The paper reports a large-scale, compute-controlled study of Chemical Language Models (CLMs) involving over 30,000 experiments across different molecular representations, tokenizations, model sizes, datasets, and architectures. It finds clear scaling trends in pretraining loss but shows that these improvements do not translate into proportional gains in goal-directed molecular design, with chemical syntax saturating early while semantic properties develop more slowly. The authors release a new suite of models, NovoMolGen, that achieves state-of-the-art results in drug discovery tasks, highlighting a disconnect between representation learning and downstream design and calling for new pretraining paradigms that target chemical semantics.
By Roshan Balaji, Kamran Chitsaz, Quentin Fournier, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt, Sarath Chandar
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
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:2609.38744v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Predicting molecular properties for compounds that differ structurally from labeled training molecules is important for drug discovery and materials de...
By Jinmo Lee, Dooho Lee, Minho Jeong, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv:2607. 02140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chemical language models (CLMs) are trained with linearized representations such as SMILES, yet it remains unclear which chemically meaningful substructures they encode.
By Anna Karnysheva, Dietrich Klakow, Ji-Ung Lee
arXiv:2604. 24474v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecular similarity plays a central role in ligand-based drug discovery, such as virtual screening, analog searching, and goal-directed molecular generation.
By Shiyun Wa, Yifei Wang, Simone Sciabola, Ye Wang
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: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:2603.03517v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) that rely on in-context learning do not reliably deliver the scientific understanding and perfor...
By Maksim Kuznetsov, Zulfat Miftahutdinov, Rim Shayakhmetov, Mikolaj Mizera, Roman Schutski, Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Nikita Bondarev, Thomas MacDougall, Mathieu Reymond, Mihir Bafna, Kaeli Kaymak-Loveless, Eugene Babin, Maxim Malkov, Mathias Lechner, Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
R-GroundBench is a new diagnostic benchmark for evaluating AI models on R‑group grounding in Markush molecular editing, derived from real pharmaceutical patents. It includes a Multiple‑Choice VQA track with varying difficulty and modality splits, as well as an open‑ended Generation track. Experiments show a large performance gap: models score over 90% on easy VQA but drop to 56–66% on hard VQA, and generation exact match stays below 20% (and under 8% with visual input).
By Xin Wang, Zichuan Ying, Xinna Lin, Junqi Zhang, Hanyi Xiong, Tianyu Gao, Hairong Zhang, Qixiang Hua, Botian Shi, Zhenhailong Wang, Kaicheng Yu
MolEmb is a lightweight framework that adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to serve as general molecular embedding models. By aligning molecular profiles with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a bidirectional contrastive objective, MolEmb produces embeddings conditioned on both a molecular profile and a natural‑language semantic context. The model performs competitively on molecular property prediction and enables cross‑modal molecule‑text retrieval, while the newly introduced MolCAR benchmark demonstrates that context‑aware molecular embedding is largely a data property of the supervision.
By Xinjian Zhao, Xiangru Jian, Yaoyao Xu, Xiaozhuang Song, Wei Pang, Lei Bai, Tianshu Yu
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.
By Arun Raja, Garrett M. Morris, Kian Ming A. Chai