arXiv:2606. 01730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as heuristic advisors for black-box optimization, yet their suggestions and self-reported confidence are not necessarily calibrated to downstream objective values.
By Jiangyu Chen, Banyi
arXiv:2606. 26657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying high-utility candidates from massive discrete spaces under expensive evaluations is a recurring challenge across the sciences, with structure-based drug discovery as a prominent example.
By Mohammad Haddadnia, Yuvan Chali, Abhilash Jayaraj, Constance Kraay, Joana Reis, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff, Haribabu Arthanari
arXiv:2607. 12488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular optimization in drug discovery, materials design, and catalysis requires searching vast chemical spaces under tight evaluation budgets, since high-fidelity oracles and experimental measurements are costly.
By Sarina Kopf, Cristina Nevado, Philippe Schwaller
arXiv:2509. 26405v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce InVirtuoGen, a discrete flow generative model for fragmented SMILES for de novo and fragment-constrained generation, and target-property/lead optimization of small molecules.
By Benno Kaech, Luis Wyss, Karsten Borgwardt, Gianvito Grasso
arXiv:2607. 23404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories increasingly rely on multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization (MFBO) to balance cheap, approximate evaluations against scarce, expensive ones, with a predictive surrogate at its core.
By Jaewook Lee, Ethan Errington, Christian D. Lorenz, Miao Guo
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as heuristic advisors for black-box optimization, yet their suggestions and self-reported confidence are not necessarily calibrated to downstream objective values. This issue becomes more pronounced in multi-objective Bayesian optimization, where different objectives may require different expert knowledge and where an LLM expert can be useful for one objective but misleading for another.
arXiv:2607. 02834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular optimization often starts from a pretrained generative model that captures a broad prior over valid molecular structures.
By Trevor Chen, Ariel Dai, Jason Yang, Riccardo De Santi, Daniel Khalil, Wenda Chu, Nate Gruver, Pranav Murugan, Alexander F. G. Goldberg, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Yisong Yue
arXiv:2608. 15669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery often involves optimising expensive-to-evaluate objectives over vast, structured, and open-ended hypothesis spaces, such as molecules, protein sequences, and computer programs.
By Zhongwei Yu, Yan Song, Xue Yan, Anjie Liu, Xingyu Lu, Yihang Chen, Huichi Zhou, Siyuan Guo, Luoyang Sun, Sihan Chen, Xiangning Yu, Jun Wang
arXiv:2502. 18966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: General chemical reaction conditions that achieve consistently high performance across multiple substrates are important for practical applications such as library synthesis and high-throughput experimentation.
By Stefan P. Schmid, Ella Miray Rajaonson, Cher Tian Ser, Mohammad Haddadnia, Shi Xuan Leong, Al\'an Aspuru-Guzik, Agustinus Kristiadi, Kjell Jorner, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff
arXiv:2607. 04108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as evolutionary engines for scientific discovery: generate candidates, select winners, feed them back as parents, and repeat.
By Pan Li
Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified. Experiments are expensive, so the central problem is \emph{data efficiency}.
arXiv:2604. 11305v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conformal selection (CS) uses calibration data to identify test inputs whose unobserved outcomes are likely to satisfy a pre-specified minimal quality requirement, while controlling the false discovery rate (FDR).
By Meiyi Zhu, Osvaldo Simeone