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Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

MEGA-CL: A Molecular Foundation Model for Generalizable ADMET Prediction through Graph External Attention and Contrastive Learning

Predicting the absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) properties of small molecules remains a major challenge in drug discovery. Here, we present MEGA-CL, a foundation graph neural network framework for universal molecular ADMET prediction. MEGA-CL integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with a multi-head external attention mechanism and an enhanced message-passing architecture, enabling simultaneous modeling of local chemical substructures and global inter-graph relationships while mitigating over-smoothing effects commonly observed in deep graph networks. Across 13 benchmark datasets and 21 downstream ADMET tasks, MEGA-CL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models. In particular, the framework demonstrates robust performance on challenging regression tasks, including clearance (CL) and steady-state volume of distribution (VDss), while maintaining strong generalization ability in independent external validation. Clinically relevant predictive accuracy was achieved, with more than 75% of predictions falling within a 3-fold error range. In an external evaluation on 18 novel compounds derived from recently approved FDA drugs, over 50% of human liver microsome clearance (HLMC) predictions were within a 2-fold error range. To further assess its practical applicability, MEGA-CL was prospectively evaluated on three preclinical drug candidates using in vitro hepatic microsomal metabolism assays and CYP450 inhibition assays guided by model predictions. The predicted HLMC values for all candidates were within 2.5-fold of the experimentally measured values, and 73.3% of CYP450 inhibition endpoints (11/15) were correctly classified. These results demonstrate the potential of MEGA-CL as a generalizable framework for accelerating in silico ADMET evaluation and early-stage drug candidate optimization.
Tinghui Jin, Kedu Jin, Ying Li +8
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

MS-GPT: Rethinking MS/MS De Novo Structure Elucidation as Spectrum-Induced Posterior Querying of a Molecule-Language Model

Molecular structure elucidation from tandem mass spectra (MS/MS) is a central inverse problem in analytical chemistry. Most existing approaches to MS/MS identification remain tied to reference libraries or predefined candidate sets, whereas de novo methods aim to generate structures directly from spectra. A common de novo route predicts a molecular fingerprint from the spectrum and then decodes structures from it, enabling decoder pretraining on large molecule-only corpora. However, this paradigm creates a training-inference mismatch: the decoder is trained on oracle fingerprints computed from molecules, but at inference it is queried with a noisy spectrum-induced fingerprint posterior that is typically collapsed to a single thresholded fingerprint. We introduce MS-GPT, which recasts fingerprint-mediated de novo elucidation as spectrum-induced posterior querying of a conditional molecule-language model. MS-GPT conditions a molecule-language model on fingerprints and formulas, then converts the spectrum-induced posterior into a band of fingerprint queries near the oracle-fingerprint manifold through active-bit density calibration. Candidates sampled across this band are pooled and ranked by generation-frequency consensus. A lightweight LoRA adapter further mitigates domain-specific posterior bias while preserving the pretrained molecular prior. On NPLIB1 and MassSpecGym, MS-GPT sets a new state of the art, reaching Top-1/Top-10 exact-match accuracy of 29.8%/41.1% and 23.9%/28.7%, respectively. Candidate-pool scaling shows that efficient autoregressive molecular generation continues to improve recall with a little additional inference cost. The source code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/VIKI623/MS-GPT.
Xin Zhao, Yumin Liu, Zhuo Li +5
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

Neonatal Hypoxic-ischaemic Encephalopathy Classification from the EEG and HRV Signals Using a Conformer based Masked Autoencoder

In this paper, we propose the MAEConformer, a novel self-supervised learning framework that combines the Conformer architecture with the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) paradigm for large-scale representation learning from unlabelled electroencephalography (EEG) and heart rate variability (HRV) signals. By integrating convolutional operations with Transformer-based self-attention, MAEConformer effectively captures both local temporal patterns and long-range contextual dependencies in physiological time series. To enhance reconstruction fidelity and representation quality, a multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (MR-STFT) loss is incorporated alongside the reconstruction objective, enabling the model to jointly learn temporal and spectral characteristics across multiple scales. Modality-specific EEG and HRV MAEConformer models were pretrained on 6,030h and 4,868h of unlabelled recordings, respectively, and subsequently transferred to expert-annotated downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned representations provide strong transferability and data efficiency. In EEG-based hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) severity classification, the pretrained MAE-EEG model achieved test AUCs of 97.19% and 96.56% for binary and four-class classification tasks, respectively, outperforming a range of state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines. On the HRV-based HIE severity classification task, MAE-HRV achieved a test AUC of 82.42%, surpassing both self-supervised Transformer-based and supervised convolutional baselines. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of MAEConformer for learning robust and transferable representations across multiple physiological modalities.
Shuwen Yu, William P Marnane, Geraldine B. Boylan +1
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

Chamaileon: Cross-Context Binder Design with Contextualized Modeling and Mixed Sampling

The rapid evolution of generative models has unlocked new potentials in protein binder design, a pivotal task in structural biology, by facilitating end-to-end generation via joint sequence-structure modeling or hallucination. However, existing approaches are predominantly implemented under a single-target, single-state assumption, limiting their ability to model multi-target or multi-state interactions required for advanced function-oriented protein design. Here, we introduce Chamaileon, which unifies multi-target and multi-state binder design by formulating the problem as cross-context binding landscape modeling. The framework is underpinned by a training paradigm termed In-Context Complex Co-Design (I3CD) for context-aware sequence-structure co-modeling. During inference, we employ Mixture-of-Paths Sampling (MoPS), a scalable strategy that optimizes a single sequence across contexts while alleviating the scarcity of high-quality multi-conformational paired data. Extensive evaluation on our newly constructed benchmark, CROSS, demonstrates that Chamaileon effectively generates sequences adaptable to diverse conformational landscapes and multi-target requirements. The code is available on https://github.com/caohengyuan/Chamaileon.
Hengyuan Cao, Shizhuo Cheng, Mingxuan Liu +5
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

A Multi-stage Constrained Optimization Framework for Data-driven Problems

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) transform high-dimensional, often noisy data into a compact latent representation, making downstream optimization more tractable. Three challenges persist in VAE-based constrained optimization: (i) sampling effectively within the latent space, (ii) identifying the active decision variables that actually influence the objective and constraints, and (iii) enforcing constraints without destabilizing training. We propose a Multi-stage Constrained Optimization Framework (MCOF). First, an entropy-constrained VAE (EC-VAE) coupled with a feature selector embeds objective and constraint information into a designated subset of latent variables, so that optimization proceeds over a low-dimensional subspace while the remaining coordinates supply solution diversity. Second, a Uniform Transformation (UT) module applies a per-dimension probability integral transform, replacing the irregular aggregate posterior with a uniform distribution over a bounded box and mitigating posterior collapse and Gaussian mixture bias. Third, a constraint-priority filter method (CPFM) solves the resulting surrogate problem by alternating violation-reduction and objective-reduction steps under a filter acceptance test, returning solutions that are feasible for the learned surrogate to a specified tolerance without requiring multiplier estimation. Finally, unselected latent coordinates are resampled to generate diverse decodings of a single optimized solution. We validate MCOF on a synthetic problem, where we ablate each stage and recover the analytic optimum, and on a ZINC250k drug design task, where the generated molecules satisfy the imposed constraints and are entirely novel relative to the training set.
Ye Shi
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

PerturbPFN: Probing the Limits of Synthetic Priors in Drug Perturbation Modelling

Predicting cellular responses to unseen chemical perturbations is challenging due to unknown targets and mechanisms, high-dimensional expression responses, and limited experimental coverage of the large small-molecule design space. We propose PerturbPFN, a PFN-style amortized model for unknown-target perturbation prediction under a hierarchical synthetic structural prior. Instead of directly regressing high-dimensional expression responses, PerturbPFN infers a latent system graph, sparse atomic intervention targets, and intervention strengths, then propagates their effects through an SCM decoder. The model is trained entirely on prior-predictive synthetic episodes generated from biologically motivated graph and expression simulators, enabling structured in-context learning without test-time gradient updates. We evaluate PerturbPFN on both real single-cell perturbation data and synthetic benchmarks, covering effect prediction, target identification, and regulatory structure discovery. Our results show that PerturbPFN offers a complementary trade-off to specialized baselines, achieving competitive perturbation prediction with low inference cost while exposing interpretable intermediate estimates of targets, strengths, and system structure.
Yuche Gao, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, Siyuan Guo
Jul 24, 2026quant-ph

Learning to Prepare Molecular Ground States with Transformer Models

Quantum state preparation is a key component of many quantum algorithms. Performing this step efficiently is essential for realizing practical quantum advantage in quantum chemistry applications. Iterative algorithms like ADAPT-VQE can produce shallow ground-state preparation circuits, but become computationally prohibitive for the larger molecules relevant to materials science and pharmaceutical development. Here, we introduce ADAPT-GQE, a generative AI framework that learns to synthesize ground-state preparation circuits for electronic structure calculations. We first use ADAPT-VQE to generate high-quality reference circuits, which are then used as targets for training models for circuit generation. Once trained, the model can efficiently propose and score circuits, enabling reinforcement learning (RL) to drive circuit generation accuracy beyond the accuracy of the ADAPT-VQE training data. This pipeline achieves order-of-magnitude reductions in circuit generation time relative to ADAPT-VQE while maintaining comparable or improved state-preparation accuracy. We demonstrate ADAPT-GQE on imipramine, a well-established tricyclic antidepressant that serves as a representative, challenging target for computational modelling in drug stability protocols. We execute generated circuits on Quantinuum Helios-1, representing a milestone for AI-generated quantum chemistry circuits on state-of-the-art quantum hardware. These results establish a pathway toward automated quantum circuit synthesis for utility-scale quantum computational chemistry.
Alex Koziell-Pipe, Jasmine Brewer, Jem Guhit +14
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

