arXiv:2606. 08973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fundamental investigations into how different molecular encoding methods affect molecular property prediction remain relatively limited.
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.
arXiv:2511. 19264v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) construct molecules through sequential decisions, but their internal policies remain opaque, limiting adoption in drug discovery, where chemists need interpretable rationales for proposed structures.
arXiv:2606. 07698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) applied to drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction rely exclusively on molecular structure encoded as SMILES-derived graphs.
SMILESGNN is a multimodal architecture that fuses a SMILES Transformer encoder with a GATv2 graph encoder through cross‑attention, enabling interpretable clinical toxicity predictions. The model retains an explicit graph branch, allowing GNNExplainer to identify substructures linked to toxicity. On the ClinTox dataset it achieves an AUC‑ROC of 0.987 and F1 of 0.906 with only 0.4 M parameters, while on Tox21 it attains a mean AUC‑ROC of 0.750, comparable to strong single‑modality baselines.
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.
arXiv:2609.37384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular representation learning is central to computer-aided drug discovery. Molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and 3D conformations provide complemen...
arXiv:2607. 02212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aqueous solubility is a key property in early-stage drug discovery, but most predictive models merge physicochemical descriptors and molecular graph information into a single representation, obscuring whether a prediction is driven by global chemistry, molecular structure, or both.
arXiv:2608. 04257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Blood-brain barrier permeability (BBBP) prediction is a critical screening task in central nervous system drug discovery, where candidate molecules must be assessed for whether they can cross, or should be prevented from crossing, the blood-brain barrier.
arXiv:2606. 14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque.
VINCENT is a post‑training framework that provides validated, chemically coherent explanations for drug synergy predictions by extracting atom‑pair evidence from attention and gradient signals, grouping them into motifs, and refining these motifs through repeated local perturbations. On a literature‑annotated subset of 25 drug pairs, VINCENT achieves a mean motif recall of 0.826, outperforming baselines (0.49–0.66). Across 71 test pairs, its validated interaction scores yield a TP/TN separation of 3.36, indicating more accurate recovery of literature‑supported molecular regions and better alignment with predictor behavior.
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.