arXiv AI
Sep 17

Procedural Pretraining for Molecular Property Prediction

The paper proposes a three‑stage training pipeline that begins with procedural pretraining on abstract, procedurally generated data, followed by molecular pretraining on SMILES, and finally downstream fine‑tuning for molecular property prediction. Experiments show that procedural pretraining improves downstream performance—e.g., a 4.8% error reduction on Lipophilicity—especially when labeled data are scarce, and that the benefit peaks at an intermediate procedural training budget. Analysis indicates that transferable knowledge resides mainly in attention layers, while feed‑forward layers may over‑specialize.

By Moritz Friedemann, Zachary Shinnick, Philip Torr, Bruno Andreis
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Fraglingo: Molecular Design via Attachment-Aware Autoregressive Fragment Generation

Fraglingo is an autoregressive fragment-based molecular generator that jointly models fragment identity and attachment in a continuous latent space. It predicts attachment-aware fragment embeddings using a wildcard-anchored readout that captures the growing molecule’s active attachment site, then retrieves the next fragment via latent-space nearest-neighbor search. This approach allows new fragments to be added at inference time without retraining and achieves stronger joint property control on benchmarks while maintaining high validity, uniqueness, and novelty.

By Thao Nguyen, Jeonghwan Kim, Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji