MM-Spectrum: Multimodal Multi-spectral Molecular Structural Elucidation with a Stable MoE Framework
Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Southeast University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Fudan University
Abstract
Inferring molecular structures from multimodal spectroscopic measurements requires integrating complementary yet highly heterogeneous signals. However, the common paradigm of directly concatenating multispectral sequences can exhibit anomalous performance degradation, primarily due to pronounced heterogeneity and the resulting multimodal imbalance across modalities. As a remedy, we propose MM-Spectrum, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts framework tailored for multimodal multispectral spectra-to-structure elucidation. To better match the information characteristics under multispectral imbalance, MM-Spectrum introduces an explicit modality-aware routing mechanism that exposes spectral identity to the router in addition to token content representations. Moreover, it incorporates shared and interaction experts, together with heterogeneous expert capacities, to extract multispectral modality-unique and cross-modal synergistic information while suppressing noise-induced interference. Across full-modality, bimodal, and missing-modality settings on molecular structural elucidation, MM-Spectrum achieves consistent and substantial improvements, supported by ablation studies and interpretability analyses.
Figures & tables
| Modality Setting | Top-K Accuracy (%) | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-2% | Top-3% | Top-4% | Top-5% | Top-6% | Top-7% | Top-8% | Top-9% | Top-10% | |
| Single-modality | ||||||||||
| NMR (1H + 13C) | 69.83 0.24 | 77.88 0.16 | 80.86 0.11 | 82.38 0.38 | 83.35 0.29 | 84.03 0.34 | 84.52 0.26 | 84.89 0.32 | 85.08 0.46 | 85.18 0.12 |
| MS (all MS spectra) | 17.35 0.30 | 23.82 0.22 | 27.80 0.41 | 30.08 0.29 | 31.73 0.15 | 32.90 0.18 | 33.81 0.40 | 34.52 0.46 | 35.04 0.17 | 35.31 0.35 |
| IR (binned spectrum) | 23.22 0.47 | 30.90 0.42 | 35.01 0.17 | 37.65 0.14 | 39.44 0.27 | 40.72 0.21 | 41.73 0.22 | 42.44 0.29 | 42.88 0.21 | 43.07 0.19 |
| Dual-modality | ||||||||||
| Setting | Missing ratio | Baseline | MM-Spectrum | Improvement | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NMR | MS | IR | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | |
| S0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 44.29 0.50 | 59.39 0.17 | 62.04 0.44 | 76.04 0.18 | 87.83 0.28 | 90.26 0.16 | 31.75 0.49 | 28.44 0.34 | 28.22 0.41 |
| S1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 33.42 0.45 | 44.79 0.47 | 46.80 0.49 | 65.01 0.47 | 75.11 0.37 | 76.43 0.19 | 31.59 0.30 | 30.33 0.37 | 29.63 0.17 |
| S2 | 0.3 | 0.3 | 0.3 | 17.29 0.12 | 23.24 0.10 | 24.31 0.37 | 45.91 0.26 | 54.21 0.17 | 55.40 0.19 | 28.62 0.33 | 30.97 0.16 | 31.09 0.44 |
| S3 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 0.6 | 4.28 0.14 | 5.77 0.24 | 6.05 0.48 | 21.38 0.41 | 26.20 0.42 | 27.04 0.46 | 17.10 0.32 | 20.42 0.47 | 21.00 0.34 |
| S4 | 0.6 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 14.88 0.46 | 20.02 0.17 | 20.94 0.17 | 28.96 0.47 | 33.47 0.21 | 34.02 0.29 | 14.09 0.40 | 13.44 0.47 | 13.09 0.28 |
| Bucket | HAC range | #Samples | Baseline | MM-Spectrum | Improvement | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | |||
| HAC_S (Small) | 14821 | 63.46 0.22 | 78.48 0.37 | 81.44 0.28 | 82.28 0.42 | 91.30 0.35 | 92.45 0.32 | 18.82 0.30 | 12.82 0.38 | 11.01 0.12 | |
| HAC_M (Medium) | 16–25 | 35985 | 46.89 0.29 | 63.16 0.16 | 66.04 0.39 | 77.52 0.32 | 88.03 0.37 | 89.19 0.44 | 30.63 0.34 | 24.87 0.25 | 23.15 0.32 |
| HAC_L (Large) | 28635 | 29.93 0.35 | 43.56 0.35 | 46.48 0.45 | 69.44 0.29 | 81.50 0.23 | 82.86 0.38 | 39.51 0.31 | 37.94 0.33 | 36.38 0.16 | |
| Protocol | Setting | Top-K Accuracy (%) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | ||
| Scratch | NMR | 18.15 0.31 | 31.74 0.25 | 33.69 0.42 |
| MS | 5.38 0.18 | 11.07 0.22 | 13.92 0.15 | |
| IR | 13.21 0.29 | 25.48 0.34 | 26.61 0.27 | |
| Baseline (Full) | 14.10 0.33 | 27.13 0.41 | 31.53 0.38 | |
| Ours (Full) | 26.67 0.24 | 38.91 0.19 | 47.37 0.26 | |
| Router-aware | Tag-routing | Top-K Accuracy (%) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | ||
