arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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 AI
Aug 26

MolEmb: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Be Strong Molecular Embedding Models

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 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
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Fraglingo: Molecular Design via Attachment-Aware Autoregressive Fragment Generation

Fraglingo is an autoregressive fragment-based molecular generator that jointly models fragment identity and attachment in a continuous latent space. It predicts attachment-aware fragment embeddings using a wildcard-anchored readout that captures the growing molecule’s active attachment site, then retrieves the next fragment via latent-space nearest-neighbor search. This approach allows new fragments to be added at inference time without retraining and achieves stronger joint property control on benchmarks while maintaining high validity, uniqueness, and novelty.

By Thao Nguyen, Jeonghwan Kim, Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji
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