Local chemical perception and property reasoning are both essential for understanding how molecular structure determines properties. Current LLM-based chemical reasoning methods either receive SMILES/molecular images together with descriptions of local motifs, or reason directly from molecular images.
arXiv:2607. 01982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using molecular large language models (LLMs) as a unified framework for understanding molecular structures and functions is emerging as a new trend in tasks such as molecular design and drug discovery.
ChemVTS-Bench is a domain-authentic benchmark that evaluates Visual‑Textual‑Symbolic reasoning in multimodal large language models for chemistry. It presents diverse chemical problems—organic molecules, inorganic materials, and 3D crystal structures—in three input modes: visual-only, visual‑text hybrid, and SMILES-based symbolic. The benchmark includes an automated agent workflow for inference, answer verification, and failure diagnosis, and shows that visual-only inputs and structural chemistry remain challenging for current models.
arXiv:2607. 21941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chemists and materials scientists increasingly use machine learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), to predict properties of molecules and the outcomes of their reactions.
arXiv:2607. 03007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in molecular large language models have led to strong performance on molecular understanding and generation tasks, yet these gains often come without reliable structural grounding.
Large language models offer a promising foundation for chemical reasoning, bringing together chemical knowledge and multistep problem solving. Chemical intuition can provide an initial sense of plausi...
arXiv:2606. 03057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for molecular tasks, but it remains unclear which molecular representation to use.
Latent JEPA is a new framework that trains continuous latent thoughts to anticipate informative aspects of future solutions in chemical reasoning, without verbalizing every intermediate step. It combines autoregressive learning with joint-embedding prediction of one or more future views, using textual and molecular prediction objectives that link latent thoughts to subsequent reasoning and molecular outcomes. Experiments on ChemCoTBench demonstrate improvements in molecular optimization, editing, and reaction metrics, and representation analyses show that future prediction makes latent thoughts more informative about molecular outcomes and better aligned with chemical structure.
ReactBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the structural reasoning abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) using chemical reaction diagrams. The dataset contains 1,618 expert‑annotated question‑answer pairs that test reasoning across four hierarchical task dimensions, from simple endpoint counting to complex topological analysis. Evaluation of 24 MLLMs shows a performance gap of more than 30% between anchor‑based tasks and holistic structural reasoning tasks, indicating that current models struggle with reasoning over branching, converging, and cyclic structures.
The paper investigates how explicitly supervising molecular embeddings with a molecule’s Bemis‑Murcko scaffold influences representation learning. Experiments compare Euclidean and Lorentz contrastive objectives under two augmentation strengths, showing that scaffold‑supervised models consistently group molecules by identical and related scaffolds. These embeddings also enhance property prediction on several tasks, though the magnitude of improvement varies with the target property and the geometry used.
ChemMLLM is a unified chemical multimodal large language model designed for molecule understanding and generation across text, SMILES strings, and images. The authors curated five multimodal tasks and benchmarked ChemMLLM against leading general MLLMs, chemical LLMs, and specialized models, finding it outperforms general-purpose MLLMs and matches specialized models on all tasks. The study demonstrates that a single foundation model can handle diverse cross‑modal chemical tasks, including image generation, enabling more intuitive visual human‑AI interaction.
arXiv:2608. 10480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied across chemical tasks, such as molecular property prediction, which underpins drug discovery.
Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied across chemical tasks, such as molecular property prediction, which underpins drug discovery. Molecular LLMs represent a molecule through several modalities, notably a 1D SMILES sequence or a 2D molecular graph.