arXiv Machine Learning

MolSC: Leveraging Substituent Contributions to Enhance Fine-grained Molecular Understanding in LLMs

MolSC is a new dataset of 181,000 substituent-level examples that captures how attaching specific substituents to molecular scaffolds changes properties such as bioactivity and physicochemical descriptors. The authors also provide MolSC-Bench, a held‑out benchmark of 1,541 examples that are disjoint from MolSC at scaffold, substituent, and molecule levels. Experiments show that training molecular large language models on MolSC markedly improves their ability to predict substituent contributions, outperforming existing models on a range of downstream chemistry tasks.

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 AI
Aug 19

Domain-Adapted Molecular Language Models for Efficient Search of Make-on-Demand Libraries

The study evaluates four pretrained molecular language models on six virtual libraries covering drug discovery, organic materials, and catalysis. It finds that native embeddings vary widely in performance, while molecular fingerprints remain consistently strong. Fine‑tuning the models on library‑specific data markedly improves sample efficiency, with several adapted encoders outperforming others across all tasks.

By Henrik Wille, Luis-Finley Sch\"utz, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Mol-JEPA: A multimodal Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Molecules

Mol-JEPA is a scalable multimodal framework that learns molecular world models by using modality masking instead of suboptimal perturbations. It incorporates diverse data such as molecular structures, cellular phenotypes, binding affinities, ADMET profiles, quantum chemistry simulations, and other drug‑discovery information. Benchmarks show that the representations it learns perform strongly, highlighting the benefit of embedding biochemical context via latent‑space prediction.

By Florian Rottach, Sebastian Schieferdecker, William Rudman, Randall Balestriero, Carsten Eickhoff
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