ChemBART: Pre-training a Reaction Language Model for Comprehensive Synthesis Planning

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential across diverse fields. However, in computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP), current LLM methodologies are often restricted to single-molecule representations, limiting their application to isolated, single-task scenarios such as precursor prediction. Addressing this gap, we present ChemBART, a BART-based language model that adopts a reaction-centric pre-training strategy. By leveraging a mask-filling pre-training task on holistic reaction expressions (Reactant > Reagent > Product), ChemBART effectively solves a variety of chemical problems, including precursor/reagent generation, temperature-yield regression, and molecular property classification. Building on these capabilities, we demonstrate the integration of ChemBART with Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for multi-step synthesis route design, where the model serves to optimize the policy and value functions within a reinforcement learning framework. Beyond single-molecule pre-trained LLMs that are constrained to specific applications, ChemBART unifies diverse chemical tasks to facilitate synthesis planning with comprehensive implementation information. Most significantly, the proposed multi-step synthesis routes and reaction conditions were validated in the wet lab, confirming the discovery of shorter synthetic pathways with a >20% yield improvement over established literature benchmarks. Our work highlights the potential of reaction-focused pre-training and showcases the broad utility of ChemBART in closing the loop between in silico prediction and wet-lab synthesis.