arXiv:2606. 11256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing molecules with target properties is most useful when candidate structures are accompanied by feasible synthetic routes.
arXiv:2604.07669v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthesizable molecular optimization seeks to improve target properties while ensuring that molecular modifications follow feasible synthetic...
The paper explores how large language models (LLMs) can be trained for small-molecule drug design by using synthetic tasks that are cheaper to evaluate. By employing a curriculum that gradually increases task difficulty, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can learn design strategies that outperform larger models on structure-based lead optimization. This approach shows that scaling post‑training with synthetic tasks can effectively adapt LLMs to high‑cost experimental scenarios that are otherwise infeasible to train on directly.
arXiv:2607. 14512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step retrosynthesis planning seeks to decompose a target molecule into commercially available building blocks through a sequence of feasible reactions.
arXiv:2608. 07454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The total synthesis of a complex molecule is among the most demanding intellectual and experimental feats in chemistry: a chemist must plan many steps ahead for how to assemble simple building blocks into an intricate target, devise backup strategies, and anticipate procedural challenges.
arXiv:2607. 19044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for molecular generation has shown remarkable potential in chemical and drug design.
arXiv:2602.00663v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimizing molecules to achieve desired properties is a central bottleneck across the chemical sciences, particularly in the pharmaceutical industr...
MolDesignBench is a new benchmark for evaluating large language model (LLM)-based agents in scenario‑grounded molecular design. It contains 2,000 generation and optimization tasks that blend implicit narrative requirements with explicit property and functional‑group constraints, including infeasible cases, and require the use of 17 specialized chemistry tools. Experiments with leading LLMs show low success rates (best ~43%) and highlight failures in implicit‑constraint reasoning, infeasibility detection, and tool usage, underscoring the benchmark’s role in identifying key bottlenecks for future research.
arXiv:2607. 04688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthesis planning aiming to find pathways of reactions for a target molecule is one of the most important and challenging tasks in drug discovery.
arXiv:2603. 12666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrosynthesis prediction aims to identify reactants that can synthesize a given product molecule.
arXiv:2605. 15354v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the success of foundation models in language and vision, molecular graph generation still lacks a unified framework for heterogeneous design tasks with reliable controllability.
arXiv:2609.00189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Goal-directed optimization is essential for steering molecular generators to propose candidates with desired properties. However, it is often implement...
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.