Kevin Maik Jablonka, Qianxiang Ai, Alexander Al-Feghali et al. · cambridge
Large-language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 caught the interest of many scientists. Recent studies suggested that these models could be useful in chemistry and materials science. To explore these possibilities, we organized a hackathon. This article chronicles the projects built as part of this hackathon. Participants employed LLMs for various applications, including predicting properties of molecules and materials, designing novel interfaces for tools, extracting knowledge from unstructured data, and developing new educational applications. The diverse topics and the fact that working prototypes could be generated in less than two days highlight that LLMs will profoundly impact the future of our fields. The rich collection of ideas and projects also indicates that the applications of LLMs are not limited to materials science and chemistry but offer potential benefits to a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are expanding in popularity for broad applications to challenging tasks in chemistry and materials science. Examples include the prediction of properties, the discovery of new reaction pathways, or the design of new molecules. The machine needs to read and write fluently in a chemical language for each of these tasks. Strings are a common tool to represent molecular graphs, and the most popular molecular string representation, SMILES, has powered cheminformatics since the late 1980s. However, in the context of AI and ML in chemistry, SMILES has several shortcomings -- most pertinently, most combinations of symbols lead to invalid results with no valid chemical interpretation. To overcome this issue, a new language for molecules was introduced in 2020 that guarantees 100\% robustness: SELFIES (SELF-referencIng Embedded Strings). SELFIES has since simplified and enabled numerous new applications in chemistry. In this manuscript, we look to the future and discuss molecular string representations, along with their respective opportunities and challenges. We propose 16 concrete Future Projects for robust molecular representations. These involve the extension toward new chemical domains, exciting questions at the interface of AI and robust languages and interpretability for both humans and machines. We hope that these proposals will inspire several follow-up works exploiting the full potential of molecular string representations for the future of AI in chemistry and materials science.
Kevin Maik Jablonka, Fergus Mcilwaine, Susana Garcia et al.
Nigam et al. reported a genetic algorithm (GA) utilizing the SELFIES representation and also propose an adaptive, neural network-based penalty that is supposed to improve the diversity of the generated molecules. The main claims of the paper are that this GA outperforms other generative techniques (as measured by the penalized logP) and that a neural network-based adaptive penalty increases the diversity of the generated molecules. In this work, we investigated the reproducibility of their claims. Overall, we were able to reproduce comparable results using the SELFIES-based GA, but mostly by exploiting deficiencies of the (easily optimizable) fitness function (i.e., generating long, sulfur containing chains). In addition, we reproduce results showing that the discriminator can be used to bias the generation of molecules to ones that are similar to the reference set. Lastly, we attempted to quantify the evolution of the diversity, understand the influence of some hyperparameters, and propose improvements to the adaptive penalty.