Evolution-Aware MSA Reasoning for Subsampling via Factor Graphs

Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) provide protein language models with explicit evolutionary context, but their large depth makes subsampling unavoidable under limited token budgets. Existing strategies, including random selection, identity-based filtering, and diversity-driven sampling, are effective heuristics, yet provide limited control over the evolutionary signals retained in the subset. In this work, we recast MSA subsampling as an explicit optimization problem, where key evolutionary measures, including query identity and diversity, are treated as controllable objectives. Building on this view, we introduce AP-REASONER, an Affinity-Propagation-based factor-graph approach. With evolution-aware unary factors, exemplar-consistency factors, and two control knobs, AP-REASONER performs factor-graph reasoning through message passing to infer a fixed-budget MSA subset. Experiments on long-range contact prediction and conformational ensemble prediction show that AP-REASONER outperforms baseline subsamplers on structure-sensitive downstream tasks and enables controllable recovery of alternative protein conformations. These results highlight the value of modeling MSA subsampling as a controllable optimization problem, where factor-graph reasoning offers an effective alternative to heuristic selection.
Zhangzhi Xiong, Minzhang Li, Haotian Yu +6
Jul 24, 2026math.NA

Closed-Loop Generative Selection: Convergence, Memory, and Noisy Oracles

Closed-loop generative selection has become a workhorse of computational drug discovery: a learned generative model proposes candidate molecules, a fitness oracle scores them, the best are kept, and the model is retrained on this elite set before the next round. Despite its wide use, the method has lacked a rigorous convergence theory, largely because retraining the model each round breaks the Markov property on which classical evolutionary-algorithm analysis relies. We develop a self-contained theory of convergence and expected running time for this class of algorithms. By recovering a Markov structure on an enlarged state space, we show that elitism makes the search absorbing, and we prove almost-sure convergence together with a runtime bound that decomposes the search into the time spent escaping each fitness level. We then analyse the role of the model's memory---how much of the past it is trained on. When learning improves steadily with more data, deeper memory never hurts; when it does not, an exit-time analysis pinpoints the optimal memory depth and shows that excess memory can actually slow convergence. The theory extends to multi-objective search and to noisy oracles: we quantify how many repeated evaluations certify progress under light-tailed noise, and how robust estimators restore guarantees under heavy tails. Recast in terms of oracle evaluations - the true bottleneck in drug design - the analysis yields a concrete, evaluation-minimal strategy. Areproducible study confirms the predictions, including the surprising cost of excess memory. We close with three open problems.
Konstantin Fackeldey, Christof Schütte
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

TriGlue: a Biology-Inspired Generative Model for Generating Molecular Glue-Induced Ternary Complex

Molecular glue degraders have emerged as a promising strategy for targeted protein degradation by inducing ternary complex formation between an E3 ubiquitin ligase and a target protein. Despite their therapeutic potential, computational design of molecular glues remains largely unexplored. Unlike conventional structure-based drug design, molecular glue design is governed by the unknown protein-protein interface and requires the simultaneous modeling of ligand generation, protein-protein docking, and ternary complex assembly. In this work, we formulate molecular glue design as a ternary complex generation problem and propose a biology-inspired generative framework, TriGlue. Motivated by the mechanism of molecular glue action, we decompose ternary complex generation into two coupled stages: interface estimation and interface-conditioned complex generation. First, we develop an SE(3)-equivariant interface estimation module that predicts a geometrically constrained protein-protein interface from unbound monomer structures. Second, we introduce an interface-conditioned ternary flow matching network that jointly generates the molecular glue and predicts the rigid-body transformation required to assemble the ternary complex. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TriGlue generates chemically valid molecules and produces plausible ternary complexes, which highlight the potential of biology-inspired generative modeling for accelerating molecular glue discovery. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuliangyan0807/molecular-glue-design.
Yuliang Yan, Shuo Yan, Haochun Tang +2
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

LC-SEPLM: long-range contact-supervised adaptation for sequence-only protein representation learning

Protein language models learn transferable sequence representations. However, because they primarily model contextual dependencies along amino-acid sequences, their training objectives do not explicitly constrain the model to learn three-dimensional residue contacts formed after folding . Here, we introduce LC-SEPLM (Long-range Contact-supervised ESM Protein Language Model), which adapts ESM2 with LoRA and long-range residue-pair contact supervision while retaining sequence-only downstream inference. Pair-specific queries use cross-attention over the complete sequence to extract global sequence context associated with long-range spatial contacts. To expose the model to diverse structural information, we trained LC-SEPLM on 500,000 AlphaFold Swiss-Prot proteins. In downstream evaluation, LC-SEPLM improved all eight protein-level tasks relative to ESM2. The largest gain occurred in remote-homology recognition, where macro-F1 increased from 0.6122 to 0.6769 (+0.0647, or 6.47 percentage points). On the official ESM-S EC benchmark, LC-SEPLM also outperformed ESM-S with a maximum absolute gain of 0.1771. These results support residue-pair contact supervision as a bounded route for introducing structural information into protein sequence representations while preserving sequence-only inference.
Chen Wang, Boming Kang, Qinghua Cui
Jul 24, 2026cs.LG

LatentFlow: Visual Analytics for Latent Space Analysis in Molecular Graph Neural Networks

Chemists and materials scientists increasingly use machine learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), to predict properties of molecules and the outcomes of their reactions. Beyond predictive performance, understanding how these models organize chemical information internally in their latent spaces, i.e., the embeddings of the molecules, is critical. Analyzing latent spaces helps diagnose model behavior and assess whether the learned embeddings are organized in ways that reflect meaningful chemical relationships. Unfortunately, existing methods provide limited support for analyzing latent spaces across layers and across different model states (e.g., training epochs, model configurations, and input data), making it difficult to understand how these latent spaces evolve throughout a model or relate to chemical concepts. We present LatentFlow, a visual analytics system developed in collaboration with a domain expert for analyzing latent spaces in molecular GNNs. LatentFlow groups embeddings into clusters and supports exploration of latent spaces by tracking how these clusters change across layers and model states using a modified Sankey diagram. To support interpretation, LatentFlow links these clusters to representative molecules and their shared substructures, and it allows scientists to introduce their own domain knowledge and compare it with the patterns found in the latent spaces. We evaluate LatentFlow through two case studies. The results show that LatentFlow helps scientists understand how latent spaces evolve, identify meaningful molecular patterns, and better interpret model behavior.
Shiyi Liu, Jiaqing Chen, Nicholas Hadler +6
Jul 23, 2026physics.chem-ph

Graph-Theoretic Neural Network Fragmentation with Covariant Direct Molecular Force Learning: Enabling Coupled-Cluster Accuracy AIMD for Fluxional Systems

Accurate ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations of complex, fluxional chemical systems are severely limited by the high computational scaling of correlated electronic structure methods. To overcome this bottleneck, we present a robust, graph-theoretic molecular fragmentation framework integrated with machine learning to directly model post-Hartree-Fock nuclear forces at coupled cluster accuracy. Bypassing the limitations of automatic differentiation on learned energy surfaces that may struggle with link-atom Jacobians, our approach directly predicts nuclear force vectors. By projecting these vectors onto fragment-fixed principal axes of inertia, we establish co-variant descriptors that naturally preserve rotational, translational, and permutational invariance. The methodology achieves exceptional high parameter efficiency through a vector-valued training protocol that reduces trainable parameters by over an order of magnitude, while an unsupervised mini-batch k-means space tessellation algorithm constructs highly representative training databases using only 10% to 20% of reference configurations. We rigorously validated this framework on the highly fluxional solvated Zundel cation H_{13}O_6^+ ). Our fully machine-learning-predicted AIMD trajectories successfully reproduced complex dynamical signatures and key structural characteristics, including radial distribution functions and the velocity autocorrelation power spectrum. Ultimately, this scalable, systematically improvable framework bridges the gap between high-level correlated wavefunction theories and long-timescale reactive sampling, laying the foundation for advanced, LLM-inspired transfer learning in modern chemical dynamics simulations.
Xiao Zhu, Srinivasan S. Iyengar
Jul 23, 2026cs.LG

Graph Learning on Ensembles of Cyclic Peptides: An Investigation of Molecular Ensemble Modeling

Molecular property prediction from structure often uses a single representative conformation, even though many molecules exist as conformational ensembles in solution. We introduce EnsembleEGNN, a molecular ensemble foundation model that encodes an ensemble by first encoding each conformer with shared Equivariant Graph Neural Network (EGNN) layers, then pooling the resulting conformer representations with a Set Attention Block. We pretrain the model on CREMP, a cyclic peptide ensemble dataset, using a multi-task self-supervised objective combining masked token recovery, noisy-coordinate reconstruction, and pairwise distance reconstruction. On the CREMP-CycPeptMPDB dataset, training EnsembleEGNN from scratch fails entirely (R2=0.005R^2=0.005). However, the pretrained model reaches R2=0.477R^2=0.477 and Pearson r=0.699r=0.699, outperforming the sequence-only BERT baseline (R2=0.439R^2=0.439, Pearson r=0.667r=0.667). When EnsembleEGNN is co-trained end-to-end with the BERT sequence encoder, the hybrid model improves further to R2=0.538R^2=0.538 and Pearson r=0.737r=0.737. These results demonstrate that encoding conformational ensembles into a single thermodynamically informed embedding improves cyclic-peptide property prediction.
Aaron Feller, Kris Deibler, Maxim Secor
Jul 23, 2026cs.LG

M3^3-Gen: Interpretable Multimodal Generation of Gene Expression Profiles Using Clinical and Imaging Data

