arXiv Machine Learning

Order Matters in Retrosynthesis: Structure-aware Generation via Reaction-Center-Guided Discrete Flow Matching

arXiv:2602. 13136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Template-free retrosynthesis methods treat the task as black-box sequence generation, limiting learning efficiency, while semi-template approaches rely on rigid reaction libraries that constrain generalization.

arXiv AI
Aug 17

Reaction-Transformation-Aware Flow Matching for Generalizable Transition State Generation

arXiv:2608. 14076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transition-state (TS) structures define the energetic barriers and mechanistic pathways of elementary chemical reactions, yet their identification remains computationally demanding because conventional saddle-point searches require expensive quantum-mechanical calculations.

By Kaipeng Zeng, Wenxi Zhai, Shengrui Xu, Jie Zhao, Bowen Li, Shiyue Wang, Junchi Yan, Tong Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Training Chemical Plausibility-Aware Large Language Models for Single-Step Retrosynthesis

The paper introduces Top‑K prompting as a training and inference strategy to better capture the diverse, plausible predictions inherent in single‑step retrosynthesis. Using an ultra‑large dataset (CREED‑CCV‑2+USPTO‑XL) of ~45.6 million verified reactions, the authors train the Chemistry Constraint‑Consistent Language Model (C3LM). With fine‑tuning that incorporates ChemCensor‑based and novelty‑oriented rewards, C3LM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the OOD URSA‑expert‑2026 benchmark and demonstrates complementary reaction space exploration compared to conventional models, suggesting benefits for ensemble‑based retrosynthesis systems.

By Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Nikita Bondarev, Maksim Kuznetsov, Mathieu Reymond, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

A General-Purpose Framework for Chemical Reaction Representation with Atomic Correspondence and Flexible Condition Adaptation

The paper introduces Align-React, a chemical reaction representation learning framework that incorporates atomic correspondence between reactants and products, an adapter for embedding reaction conditions, and a Reaction-Center-Aware attention mechanism. These components enable the model to capture precise molecular transformations and focus on critical functional groups, leading to improved performance across a variety of organic reaction tasks. The framework outperforms existing architectures on most benchmark datasets.

By Kaipeng Zeng, Xianbin Liu, Yu Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Yaohui Jin, Yanyan Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Mechanistic Reaction Prediction via Discrete Flow Matching on Graph-Structured Electron Occupation

MAELLE is a mechanistic reaction prediction framework that models chemical reactions as discrete flow matching over graph-structured electron occupation vectors. It formulates the reactant-to-product mapping as a Continuous-time Markov Chain on electron sites and uses Optimal Transport to generate mechanistically interpretable edit trajectories without elementary step annotations. The method achieves competitive accuracy on the USPTO-480K benchmark, remains robust in out-of-distribution scenarios, and can recover mechanistic pathways that align with known chemistry and predict side products.

By Nguyen Xuan-Vu, Octavian Susanu, Daniel Armstrong, Philippe Schwaller
arXiv AI
Jul 17

RetroAgent: Harnessing LLMs to Search Over Structured Memory for Agentic Retrosynthesis Planning

arXiv:2607. 14512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step retrosynthesis planning seeks to decompose a target molecule into commercially available building blocks through a sequence of feasible reactions.

By Yanqiao Zhu, Jingru Gan, Xiaoqi Sun, Fang Sun, Yidan Shi, Md Mofijul Islam, Chao Shang, Wenhao Gao, Connor W. Coley, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

When Single Answer Is Not Enough: Rethinking Single-Step Retrosynthesis Benchmarks for LLMs

arXiv:2602. 03554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress has expanded the use of large language models (LLMs) in drug discovery, including synthesis planning.

By Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Maksim Kuznetsov, Nikita Bondarev, Mathieu Reymond, Roman Schutski, Thomas MacDougall, Rim Shayakhmetov, Zulfat Miftakhutdinov, Mikolaj Mizera, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov