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.
By Roshan Balaji, Kamran Chitsaz, Quentin Fournier, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt, Sarath Chandar
arXiv:2606. 05693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained.
By Joey Chan, Wonbin Kweon, Ashley Shin, Niharika Bhattacharjee, Pengcheng Jiang, Yue Guo, Jiawei Han
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.
By Frank Hu, Shriram Chennakesavalu, Zichen Wang, Patricia Suriana, Bodhi Vani, Kirill Shmilovich, Kangway Chuang, Colin Grambow
arXiv:2609.38744v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Predicting molecular properties for compounds that differ structurally from labeled training molecules is important for drug discovery and materials de...
By Jinmo Lee, Dooho Lee, Minho Jeong, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv:2607. 02140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chemical language models (CLMs) are trained with linearized representations such as SMILES, yet it remains unclear which chemically meaningful substructures they encode.
By Anna Karnysheva, Dietrich Klakow, Ji-Ung Lee
arXiv:2604. 24474v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecular similarity plays a central role in ligand-based drug discovery, such as virtual screening, analog searching, and goal-directed molecular generation.
By Shiyun Wa, Yifei Wang, Simone Sciabola, Ye Wang