Lu, Yihang Chen, Huichi Zhou, Siyuan Guo, Luoyang Sun, Sihan Chen, Xiangning Yu, Jun Wang
arXiv:2607. 26391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Oracle-limited molecular optimization gives reward only after a complete molecule is generated, while each rollout requires many local next-token decisions.
By Xinyu Wang, Jinbo Bi, Minghu Song
arXiv:2609.36683v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Molecular optimization is inherently iterative: a candidate is proposed, evaluated against several objectives, and revised while preserving a relations...
By Shicheng Fang, Yuxin Wang, Zhuo Yang, Xiaohu Xu, Jiahao Lu, Chuanyuan Tan, Tong Zhu, Yining Zheng, Xipeng Qiu
Oracle-limited molecular optimization gives reward only after a complete molecule is generated, while each rollout requires many local next-token decisions. This delayed-feedback interface makes molecular policy optimization myopic: an optimizer can learn that a molecule was good without knowing which intermediate actions made it good.
arXiv:2606. 24990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for de novo molecular design, enabling Chemical Language Models (CLMs) to navigate and explore the chemical space while optimizing specific desired properties.
By Borja Medina, Jon Paul Janet
arXiv:2503. 00539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs).
By Debmalya Mandal, Paulius Sasnauskas, Goran Radanovic