Integrating heterogeneous biomedical data, including clinical metadata, histopathology images, and molecular profiles, is crucial for comprehensive disease understanding. However, gene expression data acquisition remains constrained by high costs and privacy concerns, limiting its use in multimodal research and AI-driven applications. We present MultiModal Molecular Generation (M3^3-Gen), a novel framework for the generation of gene expression profiles by conditioning a Generative Adversarial Network on histopathology images and clinical metadata. M3^3-Gen learns a unified latent representation from the clinical variables and the images, leveraging contrastive learning, and exploits the embeddings of the two modalities to guide a generative model in producing biologically coherent gene expression profiles. Evaluations on the TCGA dataset demonstrate that M3^3-Gen generates realistic and functionally meaningful gene expression data. Importantly, by integrating multiple modalities in an attention-based mechanism, M3^3-Gen provides intrinsic explainability: it allows the identification of which regions of the histopathology images most strongly influenced the generation of specific gene expression profiles, making the model's decisions interpretable by design.
Francesca Pia Panaccione, Carlo Sgaravatti, Marco Venere
Jul 23, 2026cs.CE

Chemical Chain-of-Thought Functions as a Hallucination-Prone Molecular Scratchpad

Chemical reasoning language models are expected to derive molecular answers through faithful chain-of-thought (CoT). However, across four reasoning model families and twelve chemistry tasks, hallucination is widespread and largely decoupled from answer correctness: correct answers often coexist with fabricated structural claims absent from the relevant molecules. Yet this does not make the reasoning trace computationally irrelevant. Attribution analyses suggest a shared scratchpad function expressed in model-specific forms: Chem-R and ether-0 rely on fragmented SMILES drafts, whereas ChemDFM-R emphasizes scaffold, positional, and naming cues. Notably, perturbing Chem-R's SMILES sketches degrades generation, showing that structural drafts can be causally load-bearing even when verbal structural claims are largely inert. Together, these results show that chemical CoT is neither a faithful explanation nor merely a post-hoc rationalization, but a hallucination-prone molecular scratchpad. This finding cautions against treating CoT as direct evidence of faithful reasoning and motivates process-level supervision beyond answer-only evaluation.
Jiatong Li, Yuxuan Ren, Weida Wang +2
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

OLEDLM: A Unified Language Model for OLED Molecular Design

The development of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) materials faces the compounded challenges of an astronomically large chemical space, stringent quantum-chemical constraints, and a scarcity of labeled data. Although the question of OLED generation is important, few models have been trained effectively for this specific domain. We propose an inverse molecular design framework based on causal language models: given target optoelectronic properties (e.g., excitation energy, oscillator strength), our model directly generates OLED SMILES sequences satisfying the specified constraints. We employ a multi-stage strategy: first, we establish a foundational chemical language model using a LLaMA-style transformer architecture. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first successful adaptation of LLMs specifically for the OLED domain, bridging the gap between generic molecular generation and the stringent structural requirements of optoelectronic materials. Second, we fine-tune property predictors based on a BERT model pre-trained on our large-scale OLED dataset. Then, we perform Reinforcement Learning on our fine-tuned model, leveraging our property predictor, for better SMILES generation. Finally, through DFT verification, we demonstrate that our framework can efficiently navigate the OLED chemical space, generating novel candidates with high structural validity and optimized optoelectronic properties.
Fukang Wen, Yuchong Tang, Jingyuan Li +9
Jul 22, 2026quant-ph

Machine-Learned Compact Subspace Generation for Quantum Selected Configuration Interaction within Density Matrix Embedding Framework

Sample-based Quantum Diagonalization (SQD), an extension of Quantum Selected Configuration Interaction (QSCI), has emerged as a promising hybrid quantum-classical paradigm for computing molecular ground state energies. By leveraging quantum sampling instead of variational optimization, QSCI avoids barren plateaus and enables direct reconstruction of correlated electronic wavefunctions. However, existing configuration recovery techniques primarily enforce symmetry constraints without guaranteeing optimal selection of the most physically relevant configurations, often leading to unnecessarily large subspaces and increased classical diagonalization costs. In this work, we introduce a machine-learned compact subspace generation protocol based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), termed QSCI-RBM, and integrate it within the Density Matrix Embedding Theory (DMET) framework. The RBM is trained on quantum-sampled configurations to learn the underlying probability distribution of dominant determinants, enabling the targeted generation of high-probability configurations. We apply this framework to the simulation of a protein-ligand complex involving the inhibitor Carmofur bound to the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (MproM^{\text{pro}}). Our results demonstrate that DMET-QSCI-RBM achieves energies within the chemical accuracy threshold by accessing only approximately 4% of the configuration subspace. In contrast, standard DMET-SQD simulations failed to reach chemical accuracy while accessing up to 20% of the subspace, even as the chemical potential itself nearly converged. These findings highlight that RBM-assisted configuration generation produces significantly more compact subspaces while preserving physical accuracy, thereby reducing classical computational overhead and enabling the scalable quantum embedding simulation of complex biological systems.
Ashish Kumar Patra, Anurag K. S. V., Ruchika Bhat +3
Jul 22, 2026cs.AI

MOF-Sleuth: Tool-Grounded Reward Alignment for Explainable Fine-Grained MOF CIF Auditing

Large metal-organic framework (MOF) databases support simulation, screening, and machine learning through crystallographic information files (CIFs). Subtle chemical and structural errors in these inputs can compromise downstream results and hinder manual inspection. LLM advances in computational chemistry offer paths beyond predictive screening toward fine-grained diagnosis with evidence-grounded explanations. However, two challenges remain: (i) limited fine-grained attribution: MOF-specific validators and machine-learning models scale detection but provide fixed checks, readiness scores, or coarse labels rather than evidence-grounded explanations; and (ii) unreliable CIF reasoning: direct LLM auditing is costly and unreliable because chemical evidence is implicit across atom-site records and requires geometric, connectivity, occupancy, and charge calculations. Both stem from weak coupling between chemical evidence and language-model explanation. We introduce MOF-Sleuth, a reinforcement-guided CIF auditing agent with two modules: a deterministic Forensic Lab and a Sleuth reasoning engine. The Lab derives composition, geometry, connectivity, occupancy, coordination, and charge evidence, and Sleuth uses this evidence to produce an evidence-grounded explanation, error types, and a binary decision. Reward-guided reinforcement learning (RL) turns tool measurements into chemical explanation-level supervision, rewarding not only the final answer but also cited chemical evidence and evidence-supported diagnoses. We introduce Chemically Grounded Diagnosis (Chem-GD), a metric that assesses whether a correct diagnosis is explained by factual, relevant CIF-derived evidence. Across four benchmarks, MOF-Sleuth establishes state-of-the-art performance among LLM-based approaches and MOF-specific machine-learning methods, demonstrating gains in detection, attribution, and grounded explanation quality.
Yu Liu, Zhiwei Yang, Diandian Guo +7
Jul 22, 2026physics.chem-ph

Hypothesis-and-Refinement Learning of Organic Structures from Multimodal Spectroscopic Data

Determining molecular structures from spectroscopic data remains fundamentally challenging because the inverse problem is intrinsically underdetermined: individual spectra are sparse, low-dimensional, and encode only partial structural evidence relative to the vast space of possible molecules. We address this challenge by formulating automated structure elucidation as a scalable hypothesis-refinement paradigm that tightly integrates spectral evidence with large-scale molecular priors. To supply structure-resolving NMR signals for multimodal learning, we construct \textbf{QM9SPIN}, a DFT-derived dataset comprising diverse 1D and 2D spectra, including J-coupling, DEPT experiments, and explicit spin--spin interactions. On this foundation, we introduce \textbf{SpectroMol}, a spectrum-to-structure model that proposes chemically valid molecular hypotheses conditioned on multimodal spectral inputs. Complementarily, we develop \textbf{MS-Mol2Mol}, a high-resolution mass-constrained molecular generator that integrates molecular formula, exact mass, and degree of unsaturation within a conditional generative prior trained on 400 million molecules, ensuring global compositional consistency and chemically realistic refinement. The integrated system achieves 93.8% top-1 accuracy on the simulated benchmark, adapts effectively from simulated to experimental spectra with limited experimental fine-tuning, and further improves experimental predictions through mass-guided refinement, establishing a scalable route toward automated, data-driven organic structure elucidation.
Chengchun Liu, Zhiyuan Yan, Li Yuan +5
Jul 21, 2026stat.ML

Boltzmann-Expected Molecular Design with Decoupled Annealing Flows

Most 3D properties relevant to molecular design, including free energies and shape descriptors, are expectations\textit{expectations} over the Boltzmann distribution over 3D configurations of a molecular graph. However, existing property-guided generative models tie each property to a single structure, ignoring the underlying ensemble. We recast 3D molecular design as Boltzmann-expected design\textbf{Boltzmann-expected design} and realise it with DECAF\textbf{DECAF} (Decoupled Annealing Flows), which factorise the joint distribution over graphs and coordinates into two conditional flow models: a graph-conditioned flow p(x∣G)p(x\mid\mathcal{G}), acting as a Boltzmann emulator\textit{Boltzmann emulator}, and a coordinate-conditioned flow p(G∣x)p(\mathcal{G}\mid x), proposing new graphs from 3D information. By alternating the two flows, DECAF optimises molecular graphs with a simulated-annealing acceptance rule whose scoring function is evaluated on ensembles drawn from p(x∣G)p(x\mid\mathcal{G}), making ensemble statistics, not single-conformer properties, the design target. The resulting loop requires no retraining to change objectives. On GEOM-Drugs, we show that ensemble-aware optimisation produces graphs whose mean radius of gyration and solvent-accessible surface area consistently shift toward targets, while single-conformer optimisation degrades on larger drug-like molecules where Boltzmann distributions are broadest. DECAF extends to multi-objective trade-offs and, uniquely among 3D generative models, to higher-moment design\textbf{higher-moment design}: jointly optimising an ensemble property's variance and skewness to produce flexible molecules biased to a prescribed conformational regime: we verify the conformational distributions of these higher-moment designs with all-atom MD simulations.
Selma Moqvist, Richard Beckmann, Ross Irwin +2
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

DBMol: Design of High-Affinity, Target-Specific Small Molecules through Structure Prediction Models

