arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

A General-Purpose Molecular Foundation Model Transfers Across Diverse Olfactory Tasks

The study fine‑tunes the Uni‑Mol2 molecular foundation model on the GS‑LF benchmark for multi‑label odor descriptor prediction. The resulting model matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines on the primary benchmark and successfully transfers to four downstream olfactory tasks—including cross‑dataset prediction, odorless vs. odorous classification, enantiomer evaluation, and odor mixture discriminability—without further deep‑learning training. The enantiomer analysis demonstrates that 3D molecular representations can distinguish mirror‑image molecules, a capability lacking in 2D graph models, though predicting stereochemistry’s perceptual effects remains unresolved.

By Yikun Han, Yi Wang, Neil Mankodi, Stephen Yang, Ambuj Tewari
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Decoding Mixture Perception through Computational Modeling of Component Interactions

The paper introduces a bio‑inspired deep learning framework that models olfactory perception of complex chemical mixtures. It constructs neural response curves for molecule‑receptor interactions, fuses attention‑weighted multi‑receptor and concentration‑dependent multi‑molecule data, and transfers knowledge from molecular associations to improve mixture recognition. The model achieves 92.2% accuracy and offers a generalizable computational pathway from chemical blending to perceptual formation.

By Fei Wang, Xiaoya Xie, Junfei Liu, Huihao Wang, Yixiao Wang, Yintao Wang, Yi Li, Hao Dong, Xing Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

What an odour descriptor corpus can and cannot measure: valence, attenuation, and the ceiling of the public record

The study evaluates the reliability of shared odor descriptor words across four public corpora from Pyrfume, finding substantial disagreement (I² = 80 %) and limited agreement on descriptor application (median tetrachoric = 0.795, κ = 0.413). Only a fraction of the achievable variance in odor perception is captured by current models and descriptor sets, with valence emerging as the primary missing component. Even with extensive model capacity and merged corpora, the gap remains, indicating that valence must be measured directly to improve machine olfaction.

By Stylianos Kampakis, Fabio Rovai