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Hauptverfasser: Varadi, Kristof, Marosi, Mark, Antal, Peter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09757
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author Varadi, Kristof
Marosi, Mark
Antal, Peter
author_facet Varadi, Kristof
Marosi, Mark
Antal, Peter
contents Transformers generate valid and diverse chemical structures, but little is known about the mechanisms that enable these models to capture the rules of molecular representation. We present a mechanistic analysis of autoregressive transformers trained on drug-like small molecules to reveal the computational structure underlying their capabilities across multiple levels of abstraction. We identify computational patterns consistent with low-level syntactic parsing and more abstract chemical validity constraints. Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we extract feature dictionaries associated with chemically relevant activation patterns. We validate our findings on downstream tasks and find that mechanistic insights can translate to predictive performance in various practical settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_09757
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Circuits, Features, and Heuristics in Molecular Transformers
Varadi, Kristof
Marosi, Mark
Antal, Peter
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Transformers generate valid and diverse chemical structures, but little is known about the mechanisms that enable these models to capture the rules of molecular representation. We present a mechanistic analysis of autoregressive transformers trained on drug-like small molecules to reveal the computational structure underlying their capabilities across multiple levels of abstraction. We identify computational patterns consistent with low-level syntactic parsing and more abstract chemical validity constraints. Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we extract feature dictionaries associated with chemically relevant activation patterns. We validate our findings on downstream tasks and find that mechanistic insights can translate to predictive performance in various practical settings.
title Circuits, Features, and Heuristics in Molecular Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09757