Designing small molecule ligands that bind with high affinity to specific protein pockets is a fundamental goal in drug discovery, as small molecules constitute a major fraction of approved therapeutics. Recent breakthroughs in structure prediction, such as AlphaFold-3 and Boltz-2, enable accurate biomolecular interaction prediction and show promise as foundation models for downstream tasks, including binding affinity prediction. We propose to leverage these models and introduce DBMol, a new structure predictor-guided framework for de novo small molecule design. DBMol formulates an alternating optimization and projection process. In the optimization stage, DBMol starts from an initial molecule and uses gradient-based optimization to improve pocket-specific interactions and predicted binding affinity using a structure prediction model. In the projection stage, a flow-matching model maps the optimized molecular graph to discrete and chemically valid molecules. Experiments show that DBMol effectively optimizes the Boltz-2 affinity proxy and generates molecules with strong predicted affinity and specificity under Boltz-2 evaluation. To reduce self-confirmation bias, we further evaluate generated molecules using held-out metrics, including AF3-based evaluation. DBMol substantially improves pocket coverage while maintaining molecular diversity over unconditional generation, and is competitive under held-out metrics despite the absence of reference-ligand supervision. These results support the promise of structure prediction models as effective optimization signals for de novo molecular design.
Yiming Qin, Kai Yi, Miruna Cretu +3
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Predicting Activities in Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions with Hybrid Machine Learning

Activities in aqueous electrolyte solutions, usually described by ionic activity and osmotic coefficients, are important properties for modeling many processes in industry and nature. Established activity models, such as those of Pitzer or Bromley, require fitting to experimental data for each electrolyte of interest and thus cannot predict properties for unstudied systems. While some predictive approaches exist, they are typically limited in scope and rely on additional ion-specific descriptors. In this work, we introduce a new hybrid model that combines the physics-based Bromley model with a matrix completion method (MCM) from machine learning. The MCM is employed to predict the electrolyte-specific parameters of the Bromley model, exploiting the fact that these parameters can be arranged in a matrix with cations and anions as rows and columns, respectively. Due to the lack of experimental data for many electrolytes, the initial parameter matrix is sparsely populated, making the prediction of the Bromley parameters for unstudied electrolytes a matrix completion problem. The hybrid model, Bromley-MCM, was trained end-to-end on experimental data for mean ionic activity coefficients and osmotic coefficients of aqueous solutions of 478 electrolytes at 298 K from the Dortmund Data Bank. As output, we obtain a completed matrix of Bromley parameters for 83 cations and 112 anions, enabling consistent prediction of concentration-dependent activities in aqueous solutions of 9,296 electrolytes at 298~K. This substantially extends the applicability of the Bromley model while maintaining high predictive accuracy, as demonstrated through evaluations on electrolytes excluded from model training.
Zeno Romero, Maximilian Kohns, Fabian Jirasek
Jul 21, 2026cs.DM

Towards chemistries in dynamical systems

Chemistry describes aspects of the universe in terms of molecules and their reactions. In this exploratory work we present a way to describe aspects of any dynamical system in similar terms. To describe a dynamical system in this way three decisions have to be made. The first is how many different "places" there are at which molecules or chemical species can occur; the second is how to determine the species present (or not) at each place; and the third is the set of transitions and reactions that can occur between the species in the various places. For these choices to be compatible with the state update of the dynamical system each state must be able to determine transitions that take the currently occurring molecules to those occurring in the updated state. We also propose an additional requirement that there is always a unique way to choose the least amount of transitions occurring during state updates. We discuss gliders in the game of life cellular and argue that when following their definition of according to Randall Beer they satisfy the additional criterion as well. We also point out some issues with the approach.
Martin Biehl, Nathaniel Virgo
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Adopting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Molecular Generation

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for molecular generation has shown remarkable potential in chemical and drug design. Current methods primarily rely on supervised training or fine-tuning with limited datasets, which are insufficient to capture complex molecular design objectives. While some approaches attempt to guide generation toward specific goals, they often lack direct optimization mechanisms, making it difficult to align generated molecules with desired properties. To tackle these challenges, we propose \textbf{LLMol}, a principled reinforcement learning framework that directly incorporates verifiable rewards for targeted molecule generation. The key insight is to formulate molecular design as a goal-conditioned sequence prediction task, where verifiable rewards serve as explicit supervision to drive generation toward desired objectives. LLMol follows a two-stage training paradigm combining supervised learning and reinforcement learning. In the first stage, large language models are supervised fine-tuned to capture chemical syntax and molecular distributions. In the second stage, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which directly integrates property-based reward signals to guide molecular generation toward task-specific objectives. To address the high variance and instability common in discrete sequence optimization, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a stable on-policy algorithm that smooths reward signals and improves training robustness. This framework enables LLMol to effectively handle a range of molecular design tasks, including single-property targeting (e.g., penalized logP, QED) and structure-constrained optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMol consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving higher success rates and improved efficiency across diverse molecular benchmarks.
Mingxuan Ouyang, Hao Lan, Wanyu Lin
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

ABOPD: Antibody CDR Design via On-Policy Distillation

Antibodies are essential therapeutic molecules, and their complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) form the primary antigen-recognition interface. Recent protein generative models have demonstrated broad capabilities in biomolecular design, yet post-training strategies for downstream objectives remain limited. Standard denoising training operates on noisy states obtained by perturbing native structures, whereas recursive generation proceeds through model-generated intermediate states. For flexible antibody CDR loops such as CDR-H3, this mismatch can allow backbone deviations to accumulate along the denoising trajectory and compromise antigen-facing loop geometry. We introduce ABOPD, an antibody design framework based on on-policy distillation that leverages privileged native geometry during training to supervise states visited along the model's own denoising trajectories. With this fine-grained structural supervision, ABOPD substantially improves structural recovery on RAbD CDR-H3 generation, reducing RMSD by 0.42 Å (from 2.37 Å to 1.95 Å) and outperforming supervised fine-tuning and offline distillation controls, offering a path to higher-fidelity protein design.
Zhuo Yang, Jiaying He, Jiaqing Xie +5
Jul 21, 2026cs.AI

Do AI-Native Biotechs Need Departments? Benchmarking Company World Models for AI-Driven Drug Development

AI-native biotechnology companies are often designed by copying human biotech org charts into agent roles. We argue for a different abstraction: a Company World Model, defined as a persistent asset-to-value state representation with transition models, explicit value functions, planning, and updating across scientific, regulatory, BD, commercial, financial, and execution constraints. We introduce a dry-lab benchmark for testing whether AI-agent organizations should mimic departments or operate around such a world model. The benchmark contains 45 retrospective public-information decision cases with strict time cutoffs, hidden outcomes, common schemas, automatic scoring, and blinded pairwise judging. We compare human-org-mimic, stronger human-org-mimic-plus, AI-native asset-centric, and AI-native value-conversion architectures. The value-conversion architecture is a prompt-level approximation of a Company World Model: a Live Asset Value Record updated by Deal, Approval, Revenue, and Investment Arbiter loops. Under a success function defined by external BD, regulatory approval and launch, and revenue discipline, it achieved the highest automatic value-conversion score and was strongly preferred over the original baselines by value-specific blinded judges. Stress tests narrowed the claim: a stronger human baseline remained competitive, and a neutral judge did not show robust value-conversion dominance. Codex-only mechanistic ablations suggest that Revenue Room, Deal Room, and Approval Room carry useful work under the target objective. The central finding is objective-sensitive: departments may remain useful governance views, but the core AI-native operating primitive should be a shared, predictive asset-to-value state rather than a static human org chart. The study is dry-lab only and does not establish real-world drug success, clinical benefit, or revenue prediction accuracy.
Yinan Wang
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

MotifRole-Diff: Risk-Optimal Role-Aware Corruption for Masked Molecular Graph Diffusion

Masked discrete diffusion for molecular graph generation typically applies a uniform corruption schedule to all tokens in a lossless graph-to-sequence representation, implicitly treating structurally heterogeneous molecular components as equally difficult and equally important to reconstruct. However, different molecular graph token roles exhibit substantial variation in denoising difficulty and their influence on the decoded molecule, motivating role-specific corruption strategies. We introduce MotifRole-Diff, a role-aware corruption process that allocates masking rates according to empirically measured denoising difficulty and graph-level perturbation impact while preserving the model architecture, clean sequence space, and lossless molecular-graph decoder. We formulate schedule selection as the risk-optimal allocation of a fixed masking budget across token roles. Our theorem characterizes optimality for the modeled role-weighted residual risk, while downstream generation performance is evaluated empirically. Under matched architecture, training budget, and sampling compute, MotifRole-Diff improves validity on QM9 from 0.905 to 0.944 while reducing FCD from 1.701 to 1.609, and on MOSES improves validity from 0.920 to 0.938 while reducing FCD from 2.125 to 1.850. Role-wise diagnostics further show improved reconstruction across molecular graph token categories. Together, these matched-compute results indicate that structurally informed corruption is a more effective masking strategy than uniform schedules for serialized molecular graph diffusion.
Tasfia Nuzhat Ornee, Elias Hossain, Ivan Garibay +1
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Do Language Models Dream of Binding Molecules? Benchmarking LLMs under Spatial Constraints

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) leverages the 3D structure of protein targets, often complemented by other spatial constraints, to generate candidate binding molecules. While diffusion models have dominated as a leading paradigm for high-quality 3D molecule generation, LLM-based methods are rapidly emerging in molecular design and have shown competitive performance in pocket-conditioned molecular generation. However, their ability to reason about physics and 3D spatial environments is largely underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyze whether current general-purpose LLMs are capable of navigating complex 3D constraints compared to established baselines such as specialized diffusion models. We consider 3D ligand generation conditioned on protein pockets together with ligand- and interaction-derived spatial constraints, including anchor fragments, pharmacophore points, and mandatory pocket-ligand interactions. To enable this evaluation, we introduce 3D-Fit - a token-efficient benchmarking strategy for assessing LLM performance on multi-conditioned spatial molecule generation. Our findings reveal a clear pattern in LLM spatial capabilities: while they still lag behind state-of-the-art approaches, they are promising and can handle multiple spatial constraints simultaneously, enabling scaling to heterogeneous setups.
Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski +5
Jul 20, 2026cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Chemical filters for ultra-high-throughput materials screening and generation

Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming materials design by enabling de novo exploration of immense chemical spaces. Yet a large proportion of AI-generated compositions remain implausible, violating established chemical principles, which limits the reliability and interpretability of generative materials design. Here, we introduce a chemical validity operator that recasts heuristic chemical rules as a configurable algorithmic prior for evaluating and guiding generative materials discovery. Built on the open-source SMACT package, a data-informed oxidation-state model exposes tunable thresholds, allowing users to interpolate continuously between permissive and conservative chemical constraints, while supporting both exploratory and conservative materials-design workflows. Benchmarking six state-of-the-art generative models for inorganic crystals shows that most reproduce stoichiometry but under-represent realistic oxidation-state combinations, and that filtering removes compositions reliant on rarely observed oxidation states while preserving low-energy compounds near the convex hull. Beyond screening, the same operator can also serve as a reinforcement-learning reward, steering a latent diffusion model towards chemically grounded compositions. By encoding chemical heuristics and observations, this work establishes a foundation for oxidation-state-aware generative models.
Kinga O. Mastej, Panyalak Detrattanawichai, Hyunsoo Park +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Trustworthy Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction via Reliability-Aware Multi-Engine Fusion

Accurate protein-ligand binding affinity prediction is central to computational drug discovery, yet modern docking engines frequently disagree without indicating which prediction to trust. Consensus scoring and ensemble methods improve mean accuracy but treat all predictions identically without interpretable confidence measures or uncertainty decomposition, ignoring the chemical context of each protein-ligand pair. To address this limitation, we introduce RELIABLE-BA (RELIABiLity-aware Evidential fusion for Binding Affinity), an evidential framework for multi-engine binding affinity prediction. Our model comprises three steps: (1) modeling each engine as an evidential expert via Normal-Inverse-Gamma distributions, (2) scaling epistemic uncertainty through learned reliability from molecular context while preserving each expert's predictive mean, and (3) fusing experts through closed-form aggregation that captures both individual uncertainty and inter-engine disagreement. Experiments on the PDBBind and BDB2020+ benchmarks demonstrate competitive point prediction with substantially improved uncertainty calibration, and additional validation on the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro dataset and 5HT2A receptor demonstrates applicability to clinically relevant drug targets. Crucially, these uncertainty estimates enable reliable filtering of protein-ligand pairs, reducing prediction error by up to 25% when retaining only high-confidence pairs. To our knowledge, RELIABLE-BA is the first multi-engine binding affinity prediction framework to combine evidential fusion with context-dependent reliability, offering a principled path toward trustworthy AI-guided drug discovery. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yongchand/RELIABLE-BA.
Yongchan Hong, Defu Cao, Wenjin Liu +6
Jul 19, 2026cs.LG

Grounded verification of chemical and materials reasoning: detection is the bottleneck

Large language models confabulate chemical objects (molecular formulas, space groups, formation energies) in fluent reasoning traces, concentrated on long-tail entities where confidence is least trustworthy. Deterministic, database-grounded verification can catch and repair such errors without the coverage cost of blanket retrieval; the binding constraint, we find, is detection, not repair. Our tiered verifier extracts each checkable claim, checks it against authoritative databases and physics, and feeds the reference into a gated correction loop. Across four models and 528 condition-pinned prompts, gated correction cuts committed-formula error from 22% to 4% at 3.2×3.2\times fewer retrievals than blanket augmentation, beating a conversational oracle. Repair succeeds wherever a flag fires (80--97%); the bottleneck is in-loop detection recall. Grounding improves the final answer only when the verifier's scope reaches the deliverable (83% to 90%), and the lift appears only where extractable long-tail error exists: absent on near-ceiling physical constants, large on isotope half-lives (11% to 0%).
Can Polat, Mustafa Kurban, Erchin Serpedin +1
Jul 19, 2026cs.LG

CORAL: Learning Amyloid Fibril Ligand Docking with Cooperative Binding Rewards

A hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is the aberrant aggregation of proteins into amyloid fibrils, and small molecules that selectively bind to these fibrils hold promise as diagnostics, imaging probes, and therapeutics. Predicting how such ligands bind to fibril targets, however, presents two fundamental challenges. First, resolved co-crystal structures of amyloid-ligand complexes are exceptionally scarce; even with recent advances in cryo-EM only a handful have been structurally characterized, making supervised training of docking models impractical for this target class. Second, amyloid fibrils present a binding mode fundamentally different from globular proteins: ligands intercalate into longitudinal cross-ββ grooves and stack cooperatively along the fibril axis, a geometry that existing docking models are not designed to capture. To address these challenges, we present CORAL (COopeRative Amyloid Ligand docking), a reinforcement learning framework that trains a generative docking model to produce ligand pose distributions tailored to the cross-ββ groove geometry. Our reward explicitly incorporates cooperative ligand-ligand stacking energy alongside protein-ligand docking affinity, directly capturing the distinctive binding geometry of amyloid fibrils. We further introduce a curated evaluation set of amyloid-ligand complexes constructed from model-generated poses validated by domain experts. Experiments on both experimentally resolved structures and this evaluation set demonstrate improved pose quality and binding affinity correlation over existing docking baselines.
Yasheng Sun, Bohan Li, Youqi Tao +1
Jul 19, 2026cs.LG

ChemHyperMag: Physics-informed magnetic hypergraph learning improves molecular ADMET prediction

Accurate prediction of ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity) is important for drug discovery. Most predictors use undirected molecular graphs and pairwise edges. This choice misses asymmetric interactions, nonreversible dynamics, and motif level effects from functional groups and ring systems. We propose ChemHyperMag for multitask ADMET prediction under missing labels. ChemHyperMag builds a functional group hypergraph from rings, BRICS fragments, Bemis-Murcko scaffolds, and bonds. It also defines a potential driven nonreversible flow guided by electronegativity and Gasteiger partial charges. The resulting circulation is encoded by a Hermitian magnetic Laplacian and processed with a magnetic Chebyshev encoder. We perturb magnetic phases to form stochastic views and train with an InfoNCE objective. Experiments on multiple ADMET benchmarks show improvements over recent methods with fewer labeled samples and no conformers. ChemHyperMag is scalable and provides interpretable directional signals through its magnetic phases.
Hexiao Ding, Hongzhao Chen, Jing Lan +12
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Neural spectroscopy of AlphaFold2 reveals encoded protein conformational landscapes

AlphaFold2's 93 million parameters, shaped by the evolutionary record of protein structure encoded in the Protein Data Bank and in sequence alignments, are conventionally treated only as machinery for converting sequence to structure. We propose they are also a scientific object that can be analyzed directly: a learned encoding of protein conformational organization that can be probed and characterized. By smoothing the Evoformer's weight tensors with a Gaussian convolution and scaling the result, we show that the trained model produces physically structured conformational landscapes. Under perturbation, ubiquitin's native contacts break in the order established by decades of folding experiments. For KaiB, five independently trained models agree that the alternative fold is not recovered under perturbation. For alpha-synuclein, five models produce five different but coherent landscapes, mapping where the training signal has determined the representation and where it has not. Matched-power noise controls confirm that random corruption of equal magnitude produces debris, not conformations. The model learned to predict static structures; the conformational organization visible under perturbation was not an explicit training target, suggesting it emerged as a byproduct of that objective. AlphaFold2's weights appear to encode structural constraints, shaped by evolutionary and structural training data, that extend beyond what unperturbed inference reveals. We call the approach of reading them neural spectroscopy, and Scaled Gaussian Convolution one such protocol.
Kaustav Mehta
Jul 16, 2026cs.SE

StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows

Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, code-check records, and a final report. Evaluations centered on question answering or script generation rarely verify this complete evidence chain and may therefore reward fluent outputs even when the underlying engineering workflow is incomplete, internally inconsistent, or non-executable. To address this limitation, we present StructureClaw, an artifact-centered workbench in which LLM agents operate through governed engineering skills, typed tools, shared artifact state, and local analysis backends. We also introduce StructureClaw-Bench, an executable benchmark of 150 controlled scenarios spanning standard workflow execution, interactive robustness, and multimodal structural-model reconstruction. A scenario succeeds only when all required artifact- and execution-level assertions pass in a single run. Across ten agent-model configurations, each evaluated on the same 50 standard cases, the average Success Rate rises from 56.8% with the generic-skill baseline to 88.6% with the full automatic workflow. The interactive and multimodal evaluations identify two prominent remaining challenges: safe handling of invalid numerical inputs and fixture-consistent reconstruction of structural models. These findings show that artifact-centered evaluation can expose workflow-level failures that are difficult to identify from final responses alone, providing a more rigorous basis for evaluating and improving structural-engineering agents. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/structureclaw/structureclaw.
Sizhong Qin, Yi Gu, Yao Jiang +13
Jul 15, 2026cs.LG

Implementations of Quantum and Classical Topology-Aligned Architectures for Molecular Property Prediction

For low-data and resource-constrained regimes typical of quantum chemistry, parameter-efficient learning is a key objective. Here, we propose a topology-aligned inductive bias in which the model architecture mirrors the molecular bond graph: atoms map to a fixed register of computational units, and bonds determine which pairs interact through shared learnable parameters. This principle is instantiated in two architectures: a variational quantum circuit (Iso-QGNN), and a parameter-matched classical message-passing model (Iso-CGNN). The models are benchmarked on HOMO-LUMO and dipole moment binary classification tasks over the QM9 benchmark. With 64 trainable parameters, the implementations achieve test AUCs of approximately 0.88 (quantum) and 0.91 (classical) on the gap task, and close to 0.78 (both) on the dipole task. The models reach 90% of asymptotic performance within about 250 training molecules and gradient norms remain stable throughout training. These results indicate that the topology-aligned inductive bias is the active ingredient driving parameter efficiency at QM9 scale, with implications for matched-baseline benchmarking in quantum machine learning.
James T. Pegg, Hubert Okadome Valencia, Ronin Wu
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

