arXiv AI By Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Sviatlana V. Lamaka, Mikhail L. Zheludkevich, Christian J. Cyron, Roland C. Aydin, Christian Feiler

Molecular D\'ej\`a Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Molecular Properties in Frontier Language Models

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The paper evaluates 22 state‑of‑the‑art large language models on 12 molecular regression datasets in a zero‑shot setting, comparing their predictions to a molecule‑blind reference derived from the datasets’ labels. It finds that many models retrieve published values rather than truly predicting properties, with significant retrieval concentrated on five datasets and additional flagged instances elsewhere. Increasing the reasoning setting doubles the number of flagged model–dataset pairs, and an in‑context blinding experiment reduces but does not eliminate retrieval, also altering model rankings and increasing errors.

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