arXiv AI By Dong Li, Sixuan Mi, Zihao Ye, Huan Xiong, Tao XU, Tong Zhu, Aijia Zhang, Junqi Gao, Kaiyan Zhang, Shijie Wang, Bowen Zhou, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi

Autonomous Chemical Mechanistic Discovery through Agentic Reasoning and Validation

Read the original on arXiv AI →

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challenging scenarios, including reconstructing stereocontrolling transition states, proposing a radical pathway for an unpublished reaction, and identifying a descriptor governing selectivity in nickel-catalyzed cross‑coupling reactions.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Jul 10

Reaction-network reasoning with frontier models for experimentally confirmed catalyst-selectivity hypotheses

arXiv:2607. 08003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Catalysts are essential for sustainable chemical manufacturing, yet discovering novel architectures remains a bottleneck dominated by trial-and-error experimentation and computationally intensive screening.

By Sutanay Choudhury, Anwesha Banerjee, Udishnu Sanyal, Jorin Dawidowicz, Chiezugolum Ijeoma Odilinye, Jesun Firoz, Liney Arnadottir, Simone Raugei, Johannes Lercher, Arnab Dutta
arXiv AI
Sep 18

oMeBench: Towards Robust Benchmarking of LLMs in Organic Mechanism Elucidation and Reasoning

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.

By Ruiling Xu, Yifan Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Masked Diffusion Language Agents for Tool-Integrated Chemical Reasoning

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.

By Mengdi Liu, Chenghao Jia, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Multi-Agent Closed-Loop Reasoning for Organic Structure Elucidation from Multimodal Spectra

arXiv:2608. 14720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Following the molecular discovery and synthesis revolutions, scalable automated structure elucidation from routine spectroscopic data remains an outstanding challenge.

By Bingsen Xue, Zhuojun Jiang, Jianhao Zhang, Mingcheng Gu, Yizhe Yuan, Yongtai Zhuo, Yifan Zhang, Li Wang, Ya Su, Yue Yuan, Jiang Liu, Xueqian Kong, Cheng Jin