HEDGEHOG: Hierarchical Evaluation of Drug Generators Through Rigorous Filtration

Generative molecular models can support early drug discovery by proposing new candidate compounds de novo. In practice, useful candidates must balance target-relevant activity, synthetic accessibility, physicochemical properties, and other multiparameter design constraints. However, metrics commonly used to evaluate molecular generators only weakly reflect whether the generated compounds are medicinally plausible and suitable for downstream computation. This can produce false positives in model evaluation, incorrect assumptions, and inefficient use of computational resources. We introduce HEDGEHOG, a unified six-stage filtration benchmark that is inspired by industrial hit identification workflows: (i) preprocessing; (ii) physicochemical descriptor screening; (iii) structural alerts and graph-sanity checks; (iv) synthesis feasibility; (v) docking and binding affinity estimation; and (vi) three-dimensional pose and interaction checks. We evaluate 23 molecular generators across three model classes under a standardized protocol. Across 230,000 generated molecules, only 0.65% of initial molecules survive all stages. Our results expose a central limitation of current molecular generators: molecules that appear acceptable under isolated criteria rarely satisfy medicinal chemistry, synthesis, docking, and 3D pose filters simultaneously.
Daria A. Ryabchenko, Pavel Gurevich, Shamil Kadyrov +5
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

CoDiffGRN: Rethinking Gene Regulatory Network Inference via the BEELINE-KGC Benchmark and Co-evolutionary Discrete Diffusion

Inferring gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from single-cell transcriptomic data is crucial for biological discovery, yet existing approaches suffer from a fundamental misalignment with real-world needs. Researchers typically seek a small set of high-confidence regulatory interactions for experimental validation, often involving previously unseen genes. However, current benchmarks rely on transductive splits with global classification metrics, while prevailing models struggle to generalize under inductive settings. To bridge this gap, we reformulate GRN inference as an inductive, ranking-centric graph completion problem and introduce \textbf{\benchmark}, a new benchmark that incorporates an inductive gene-holdout split together with knowledge graph completion metrics to better evaluate top-ranked predictions. Building on this, we propose \textbf{\method}, the first co-evolutionary discrete diffusion framework that jointly models biologically coherent discretized gene expression states and regulatory interactions for robust inductive generalization and improved top-ranked regulatory discovery. We further introduce TF-ALL Subgraph Sampling (TASS) for scalable training. Extensive experiments on {\benchmark} show that {\method} establishes new state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in novel regulatory discovery, and ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of our design.
Jiaze Song, Runhao Zhao, Minghao Xu +2
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Learning Mechanistic Reasoning for Chemical Reactions with Large Language Models

Reaction mechanisms consist of the step-by-step sequences of elementary reactions that explain chemical transformations. Learning the mechanism logic is therefore essential for enhancing the fundamental chemical intelligence of large language models (LLMs). The stepwise deduction of reaction mechanism aligns naturally with the reasoning paradigms of reasoning LLMs. However, current chemical LLMs primarily emphasize coarse-grained name reactions for product prediction and retrosynthesis, often leading to physical inconsistencies and hallucinations. In contrast, specialized small-scale generative models for mechanism inference typically suffer from restricted generalization capacity across diverse chemical spaces. To overcome these limitations, we built a novel, large-scale reasoning dataset of reaction mechanisms. Furthermore, we established the FukuyamaBench, a difficult benchmark derived from Fukuyama's Advanced Organic Reaction Mechanism book, to rigorously evaluate model performance on hierarchical mechanism reasoning. Our fine-tuned Qwen3-30B-A3B achieves 8.3% exact pathway match on FukuyamaBench Set~A, surpassing the specialized FlowER model (5.1%), demonstrating that mechanism-aware training substantially enhances chemical reasoning in language models.
Xingyu Dang, Haocheng Tang, Junmei Wang +1
Jul 14, 2026cs.AI

Improving Molecular Property Prediction in Small Language Models Using Graph-based Tools

Small language models (SLMs) have shown promise for zero-shot molecular property prediction from SMILES strings, yet they often suffer from structural blindness because sequence representations under-specify key graph-topological cues. We propose a modular Context-Augmented Prompting framework that enables agentic tool use at inference time: a trained GNN expert model provides a predictive hint with confidence, and a GNN extracts an instance-specific explanatory subgraph (e.g., a subgraph SMILES and an accompanying explanatory paragraph). We evaluate three commonly used SLMs on MUTAG and Tox21 under five prompting configurations ranging from SMILES-only to using all available tools at hand. Across two datasets, enriching prompts with graph-derived context yields substantial accuracy gains, often exceeding 25% relative improvement and up to 74% on Tox21. We further validate the functional relevance of the extracted motifs via a necessity-based edge-drop intervention. Despite the observed gains, a persistent gap remains to specialized GNN models, highlighting both the value and limits of text-conditioned reasoning for molecular structure.
Konstantinos Bougiatiotis, Dimitrios Kelesis, Georgios Paliouras
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Sample Efficient Generative Optimization for Molecular Design

Molecular optimization in drug discovery, materials design, and catalysis requires searching vast chemical spaces under tight evaluation budgets, since high-fidelity oracles and experimental measurements are costly. The practical impact of an optimization method therefore hinges on its sample efficiency: how few evaluations it needs to find strong candidates. We introduce Sample Efficient Generative Optimization (SEGO), a framework for Bayesian optimization on adaptively generated molecules. In SEGO, a probabilistic surrogate model forms a hypothesis about where hits lie in chemical space, a generative model is steered to propose candidates in that region, the most promising candidate is selected via an acquisition function, and the resulting oracle call is used both to sharpen the surrogate and to anchor the generator in real reward. SEGO attains state-of-the-art performance on the practical molecular optimization (PMO) benchmark using only one tenth of the oracle calls consumed by other methods, and on a multiparameter docking task it reaches ten hits in roughly half the oracle calls of existing approaches. These gains move molecular optimization closer to campaigns driven by direct experimental feedback.
Sarina Kopf, Cristina Nevado, Philippe Schwaller
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

SinAE: A Single-Architecture Flow-Matching Autoencoder for Cross-Domain Atomic Systems

Small molecules, crystals, and proteins all reduce to atoms in 3D space, yet their generative pipelines remain fragmented across domains, each with its Small molecules, crystals, and proteins all reduce to atoms in 3D space, yet their generative pipelines remain fragmented across domains, each with its own graph, equivariant, or frame-based architecture. Cross-domain training would mitigate per-domain data scarcity, but direct generation in 3D coordinate space cannot easily handle the heterogeneous structural priors of all three domains, and no prior latent autoencoder is simultaneously lossless and architecturally general across all three. We introduce SinAE, a single-architecture flow-matching autoencoder for molecules, crystals, and proteins, with vanilla Transformer encoder and decoder and no equivariant, graph, or domain-specific operators. Rather than requiring the encoder to capture fine-grained geometry, SinAE shifts the reconstruction burden into an iterative flow-matching decoder, achieving near-lossless reconstruction across domains and reducing reconstruction errors by orders of magnitude relative to prior latent baselines. The same per-token latent supports a standard Diffusion Transformer prior that reaches strong performance on molecular, crystal, and protein generation benchmarks. Joint molecule--crystal training strictly improves both domains, providing direct evidence of cross-domain transfer through a shared atomic latent. Code is available at https://github.com/BlueWhaleLab/SinAE .
Yuxuan Ren, Fan Yang, Jianhua Yao +1
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Generating Developable 3D Molecules via Pocket-Conditioned Diffusion and Property-Aware Optimization

Drug discovery and development is time-consuming and resource-intensive, motivating computational approaches such as diffusion models for de novo drug design. Many such models follow the structure-based drug design (SBDD) paradigm, generating molecules to fit a target binding pocket. However, existing diffusion-based SBDD methods typically couple pocket and ligand representation learning, model interactions only at the atom level, and prioritize binding affinity over other developability properties. Here, we introduce conDitar-dev, a conditional diffusion-based SBDD framework for generating ligands with strong binding affinities and favorable ADMET properties. It consists of three modules: msPRL, a pretrained multi-scale pocket representation learning module; conDitar, a pocket-conditioned diffusion model guided by msPRL representations; and paOPT, a generation-time method for optimizing ligand developability. On a newly curated benchmark of human disease targets, conDitar outperforms state-of-the-art SBDD baselines, achieving an average binding score of -8.85 kcal/mol. Across five ADMET properties, conDitar-dev improves performance by up to 73% over conDitar. To further validate the abilities of conDitar-dev to generate developable molecules, we have applied it to two validated druggable targets: programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) and colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R) proteins. Top-ranked generatively designed molecules and their analogs have been experimentally synthesized and biologically tested. Two molecules generated directly by conDitar-dev for PD-L1 exhibited SPR-derived KDK_D values of 3.49 and 3.75 μμM, respectively. Hit expansion based on conDitar-dev-designed molecules identified selective CSF1R inhibitors with IC50_{50} values as low as 200 nM, while also uncovering opportunities for drug repositioning.
Ruoxi Gao, Jiangweizhi Peng, Ziqi Chen +10
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

CatRetriever: Contrastive Representation Learning for Slab-to-Bulk Retrieval in Generative Catalyst Discovery

