MolEdit: Knowledge Editing for Multimodal Molecule Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lei, Zhenyu, Soga, Patrick, Zhu, Yaochen, He, Yinhan, Dong, Yushun, Li, Jundong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lei, Zhenyu
Soga, Patrick
Zhu, Yaochen
He, Yinhan
Dong, Yushun
Li, Jundong
author_facet Lei, Zhenyu
Soga, Patrick
Zhu, Yaochen
He, Yinhan
Dong, Yushun
Li, Jundong
contents Understanding and continuously refining multimodal molecular knowledge is crucial for advancing biomedicine, chemistry, and materials science. Molecule language models (MoLMs) have become powerful tools in these domains, integrating structural representations (e.g., SMILES strings, molecular graphs) with rich contextual descriptions (e.g., physicochemical properties). However, MoLMs can encode and propagate inaccuracies due to outdated web-mined training corpora or malicious manipulation, jeopardizing downstream discovery pipelines. While knowledge editing has been explored for general-domain AI, its application to MoLMs remains uncharted, presenting unique challenges due to the multifaceted and interdependent nature of molecular knowledge. In this paper, we take the first step toward MoLM editing for two critical tasks: molecule-to-caption generation and caption-to-molecule generation. To address molecule-specific challenges, we propose MolEdit, a powerful framework that enables targeted modifications while preserving unrelated molecular knowledge. MolEdit combines a Multi-Expert Knowledge Adapter that routes edits to specialized experts for different molecular facets with an Expertise-Aware Editing Switcher that activates the adapters only when input closely matches the stored edits across all expertise, minimizing interference with unrelated knowledge. To systematically evaluate editing performance, we introduce MEBench, a comprehensive benchmark assessing multiple dimensions, including Reliability (accuracy of the editing), Locality (preservation of irrelevant knowledge), and Generality (robustness to reformed queries). Across extensive experiments on two popular MoLM backbones, MolEdit delivers up to 18.8% higher Reliability and 12.0% better Locality than baselines while maintaining efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/LzyFischer/MolEdit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12770
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MolEdit: Knowledge Editing for Multimodal Molecule Language Models
Lei, Zhenyu
Soga, Patrick
Zhu, Yaochen
He, Yinhan
Dong, Yushun
Li, Jundong
Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Understanding and continuously refining multimodal molecular knowledge is crucial for advancing biomedicine, chemistry, and materials science. Molecule language models (MoLMs) have become powerful tools in these domains, integrating structural representations (e.g., SMILES strings, molecular graphs) with rich contextual descriptions (e.g., physicochemical properties). However, MoLMs can encode and propagate inaccuracies due to outdated web-mined training corpora or malicious manipulation, jeopardizing downstream discovery pipelines. While knowledge editing has been explored for general-domain AI, its application to MoLMs remains uncharted, presenting unique challenges due to the multifaceted and interdependent nature of molecular knowledge. In this paper, we take the first step toward MoLM editing for two critical tasks: molecule-to-caption generation and caption-to-molecule generation. To address molecule-specific challenges, we propose MolEdit, a powerful framework that enables targeted modifications while preserving unrelated molecular knowledge. MolEdit combines a Multi-Expert Knowledge Adapter that routes edits to specialized experts for different molecular facets with an Expertise-Aware Editing Switcher that activates the adapters only when input closely matches the stored edits across all expertise, minimizing interference with unrelated knowledge. To systematically evaluate editing performance, we introduce MEBench, a comprehensive benchmark assessing multiple dimensions, including Reliability (accuracy of the editing), Locality (preservation of irrelevant knowledge), and Generality (robustness to reformed queries). Across extensive experiments on two popular MoLM backbones, MolEdit delivers up to 18.8% higher Reliability and 12.0% better Locality than baselines while maintaining efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/LzyFischer/MolEdit.
title MolEdit: Knowledge Editing for Multimodal Molecule Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12770