Reinforced Reasoning for End-to-End Retrosynthetic Planning
This addresses a fundamental challenge in organic chemistry for chemists and AI researchers, offering a novel approach to improve planning coherence, though it builds incrementally on existing reasoning and reinforcement learning methods.
The paper tackled the combinatorial complexity of retrosynthetic planning in organic chemistry by introducing ReTriP, an end-to-end generative framework that reformulates it as a Chain-of-Thought reasoning task, achieving state-of-the-art performance on RetroBench with superior robustness in long-horizon planning.
Retrosynthetic planning is a fundamental task in organic chemistry, yet remains challenging due to its combinatorial complexity. To address this, conventional approaches typically rely on hybrid frameworks that combine single-step predictions with external search heuristics, inevitably fracturing the logical coherence between local molecular transformations and global planning objectives. To bridge this gap and embed sophisticated strategic foresight directly into the model's chemical reasoning, we introduce ReTriP, an end-to-end generative framework that reformulates retrosynthesis as a direct Chain-of-Thought reasoning task. We establish a path-coherent molecular representation and employ a progressive training curriculum that transitions from reasoning distillation to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, effectively aligning stepwise generation with practical route utility. Empirical evaluation on RetroBench demonstrates that ReTriP achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting superior robustness in long-horizon planning compared to hybrid baselines.