arXiv Machine Learning By Bryan Cheng, Jasper Zhang

When Does Context Help? A Systematic Study of Target-Conditional Molecular Property Prediction

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The paper systematically investigates when conditioning molecular property predictions on target context is beneficial. Across 10 protein families, 4 fusion architectures, and varying data sizes, the FiLM-based NestDrug model outperforms other conditioning methods, especially in data-scarce scenarios, but can also hurt performance due to distribution mismatch. The study also highlights flaws in standard benchmarks, such as high performance from simple nearest-neighbor methods and data leakage, and demonstrates that a temporal split yields stable generalization to future chemical space.

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