SmilesT5: Domain-specific pretraining for molecular language models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Spence, Philip, Paige, Brooks, Osbourn, Anne
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Spence, Philip
Paige, Brooks
Osbourn, Anne
author_facet Spence, Philip
Paige, Brooks
Osbourn, Anne
contents Molecular property prediction is an increasingly critical task within drug discovery and development. Typically, neural networks can learn molecular properties using graph-based, language-based or feature-based methods. Recent advances in natural language processing have highlighted the capabilities of neural networks to learn complex human language using masked language modelling. These approaches to training large transformer-based deep learning models have also been used to learn the language of molecules, as represented by simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) strings. Here, we present novel domain-specific text-to-text pretraining tasks that yield improved performance in six classification-based molecular property prediction benchmarks, relative to both traditional likelihood-based training and previously proposed fine-tuning tasks. Through ablation studies, we show that data and computational efficiency can be improved by using these domain-specific pretraining tasks. Finally, the pretrained embeddings from the model can be used as fixed inputs into a downstream machine learning classifier and yield comparable performance to finetuning but with much lower computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22514
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SmilesT5: Domain-specific pretraining for molecular language models
Spence, Philip
Paige, Brooks
Osbourn, Anne
Machine Learning
Molecular property prediction is an increasingly critical task within drug discovery and development. Typically, neural networks can learn molecular properties using graph-based, language-based or feature-based methods. Recent advances in natural language processing have highlighted the capabilities of neural networks to learn complex human language using masked language modelling. These approaches to training large transformer-based deep learning models have also been used to learn the language of molecules, as represented by simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) strings. Here, we present novel domain-specific text-to-text pretraining tasks that yield improved performance in six classification-based molecular property prediction benchmarks, relative to both traditional likelihood-based training and previously proposed fine-tuning tasks. Through ablation studies, we show that data and computational efficiency can be improved by using these domain-specific pretraining tasks. Finally, the pretrained embeddings from the model can be used as fixed inputs into a downstream machine learning classifier and yield comparable performance to finetuning but with much lower computational overhead.
title SmilesT5: Domain-specific pretraining for molecular language models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22514