arXiv Machine Learning

Predicting Collision Cross Sections with GRACE: Geometric Residual Adduct Conditioning via Early-fusion

The paper introduces GRACE, a 3D collision cross section (CCS) predictor that incorporates geometric residual adduct conditioning via early fusion. GRACE adapts a pretrained molecular geometry encoder with an adduct token and low‑rank attention adapters, achieving the lowest mean percentage differences on random, scaffold, and adduct‑sensitive splits of a curated dataset of over 9,000 experimental CCS records. Diagnostic analyses attribute its performance to residual learning that removes the dominant mass‑CCS trend and to early fusion that enhances adduct‑sensitive prediction.

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Beyond Predictive Accuracy: A Reliability-Aware Audit of Molecular Representations for Human Olfaction

arXiv:2607. 24848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained molecular encoders are commonly evaluated through downstream prediction, but predictive accuracy alone does not establish that a learned representation captures reproducible scientific structure, adds information beyond strong conventional baselines, or transfers out of distribution.

By Kai Lun Huang (California State University, Fullerton), Wei Chieh Sun (University of Washington)
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Procedural Pretraining for Molecular Property Prediction

The paper proposes a three‑stage training pipeline that begins with procedural pretraining on abstract, procedurally generated data, followed by molecular pretraining on SMILES, and finally downstream fine‑tuning for molecular property prediction. Experiments show that procedural pretraining improves downstream performance—e.g., a 4.8% error reduction on Lipophilicity—especially when labeled data are scarce, and that the benefit peaks at an intermediate procedural training budget. Analysis indicates that transferable knowledge resides mainly in attention layers, while feed‑forward layers may over‑specialize.

By Moritz Friedemann, Zachary Shinnick, Philip Torr, Bruno Andreis
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

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.

By Hyuntae Park, Sooyeon Kim, Jiwon Park, SangKeun Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

ElemeNet: Multiscale Molecular Machine Learning with Uncertainty Quantification Across the Periodic Table

arXiv:2606. 30961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advances in deep learning architectures and representations have enabled ML-driven chemical property prediction, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models have remained largely confined to independent codebases and lack support for diverse chemical species.

By Jacob W. Toney, Samir Darouich, Yiran Wang, Aaron G. Garrison, Johannes K\"astner, Heather J. Kulik
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
Sep 25

TopU-LBVS: A Realistic Multi Target Benchmark for Ligand Based Virtual Screening

TopU-LBVS is a new multi‑target benchmark for ligand‑based virtual screening that addresses shortcomings of existing datasets by using hard‑negative decoys and a fixed 1:40 active‑to‑decoy ratio. It covers 93 protein targets across seven classes, provides three evaluation protocols (full, low‑data, and mini), and includes curated ChEMBL‑35 bioactivity data with property‑matched, structurally similar decoys. The benchmark demonstrates that performance drops sharply when moving from random‑decoy to hard‑negative evaluation, and it releases data, splits, code, and baseline implementations for reproducible comparison.

By Surbhi Kumar, Yuhe Zhou, Varun Shiralkar, Niu Huang, Baris Coskunuzer