Organizations: 1Cleer Science · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London · Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University
Abstract
Chemical property prediction plays a critical role in accelerating scientific discovery in chemistry, materials science, and drug development. However, existing benchmarks often suffer from limited task diversity, fragmented datasets, and inconsistent evaluation protocols, making it challenging to systematically assess the reliability and generalization of AI models. In this work, we introduce Chem World, a comprehensive benchmark for chemical property prediction that integrates 17 diverse chemical datasets with over 800,000 molecular samples, covering various properties including density, electrical conductivity, solubility, and other molecular characteristics. Chem World provides a unified platform for evaluating AI models across multiple property prediction tasks. Furthermore, we propose Mixture-PINN, a physics-informed neural network based prediction framework that incorporates chemical prior knowledge into data-driven learning, improving the accuracy, robustness, and reliability of chemical property prediction. Extensive experiments on Chem World demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with existing methods. By combining large-scale standardized evaluation with physics-informed learning, Chem World establishes a foundation for developing trustworthy AI systems for computational chemistry and advancing AI-driven scientific discovery.
Molecular property prediction integrates quantum chemistry, cheminformatics, and deep learning to connect molecular structure with physicochemical and biological behavior. This survey traces four complementary paradigms, including Quantum, Descriptor Machine Learning, Geometric Deep Learning, and Foundation Models, and outlines a unified taxonomy linking molecular representations, model architectures, and interdisciplinary applications. Benchmark analyses integrate evidence from both widely used datasets and datasets reflecting industry perspectives, encompassing quantum, physicochemical, physiological, and biophysical domains. The survey examines current standards in data curation, splitting strategies, and evaluation protocols, highlighting challenges including inconsistent stereochemistry, heterogeneous assay sources, and reproducibility limitations under random or poorly defined splits. These observations motivate the modernization of benchmark design toward more transparent, time- and scaffold-aware methodologies. We further propose three forward-looking directions: (i) physics-aware learning embedding quantum consistency, (ii) uncertainty-calibrated foundation models for trustworthy inference, and (iii) realistic multimodal benchmark ecosystems integrating computational and experimental data. Repository: https://github.com/Zongru-Li/Survey-and-Benchmarks-of-DL-for-Molecular-Property-Prediction-in-the-Foundation-Model-Era.
Data-driven molecular discovery leverages artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and generative modeling to filter and design novel molecules. Discovering novel molecules requires accurate out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions, but ML models struggle to generalize OOD. Currently, no systematic benchmarks exist for molecular OOD prediction tasks. We present BOOM, benchmarks for out-of-distribution molecular property predictions: a chemically-informed benchmark for OOD performance on common molecular property prediction tasks. We evaluate over 150 model-task combinations to benchmark deep learning models on OOD performance. Overall, we find that no existing model achieves strong generalization across all tasks: even the top-performing model exhibited an average OOD error 3x higher than in-distribution. Current chemical foundation models do not show strong OOD extrapolation, while models with high inductive bias can perform well on OOD tasks with simple, specific properties. We perform extensive ablation experiments, highlighting how data generation, pre-training, hyperparameter optimization, model architecture, and molecular representation impact OOD performance. Developing models with strong OOD generalization is a new frontier challenge in chemical ML. This open-source benchmark is available at https://github.com/FLASK-LLNL/BOOM
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.