arXiv Machine Learning

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

arXiv:2606. 18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

MolEmb: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Be Strong Molecular Embedding Models

MolEmb is a lightweight framework that adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to serve as general molecular embedding models. By aligning molecular profiles with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a bidirectional contrastive objective, MolEmb produces embeddings conditioned on both a molecular profile and a natural‑language semantic context. The model performs competitively on molecular property prediction and enables cross‑modal molecule‑text retrieval, while the newly introduced MolCAR benchmark demonstrates that context‑aware molecular embedding is largely a data property of the supervision.

By Xinjian Zhao, Xiangru Jian, Yaoyao Xu, Xiaozhuang Song, Wei Pang, Lei Bai, Tianshu Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

MolSC: Leveraging Substituent Contributions to Enhance Fine-grained Molecular Understanding in LLMs

MolSC is a new dataset of 181,000 substituent-level examples that captures how attaching specific substituents to molecular scaffolds changes properties such as bioactivity and physicochemical descriptors. The authors also provide MolSC-Bench, a held‑out benchmark of 1,541 examples that are disjoint from MolSC at scaffold, substituent, and molecule levels. Experiments show that training molecular large language models on MolSC markedly improves their ability to predict substituent contributions, outperforming existing models on a range of downstream chemistry tasks.

By Hyuntae Park, Sooyeon Kim, Jiwon Park, SangKeun Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Procedural Pretraining for Molecular Property Prediction

The paper proposes a three‑stage training pipeline that begins with procedural pretraining on abstract, procedurally generated data, followed by molecular pretraining on SMILES, and finally downstream fine‑tuning for molecular property prediction. Experiments show that procedural pretraining improves downstream performance—e.g., a 4.8% error reduction on Lipophilicity—especially when labeled data are scarce, and that the benefit peaks at an intermediate procedural training budget. Analysis indicates that transferable knowledge resides mainly in attention layers, while feed‑forward layers may over‑specialize.

By Moritz Friedemann, Zachary Shinnick, Philip Torr, Bruno Andreis
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

ChemMLLM: Chemical Multimodal Large Language Model

ChemMLLM is a unified chemical multimodal large language model designed for molecule understanding and generation across text, SMILES strings, and images. The authors curated five multimodal tasks and benchmarked ChemMLLM against leading general MLLMs, chemical LLMs, and specialized models, finding it outperforms general-purpose MLLMs and matches specialized models on all tasks. The study demonstrates that a single foundation model can handle diverse cross‑modal chemical tasks, including image generation, enabling more intuitive visual human‑AI interaction.

By Qian Tan, Di Zhang, Ben Gao, Peng Xia, Wanhao Liu, Shufei Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Yuqiang Li, Tianfan Fu