Doubly Stochastic Graph-based Non-autoregressive Reaction Prediction
This work solves a domain-specific problem in organic chemistry for drug discovery researchers, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of non-autoregressive reaction prediction in drug discovery by addressing violations of physical constraints like electron-counting and symmetry rules, resulting in improved predictive performance without excessive computational cost.
Organic reaction prediction is a critical task in drug discovery. Recently, researchers have achieved non-autoregressive reaction prediction by modeling the redistribution of electrons, resulting in state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy, and enabling parallel sampling. However, the current non-autoregressive decoder does not satisfy two essential rules of electron redistribution modeling simultaneously: the electron-counting rule and the symmetry rule. This violation of the physical constraints of chemical reactions impairs model performance. In this work, we propose a new framework called that combines two doubly stochastic self-attention mappings to obtain electron redistribution predictions that follow both constraints. We further extend our solution to a general multi-head attention mechanism with augmented constraints. To achieve this, we apply Sinkhorn's algorithm to iteratively update self-attention mappings, which imposes doubly conservative constraints as additional informative priors on electron redistribution modeling. We theoretically demonstrate that our can simultaneously satisfy both rules, which the current decoder mechanism cannot do. Empirical results show that our approach consistently improves the predictive performance of non-autoregressive models and does not bring an unbearable additional computational cost.