Inverse design is an emerging data-driven paradigm for efficiently navigating vast chemical spaces to discover new materials with targeted properties, and in the context of heterogeneous catalysis, surface generative models have recently advanced this goal by directly generating catalyst surface-adsorbate structures. However, these models typically operate at the slab level and do not provide the corresponding parent bulk structure, making it difficult to assess bulk-dependent properties such as formation energy, surface energy, crystallographic symmetry, and synthesizability. Here, we address this missing slab-to-bulk connection as a retrieval problem and introduce CatRetriever, a contrastive representation learning model that aligns slab and bulk crystal representations in a shared latent space. From a slab query, CatRetriever accurately retrieves plausible parent bulk candidates with R@1 > 91% and R@3 > 98% on both the in-distribution and holdout evaluation sets. We further extend the CatRetriever framework into an adsorption energy targeted bulk discovery pipeline that combines bulk retrieval, generative search space expansion, and adsorption energy distribution analysis. This workflow evaluates candidates by both structural compatibility with the query slab and their ability to access the target adsorption energy range across diverse surface environments. CatRetriever therefore provides a scalable route for connecting catalyst generative models with physically plausible and adsorption energy compatible bulk catalyst discovery.
Jungho Oh, Woosung Kim, Dong Hyeon Mok +2
Jul 13, 2026quant-ph

Q2SAR\mathtt{Q^2SAR}: overcoming classical bottlenecks in drug discovery via quantum multiple kernel learning

Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR\mathtt{QSAR}) modeling is a foundational computational methodology in early-stage drug discovery, heavily relied upon for predicting compound toxicity, bioavailability, and therapeutic potential. However, classical methods often struggle to effectively map the highly complex, non-linear, and high-dimensional interactions inherent in molecular data, leading to reduced predictive accuracy and costly late-stage clinical failures. In this paper, we present a Quantum Multiple Kernel Learning (QMKL\mathtt{QMKL}) framework, dubbed Next-Gen Q2SAR\mathtt{Q^2SAR}, that leverages Quantum Support Vector Machines (QSVMs\mathtt{QSVMs}) to overcome these classical limitations. By encoding molecular descriptors into exponentially large quantum Hilbert spaces, our approach substantially enhances the expressiveness of non-linear modeling. Benchmarking our quantum-enhanced framework on a dataset targeting the DYRK1A\mathtt{DYRK1A} kinase (a critical target for Alzheimer's disease), the QMKL\mathtt{QMKL}-SVM\mathtt{SVM} achieves an impressive Area Under the Curve (AUC\mathtt{AUC}) score of 0.87500.8750, significantly outperforming classical state-of-the-art Gradient Boosting models (AUC=0.8037\mathtt{AUC} = 0.8037). Furthermore, we establish a theoretical and empirical pathway toward resolving classical data bottlenecks through projected quantum kernels (PQK\mathtt{PQK}) and measurement accelerators. As quantum computing architecture matures, this framework paves the way for autonomous cognitive architectures and self-improving drug discovery pipelines, promising to unlock deeper insights across vast chemical spaces and to accelerate the development of life-saving therapeutics.
Mariano Caruso, Daniel Ruiz, Alejandro Giraldo +1
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Advancing Optimal Subset Oracle via Learning Relaxation of Neural Set Functions

Learning neural set functions is pivotal to a wide range of important applications, including compound selection in AI-driven drug discovery and product recommendation. Recent work has introduced optimal subset oracles to implicitly learn set functions under practical weakly supervised settings, where model parameters are optimized through mean-field variational inference. However, these frameworks rely on Monte Carlo sampling to estimate gradients of the evidence lower bound when updating the variational distribution. Repeated sampling across iterations incurs substantial computational overhead, while the resulting stochasticity can destabilize the optimization trajectory. In this work, we reinterpret the evidence lower bound as a continuous relaxation of the set function and learn a surrogate objective that replaces sampling-based ELBO gradient estimation during variational optimization. The learned surrogate provides stable and efficient gradients throughout the continuous domain, thereby reducing computational overhead and accelerating inference. Furthermore, we establish an approximation guarantee for the proposed framework under submodular maximization and characterize its connection to variational free energy. Experiments on a variety of real-world tasks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing baselines.
Yongquan Shi, Zijing Ou, Shiping Wang +1
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

AutoMatBench: An Automatic Optimization Toolkit for the Acceleration of Material Properties Prediction Benchmarking

Material property prediction (MPP) infers key properties from chemical composition and structure, accelerating the discovery and optimization of novel materials. In the realm of MPP, MatBench is a widely accepted benchmarking tool that defines over ten significant problems and provides the paradigm of performance evaluation for AI prediction models. Even though MatBench works well in benchmarking the performances of prediction models on in-distribution (ID) tasks and datasets, it lacks the ability to reflect their performances on out-of-distribution (OOD) material data, resulting failure in new material discovery. By combining the pipelines of MatBench and the existing researches on OOD performance evaluation, this study enables a huge space of benchmarking configurations, comprehensively reflecting the performances, abilities, and disadvantages of various AI prediction models. This work reports that the discrepancy of performances at different configuration values is huge and can be illustrated with prior knowledge and novel insights, therefore consideration of causal effect of configurations on performance results is necessary. In case of the impossibility of enumerative benchmarking at every configuration, this work further proposes AutoMatBench, an automatic toolkit with Bayesian optimization. Experiments with AutoMatBench reports that, within twelve steps of optimization, the similar results with MatBench and former OOD research can be accessed while more than half of the cost are saved. Besides, this tool also yields more essential findings on MPP benchmarking, positively contributing to the cost and efficiency of new material discovery.
Hongxiao Li, Wanling Gao
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Gene Expression-Informed Jointly Controlled Generative Modeling for Precision Molecular Design

Precision molecular design aims to discover personalized drug candidates through joint control of multiple conditions, such as biological relevance and molecular design strategies. Biological relevance reflects cellular functional states under disease or perturbation conditions, while molecular design strategies provide complementary guidance in terms of structural intentions and property optimization. In this study, we propose JoPMol, a jointly controlled precision molecular generative model that integrates biological states encoded by gene expression profiles with molecular structure information expressed in text, and chemical properties quantified by numerical values within a unified modeling framework. This formulation enables coordinated generation and optimization of candidate molecules under joint condition control. Experimental results show that JoPMol outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Moreover, JoPMol demonstrates strong generalization ability in both transfer tasks and biologically grounded simulation scenarios, validating its effectiveness for precision molecular design. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/hala-yh/JoPMol.
Hang Yuan, Chen Li, Wenjun Ma +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Adapting Evidential Neural Networks to Test-Time Neighbor Fusion Improves Molecular Property Prediction

A trained molecular property model can be refined at test time by correcting each prediction with the measured labels of the most similar training molecules, a retraining-free procedure we call neighbor fusion; evidential neural networks make it principled by using their aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to parameterize a Bayesian update. Our main contribution, PG-EVIKAL, learns a property-distance metric to re-rank structurally similar neighbors by their property relevance before fusion, building on EVIKAL (scalar Kalman filter) and GP-EVIKAL (Gaussian process variant handling correlated neighbors). Evaluated on 16 molecular datasets, PG-EVIKAL reduces RMSE relative to the evidential model baseline on 14 of them, with a median reduction of 19.4%, and improves calibration; in sequential-assay scenarios it further incorporates newly measured molecules, refining predictions as they arrive without retraining. This work demonstrates that evidential uncertainty decomposition is not merely a calibration objective but an actionable inference resource that enables test-time refinement of molecular property predictions.
Cameron Gruich, Weichi Yao, Yixin Wang +1
Jul 12, 2026physics.chem-ph

Transferable Implicit Solvent Machine Learning Potential for Drugs and Proteins Approaching Ab Initio Accuracy

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLPs) have revolutionized atomistic modeling, offering the potential to replace traditional methods like Density Functional Theory (DFT). However, inference time of MLPs is orders of magnitude slower than that of classical force fields, hindering real-world applications for biomolecular systems that require timescales of microseconds and beyond. Implicit solvent MLPs can address this issue, but are faced with data challenges associated with coarse-grained modeling. Consequently, previous approaches relied on empirical force field data, thereby inherently limiting the MLP's accuracy. Here, we introduce the Transferable Water Implicit Network (TWIN), an implicit water MLP parametrized entirely by an Equivariant Graph Neural Network and trained solely on ab initio and experimental labels. We demonstrate TWIN's transferability across drug-like molecules, peptides, and proteins, achieving excellent results on ab initio and experimental crystallographic and NMR benchmarks, consistently outperforming previous machine-learning-based implicit solvent or coarse-grained models. Furthermore, TWIN closely matches DFT-based explicit solvent MLPs while providing a two-order-of-magnitude faster timestep evaluation, paving the way for efficient ab initio-level modeling of biomolecular systems in aqueous environments.
Jan Eckwert, Julija Zavadlav
Jul 12, 2026cs.LG

Scaffold splits hide structural-frontier failures in ADMET models

Molecular property models are commonly evaluated by holding out Bemis--Murcko scaffolds, yet a scaffold identifier is only one notion of chemical unfamiliarity. We introduce a label-free structural-frontier split that reserves the sparsest and most physicochemically remote scaffold groups, and evaluate it on six public experimental or curated ADMET tasks. Against a 70/10/20 scaffold control with identical acyclic grouping, the frontier inflates equally weighted primary error with a taskwise median of 87.0% and a skew-sensitive mean of 130.3% (descriptive task/seed bootstrap interval, 52.1--246.0%). The mean falls to 75.9% once BBB is removed; that endpoint is the one whose score ranking inverts at the frontier. A message-passing graph-network control still shows a large gap (mean 82.8% over four tasks) and does not invert, so a low-capacity head does not explain the effect. We also test Multi-View Frontier Risk Extrapolation (\method), a count-adjusted tail-risk penalty over four molecular views, and treat it as a falsifiable probe. It changes normalized frontier error by only 0.16% relative to empirical risk minimization for the perceptron head (interval, −0.43-0.43--0.84%) and by −1.9-1.9% for the graph network; three fixed robust-penalty controls are likewise inconclusive. Against the published Lo-Hi and DataSAIL splitters the frontier inflates error more on average, though no split is uniformly hardest. An audit of 31,561 marine natural products further shows that OOD status and agreement with legacy ADMET predictions depend on the molecular view, endpoint and teacher coverage. Split construction and label provenance are important evaluation constraints in their own right, and the tested training penalties do not resolve the frontier failures we observe.
Jiacheng Zheng, Chang Guo, Zixuan Wang +1
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

