arXiv:2606. 03660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as chemistry assistants, yet most chemistry benchmarks still score only final answers.
oMeBench is a large-scale, expert-curated benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on organic mechanism reasoning. It contains over 10,000 annotated mechanistic steps, including reaction type labels, intermediate structures, and difficulty ratings, and introduces the oMeS scoring framework to assess logical consistency and chemical structural similarity. Evaluation shows that while current LLMs display promising chemical intuition, they often fail to produce correct and consistent multi-step reasoning, though prompting and fine-tuning can bring smaller models up to the level of closed‑source frontier models.
Chemical reasoning language models are expected to produce faithful chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations when answering chemistry tasks, but across four model families and twelve tasks, hallucinations are widespread and largely independent of answer correctness. Attribution analyses reveal that these models use a shared scratchpad function: Chem‑R and ether‑0 rely on fragmented SMILES drafts, while ChemDFM‑R emphasizes scaffold, positional, and naming cues. Perturbing Chem‑R’s SMILES sketches degrades generation, indicating that structural drafts can be causally load‑bearing even when verbal structural claims are largely inert.
arXiv:2608. 06961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Early-stage molecular design is an iterative process, not just a task of generating molecules.
arXiv:2610.17183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current chemistry benchmarks primarily evaluate outcome prediction or reaction pathway generation, but rarely test whether a model can explain why an o...
The paper introduces ChemDiffAgent, a masked diffusion language agent designed for tool‑integrated chemical reasoning. Unlike traditional autoregressive agents, it treats reasoning as iterative denoising over interleaved reasoning and tool‑use trajectories, allowing joint decision making under full‑trajectory context. A two‑stage post‑training framework further refines tool use and reasoning, and the authors benchmark the model on six chemistry tasks, reporting a ~20% performance gain over autoregressive baselines and competitive results against larger models.
arXiv:2607. 12771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reaction mechanisms consist of the step-by-step sequences of elementary reactions that explain chemical transformations.
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: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.
arXiv:2602. 17902v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can plan scientific workflows and generate code, but these capabilities do not specify how scientific state is validated, transferred and recorded across heterogeneous computational and experimental operations.
arXiv:2508. 10967v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to infer the reactant molecules based on a given product molecule, which is a fundamental task in chemical synthesis.
The paper introduces ARCHE, an autonomous system that combines a general-purpose reasoning model, a domain-specialized computational chemistry model, and a structured tool registry to automate chemical mechanism discovery. ARCHE interprets scientific questions, generates and prioritizes mechanistic hypotheses, orchestrates computational workflows, and refines conclusions in a closed loop. The authors validate the system on three challenging scenarios, including reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states, proposing a radical pathway for an unpublished reaction, and identifying a descriptor governing selectivity in nickel-catalyzed cross‑coupling reactions.