arXiv Machine Learning

Do LLMs Truly Generalize in the Molecular Domain? A Perturbation-Based Analysis

arXiv:2607. 01800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in molecular discovery, yet a gap remains between their probabilistic nature over discrete sequential tokens and the rigid topological constraints of chemical space.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

WEECFP-SuRGE: A Position-Aware Substructure Encoding Method for Molecular Property Prediction

WEECFP-SuRGE introduces a position‑aware substructure encoding method that combines tokenized hierarchical Morgan fingerprints with graph‑distance‑dependent rotations applied at the input and within transformer self‑attention. The approach captures local chemistry, long‑range interactions, and molecular topology without requiring external pretraining or 3‑D conformer generation. Benchmarks on MoleculeNet and the Therapeutic Data Commons ADMET datasets show competitive performance, and a reconstruction procedure correctly identifies constitutional isomers for 92.6% of a 4,200‑molecule library.

By Robert Epps
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Structural Hierarchy and Geometry in Molecular Representation Learning

The paper investigates how explicitly supervising molecular embeddings with a molecule’s Bemis‑Murcko scaffold influences representation learning. Experiments compare Euclidean and Lorentz contrastive objectives under two augmentation strengths, showing that scaffold‑supervised models consistently group molecules by identical and related scaffolds. These embeddings also enhance property prediction on several tasks, though the magnitude of improvement varies with the target property and the geometry used.

By David Sulu, Lorenzo Di Fruscia, Jana M. Weber
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