LICO: Large Language Models for In-Context Molecular Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nguyen, Tung, Grover, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nguyen, Tung
Grover, Aditya
author_facet Nguyen, Tung
Grover, Aditya
contents Optimizing black-box functions is a fundamental problem in science and engineering. To solve this problem, many approaches learn a surrogate function that estimates the underlying objective from limited historical evaluations. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their strong pattern-matching capabilities via pretraining on vast amounts of data, stand out as a potential candidate for surrogate modeling. However, directly prompting a pretrained language model to produce predictions is not feasible in many scientific domains due to the scarcity of domain-specific data in the pretraining corpora and the challenges of articulating complex problems in natural language. In this work, we introduce LICO, a general-purpose model that extends arbitrary base LLMs for black-box optimization, with a particular application to the molecular domain. To achieve this, we equip the language model with a separate embedding layer and prediction layer, and train the model to perform in-context predictions on a diverse set of functions defined over the domain. Once trained, LICO can generalize to unseen molecule properties simply via in-context prompting. LICO performs competitively on PMO, a challenging molecular optimization benchmark comprising 23 objective functions, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on its low-budget version PMO-1K.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LICO: Large Language Models for In-Context Molecular Optimization
Nguyen, Tung
Grover, Aditya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Chemical Physics
Biomolecules
Quantitative Methods
Optimizing black-box functions is a fundamental problem in science and engineering. To solve this problem, many approaches learn a surrogate function that estimates the underlying objective from limited historical evaluations. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their strong pattern-matching capabilities via pretraining on vast amounts of data, stand out as a potential candidate for surrogate modeling. However, directly prompting a pretrained language model to produce predictions is not feasible in many scientific domains due to the scarcity of domain-specific data in the pretraining corpora and the challenges of articulating complex problems in natural language. In this work, we introduce LICO, a general-purpose model that extends arbitrary base LLMs for black-box optimization, with a particular application to the molecular domain. To achieve this, we equip the language model with a separate embedding layer and prediction layer, and train the model to perform in-context predictions on a diverse set of functions defined over the domain. Once trained, LICO can generalize to unseen molecule properties simply via in-context prompting. LICO performs competitively on PMO, a challenging molecular optimization benchmark comprising 23 objective functions, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on its low-budget version PMO-1K.
title LICO: Large Language Models for In-Context Molecular Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Chemical Physics
Biomolecules
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18851