2024/11/03 by Tianhao Peng, Yuchen Li, Peng, Tianhao +17 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Biomolecules (q-bio.BM) #Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning in Bioinformatics #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.01401
openalex publication_date 2024/11/03 · openalex created_date 2024/11/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent advancements in computational chemistry have leveraged the power of trans-former-based language models, such as MoLFormer, pre-trained using a vast amount of simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) sequences, to understand and predict molecular properties and activities, a critical step in fields like drug discovery and materials science. To further improve performance, researchers have introduced graph neural networks with graph-based molecular representations, such as GEM, incorporating the topology, geometry, 2D or even 3D structures of molecules into pre-training. While most of molecular graphs in existing studies were automatically converted from SMILES sequences, it is to assume that transformer-based language models might be able to implicitly learn structure-aware representations from SMILES sequences. In this paper, we propose \ours -- a SMILES-based \underline\em Molecular \underline\em Language \underline\em Model, which randomly masking SMILES subsequences corresponding to specific molecular \underline\em Functional \underline\em Groups to incorporate structure information of atoms during the pre-training phase. This technique aims to compel the model to better infer molecular structures and properties, thus enhancing its predictive capabilities. Extensive experimental evaluations across 11 benchmark classification and regression tasks in the chemical domain demonstrate the robustness and superiority of \ours. Our findings reveal that \ours outperforms existing pre-training models, either based on SMILES or graphs, in 9 out of the 11 downstream tasks, ranking as a close second in the remaining ones.