| 76.04 0.20 | 87.83 0.39 | 90.26 0.13 | ||
| 72.57 0.26 | 86.39 0.48 | 88.93 0.39 | ||
| 71.23 0.25 | 86.06 0.16 | 88.83 0.15 | ||
| 70.11 0.30 | 84.43 0.31 | 86.06 0.34 | ||
| Shared | Interaction | Dynamic | Top-K Accuracy (%) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | |||
| 76.04 0.15 | 87.83 0.32 | 90.26 0.21 | |||
| 74.41 0.28 | 86.54 0.41 | 88.83 0.19 | |||
| 74.39 0.35 | 86.34 0.22 | 88.63 0.45 | |||
| 75.01 0.12 | 86.90 0.33 | 89.20 0.27 | |||
| 72.70 0.40 | 84.65 0.18 | 87.05 0.36 | |||
| Hetero. | Regularizer | Top-K Accuracy (%) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% | ||
| 76.04 0.14 | 87.83 0.29 | 90.26 0.18 | ||
| 74.81 0.35 | 86.61 0.22 | 89.21 0.41 | ||
| 74.07 0.19 | 85.93 0.38 | 88.65 0.26 | ||
| 74.24 0.44 | 86.08 0.15 | 88.65 0.32 | ||
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Modality | Token type | Compression | Max length |
|---|---|---|---|
| NMR ( 1 H/ 13 C) | symbolic / constraint-rich | identity / conservative parsing | |
| IR | dense / autocorrelated | local binning / aggregation | |
| MS | sparse peaks + noise tail | top- peak filtering |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| #experts | 8 |
| Top- | 2 |
| Capacity factor | 1.25 |
| Aux losses | |
| Schedules | (cosine), (exp or cosine) |
| Expert families | shared / modality-specific / interaction |
| Category | Parameter | Value |
| Backbone | Model Architecture | Transformer Encoder-Decoder |
| Layers ( ) | 6 (Encoder) / 6 (Decoder) | |
| Hidden Dimension ( ) | 512 | |
| Attention Heads ( ) | 8 | |
| Feed-Forward Dimension | 2048 (in non-MoE layers) | |
| MM-Spectrum MoE | Total Experts ( ) | 8 (Partitioned: 2 Shared, 2 NMR, 2 IR/MS, 2 Interact) |
| Method | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dense Concatenation ( Alberts et al., 2024 ) | 44.29 0.35 | 59.39 0.31 | 62.04 0.47 |
| Cross-Attention Fusion | 42.15 0.41 | 56.45 0.38 | 61.91 0.52 |
| Contrastive Alignment ( Liang et al., 2024 ) | 39.01 0.28 | 52.74 0.44 | 57.06 0.39 |
| OGM-GE ( Wu et al., 2022 ) | 44.87 0.30 | 60.93 0.27 | 63.32 0.41 |
| PCGrad ( Yu et al., 2020 ) | 44.73 0.34 | 61.24 0.49 | 64.92 0.36 |
| Gradient Blending ( Wang et al., 2020 ) | 46.78 0.25 | 63.45 0.33 | 67.82 0.45 |
| Modality Configuration | Method | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NMR-only ( 1 H + 13 C) | Dense Baseline | 79.41 0.16 | 89.45 0.22 | 94.71 0.11 |
| MS-only | Dense Baseline | 25.13 0.42 | 28.42 0.35 | 31.28 0.51 |
| IR-only | Dense Baseline | 19.35 0.38 | 23.60 0.29 | 27.04 0.34 |
| Full-Modality Concatenation | Dense Baseline | 65.71 0.50 | 85.07 0.34 | 89.02 0.46 |
| Full-Modality (Ours) | MM-Spectrum | 87.35 0.19 | 95.87 0.14 | 98.72 0.12 |
| Omitted Modality Channel | Method | Top-1% | Top-5% | Top-10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mass Spectrometry (MS) Removed | Dense Baseline | 25.71 0.49 | 28.52 0.36 | 30.84 0.41 |
| MM-Spectrum | 73.94 0.22 | 86.12 0.15 | 88.47 0.18 | |
| Infrared (IR) Removed | Dense Baseline | 31.52 0.38 | 35.78 0.42 | 37.79 0.35 |
| MM-Spectrum | 74.81 0.17 | 86.79 0.20 | 89.05 0.24 | |
| Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Removed | Dense Baseline | 18.65 0.52 | 20.46 0.47 | 23.17 0.55 |
| MM-Spectrum | 39.24 0.31 | 59.36 0.28 | 63.41 0.39 |
| Top-1 | Top-3 | Top-5 | Top-10 | Latency | Throughput | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 73.15 | 85.02 | 87.10 | 89.05 | 19.8 ms | 50.2 s/sample |
| 4 | 74.82 | 86.95 | 88.45 | 90.12 | 20.1 ms | 49.5 s/sample |
| 8 | 76.04 | 87.83 | 90.26 | 91.80 | 21.3 ms | 46.8 s/sample |
| 16 | 75.88 | 87.60 | 90.15 | 91.75 | 24.5 ms | 40.5 s/sample |
| Top- | Top-1 | Top-3 | Top-5 | Top-10 | Latency | Throughput | Activated Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 73.50 | 85.20 | 87.35 | 89.20 | 13.5 ms | 74.0 s/sample | 1.0 |
| 2 | 76.04 | 87.83 | 90.26 | 91.80 | 21.3 ms | 46.8 s/sample | 2.0 |
| 4 | 76.12 | 87.85 | 90.30 | 91.85 | 38.6 ms | 25.8 s/sample | 4.0 |
| Model | Top-1 | Top-10 | #Params | #Active Params | Throughput | Peak Mem. | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dense (Concat) | 44.29 | 62.04 | 110M | 110M | 4,850 tok/s | 16.5 GB | 18.2 ms |
| MM-Spectrum (MoE, Top- =2) | 76.04 | 90.26 | 450M | 135M | 4,210 tok/s | 22.4 GB | 21.3 ms |