arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

A Large Scale Investigation of Scaling Limits in Chemical Language Models

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 AI
Sep 7

NEAT-POCKET: Pocket-Conditioned Autoregressive 3D Molecular Generation with a Neighborhood-Guided Set Transformer

NEAT-POCKET is a pocket‑conditioned extension of the autoregressive NEAT model that generates 3D molecules atom by atom within protein binding pockets, maintaining atom permutation invariance and explicitly modeling hydrogen atoms. It outperforms existing baselines on the CrossDocked and SPINDR datasets, achieving competitive structure‑based generation performance while sampling significantly faster. The model also supports pocket‑conditioned fragment completion, a capability directly useful for lead optimization and scaffold elaboration in drug design.

By Roxane Axel Jacob, Daniel Rose, Thierry Langer, Johannes Kirchmair
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints

arXiv:2607. 18144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) leverages the 3D structure of protein targets, often complemented by other spatial constraints, to generate candidate binding molecules.

By Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski, Rim Shayakhmetov, Maxim Malkov, Vladimir Aladinskiy, Alex Aliper, Alex Zhavoronkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Molecular representation shapes the balance between target fidelity and exploration in flow based polymer generation

The paper introduces PolyLatentFlow, a continuous‑time flow‑matching framework for polymer generation, and LlamaUni, a multimodal representation that fuses polymer sequences with 3D structural data. In unconditional generation, the combination yields the highest number of valid, novel candidates while preserving diversity, and in conditional settings it systematically shifts property distributions across a 200 °C target range. Across multi‑property tasks, the representation choice affects validity, training‑set replay, and structural proximity, with PolyLatentFlow + LlamaUni achieving the best balance of high validity, low replay, and high target hit yield.

By Tianren Zhang