Thin Bridges for Drug Text Alignment: Lightweight Contrastive Learning for Target Specific Drug Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Tupakula, Mallikarjuna
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Tupakula, Mallikarjuna
author_facet Tupakula, Mallikarjuna
contents Multimodal foundation models hold promise for drug discovery and biomedical applications, but most existing approaches rely on heavy pretraining or large scale multimodal corpora. We investigate whether thin contrastive bridges, lightweight projection heads over frozen unimodal encoders can align chemical and textual representations without training a full multimodal model. Using paired mechanisms from ChEMBL, we align ECFP4 molecular fingerprints with biomedical sentence embeddings through dual linear projections trained with a contrastive objective. To better handle drugs sharing the same therapeutic target, we incorporate hard negative weighting and a margin loss. Evaluation under scaffold based splits, which require generalization across disjoint chemical cores, demonstrates that our approach achieves non-trivial cross modal alignment and substantially improves within target discrimination compared to frozen baselines. These results suggest that thin bridges offer a compute efficient alternative to large scale multimodal pretraining, enabling scaffold aware drug text alignment and target specific retrieval in precision medicine.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thin Bridges for Drug Text Alignment: Lightweight Contrastive Learning for Target Specific Drug Retrieval
Tupakula, Mallikarjuna
Machine Learning
Biomolecules
Multimodal foundation models hold promise for drug discovery and biomedical applications, but most existing approaches rely on heavy pretraining or large scale multimodal corpora. We investigate whether thin contrastive bridges, lightweight projection heads over frozen unimodal encoders can align chemical and textual representations without training a full multimodal model. Using paired mechanisms from ChEMBL, we align ECFP4 molecular fingerprints with biomedical sentence embeddings through dual linear projections trained with a contrastive objective. To better handle drugs sharing the same therapeutic target, we incorporate hard negative weighting and a margin loss. Evaluation under scaffold based splits, which require generalization across disjoint chemical cores, demonstrates that our approach achieves non-trivial cross modal alignment and substantially improves within target discrimination compared to frozen baselines. These results suggest that thin bridges offer a compute efficient alternative to large scale multimodal pretraining, enabling scaffold aware drug text alignment and target specific retrieval in precision medicine.
title Thin Bridges for Drug Text Alignment: Lightweight Contrastive Learning for Target Specific Drug Retrieval
topic Machine Learning
Biomolecules
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03309