Vilya-1: An all-atom foundation model for macrocycle structure prediction and design

Macrocyclic peptides are an increasingly important therapeutic modality, but existing computational methods for modeling their structures and properties are limited in scope and do not generalize well across the synthetically accessible chemical space. In this work, we introduce Vilya-1, a deep learning model that addresses two central challenges in macrocycle design: sampling biologically relevant conformations across arbitrary chemistries and predicting key developability properties such as membrane permeability. Vilya-1 operates on a uniform all-atom representation and is trained on heterogeneous structural datasets spanning diverse topologies and chemical classes. Across a broad set of macrocycles composed of canonical and non-canonical residues, Vilya-1 substantially improves geometric accuracy relative to physics-based methods, co-folding networks, and deep-learning conformer generators, while maintaining broad chemical coverage that extends to small molecules. Vilya-1 also supports generative applications, enabling the design of novel macrocycles with tailored chemical, structural, and property profiles. Together, these capabilities establish Vilya-1 as a foundation model for accelerating the development of next-generation macrocycle therapeutics.
Vilya Research, :, Pascal Sturmfels +8
Jul 10, 2026physics.chem-ph

Inverse-IMPRESSION: A Graph-based Platform for Molecular Structure Elucidation from Experimental NMR Spectroscopic Properties

Here, we present a platform built on our inverted Graph Transformer Network, IMPRESSION-G2, which can accurately and rapidly reconstruct molecular bonding directly from experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic information. It comprises three interconnected stages: a one-shot model that predicts bond connectivity between atoms; a structure-correction stage that corrects the predicted structures by removing uncertain bonds and iteratively reassigning them; noise-augmented multi-shot prediction, generating an ensemble of candidate structures, which are ranked to identify the best-fit structure. By integrating a range of 1^{1}H and 13^{13}C NMR data, including two-dimensional (2D) experiments such as COSY, HSQC, and HMBC, the inverse-IMPRESSION platform correctly identifies the structures of 77.8% of molecules with up to 30 heavy atoms (H, C, N, O and F) using simulated NMR data, and 10 of 19 (53%) molecules using experimental NMR data. The experimental structures solved have molecular weights of up to 480 Da and are representative of the complex structures in synthetic and natural products that routinely challenge chemists. The inverse-IMPRESSION framework thus provides the first effective approach for automated molecular structure elucidation using graph-based machine learning on experimental data.
Zheqi Jin, Grace Armitage, Richard Cox +3
Jul 10, 2026physics.flu-dyn

Entropy-Constrained Machine Learning with Residual Data Augmentation for Modeling Chemical Kinetics

We present a physics-constrained machine learning framework for accelerating the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent reacting flows. The model replaces the direct evaluation of detailed chemical source terms with a surrogate that predicts reaction rates from a reduced thermochemical state. To improve physical consistency, the second law of thermodynamics is incorporated as a training constraint by enforcing non-negative entropy generation, which restricts the evolution of the thermochemical state to physically admissible directions and improves stability during time integration. The approach is demonstrated on DNS of a two-dimensional planar lean premixed methane-air flame interacting with a turbulent flow field. The model reproduces detailed-chemistry results with high fidelity while achieving more than an order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost. Furthermore, a residual-based synthetic data augmentation strategy enables parametric exploration by constructing new training data from the original dataset, allowing accurate simulation at new inlet conditions without additional detailed-chemistry CFD runs. These results demonstrate that thermodynamically constrained machine learning can provide reliable and computationally efficient surrogates for detailed chemistry in high-fidelity combustion simulations.
Okezzi Ukorigho, Opeoluwa Owoyele
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

Autoregressive latent diffusion for 3D molecule generation

Three-dimensional (3D) molecule generation has been dominated by diffusion models, which achieve strong generation quality but typically require the molecular size to be specified a priori. Recent autoregressive approaches have substantially narrowed the performance gap while naturally supporting variable-length generation and conditioning on partial molecular context. However, balancing unconditional and context-conditioned generation remains challenging. We introduce KRONOS, a latent autoregressive diffusion framework that generates molecules in the latent space of a pre-trained autoencoder, jointly modeling molecular graph topology and geometry, while retaining the flexibility of autoregressive generation. We further introduce a mixed training strategy inspired by Fill-in-the Middle (FIM) paradigm, enabling both unconditional and fragment-conditioned molecular generation within a single left-to-right autoregressive model. Experiments on QM9 and GEOM-Drugs demonstrate that KRONOS achieves leading unconditional generation performance among autoregressive methods, while remaining competitive with diffusion models. Moreover, fragment-conditioned generation is achieved with negligible impact on unconditional generation performance, demonstrating that both generation paradigms can be supported within a single architecture.
Federico Ottomano, Gaopeng Ren, Yingzhen Li +2
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

Variable-Length Generative Protein Design via Generalized Poisson Flow

The ability to generate variable-length proteins is crucial in protein design, where the optimal length is often unknown and tightly coupled to designability. Current diffusion- and flow-based generative models typically require the protein length to be specified before sampling, limiting their flexibility in exploring the feasible design space. To address this limitation, we introduce Generalized Poisson Flow (GPFlow), a variable-length generative framework that learns the rate function of an inhomogeneous generalized Poisson process by minimizing its negative log-likelihood. We establish population-level guarantees for recovering the joint multimodal distribution and derive an upper bound on the KL divergence between the data and generated distributions. We comprehensively evaluate GPFlow across structure and sequence design, motif scaffolding, and peptide co-design, spanning Euclidean, categorical, and Riemannian modalities to fully validate its variable-length generation quality. In unconditional design, GPFlow improves structural designability and achieves the best distributional fitness for sequence design compared to their corresponding fixed-length baselines, while perfectly recovering the length distribution. In conditional motif scaffolding, GPFlow ranks first on 10 of 16 structure-based design tasks with significantly more unique successes and also achieves more passed tasks in sequence-based design. In peptide co-design, GPFlow remains competitive even without access to a native-length oracle.
Chaoran Cheng, Zhanghan Ni, Yanru Qu +4
Jul 9, 2026cs.LG

Model Agnostic Graph Prompt Learning for Crystal Property Prediction

Graph Neural Networks have emerged as a powerful tool for the fast and accurate prediction of various crystal properties. These models often encode domain-specific knowledge into their graph encoding modules, which increases their parameter size and makes their performance heavily dependent on domain expertise. Added to this, explicitly incorporating all chemical and structural features, that might influence a specific crystal property into the GNN encoder, is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a soft prompt learning framework that captures latent features essential for property prediction, which are not explicitly provided to the GNN. We introduce a novel multilevel graph prompt learning framework comprising both node-level and graph-level soft prompts. At the node level, we capture the local chemical semantics of different atom types, while at the graph level, we encode the global structural symmetry of the crystal graph. Our proposed prompt learning framework is lightweight and seamlessly integrates with any existing GNN encoder. Extensive experiments on popular benchmark datasets show that incorporating prompt learning significantly improves (3% - 15%) the performance of state-of-the-art GNN models in crystal property prediction tasks. Furthermore, the learned soft prompts enable cross-property knowledge transfer, enhancing prediction performance for properties with limited training data. Code is available at https://github.com/shrimonmuke0202/Prompt.git
Shrimon Mukherjee, Kishalay Das, Partha Basuchowdhuri +2
Jul 9, 2026q-bio.QM

DrugGen 2: A disease-aware language model for enhancing drug discovery

Current computational approaches for drug design typically focus on generating molecules conditioned on specific targets or general molecular properties, often neglecting the influence of disease context on target behavior and therapeutic outcomes. To address this gap, we introduce DrugGen-2, a novel generative model that designs small molecules conditioned on both disease ontology and target protein sequences. DrugGen-2 was developed by fine-tuning a pre-trained GPT-2 model on a curated dataset of approved drugs linked to their diseases and targets, using a two-step strategy of supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning via group relative policy optimization (GRPO). This process was guided by reward functions optimizing for chemical validity, novelty, diversity, and high predicted binding affinity. When evaluated on five protein targets relevant to diabetic nephropathy, DrugGen-2 significantly outperformed baseline models (DrugGPT and DrugGen). It demonstrated a superior capacity to generate unique molecules, exhibited greater structural similarity to approved drugs, and achieved improved predicted binding affinities across all targets. Molecular docking analyses further supported these findings, identifying candidate ligands with strong binding potential, including compounds with predicted affinities (-9.917, -9.485, and -9.367) exceeding those of reference drugs such as enalapril for angiotensin-converting enzyme (-8.283). By integrating disease-specific context into molecular generation, DrugGen-2 advances AI-assisted drug discovery, offering a powerful tool for de novo design and drug repurposing that accounts for the complex interplay between diseases and molecular targets.
Ali Motahharynia, Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh-Esfahani, Mahsa Sheikholeslami +4
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

path_boost: A Python Package for Interpretable Graph-Level Prediction using Path-Based Gradient Boosting

We present path_boost, a Python package for interpretable supervised learning on graph-structured input data. The package implements PathBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm that automatically discovers predictive labeled paths within graphs during the learning process. Unlike graph neural networks, which are generally difficult to interpret, PathBoost produces an additive prediction model over path-based features that explicitly reveals which substructures drive predictions. To avoid an exhaustive enumeration of all possible paths, the algorithm iteratively selects and extends paths during learning based on their predictive power, using boosting to combine weak learners into a strong ensemble. The package supports both regression and binary classification. Key features include compatibility with scikit-learn workflows, support for custom base learners and selectors, automatic starting node selection, parallel training across anchor nodes, and built-in variable importance computation. We demonstrate PathBoost on molecular property prediction of transition metal compounds, where atoms serve as nodes and bonds as edges, and further benchmark PathBoost against an established graph neural network and a graph kernel method across six molecular datasets. The package is available on PyPI and GitHub under an open-source license.
Claudio Meggio, Johan Pensar, Riccardo De Bin