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Main Authors: Li, Ran, Di, Shimin, LI, Haowei, Bu, Luanshi, Wang, Jiachuan, Ni, Wangze, Chen, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02215
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author Li, Ran
Di, Shimin
LI, Haowei
Bu, Luanshi
Wang, Jiachuan
Ni, Wangze
Chen, Lei
author_facet Li, Ran
Di, Shimin
LI, Haowei
Bu, Luanshi
Wang, Jiachuan
Ni, Wangze
Chen, Lei
contents Chemical reaction prediction is pivotal for accelerating drug discovery and synthesis planning. Despite advances in data-driven models, current approaches are hindered by an overemphasis on parameter and dataset scaling. Some methods coupled with evaluation techniques that bypass fundamental challenges in reaction representation and fail to capture deep chemical intuition like reaction common sense and {topological atom mapping logic}. We argue that the core challenge lies in instilling these knowledge into the models. To this end, we propose a unified framework that prioritizes chemical understanding over scale through three key innovations: (1) a {Latent Chemical Consistency} objective that models reactions as movements on a continuous chemical manifold, ensuring reversible and physically plausible transformations; (2) a {Hierarchical Cognitive Curriculum} that trains the model through progressive stages, from syntax mastery to semantic reasoning, building robust chemical intuition; (3) {Atom-Map Permutation Invariance (AMPI)}, which force the model to learn invariant relational topology and balance multi-task learning. (4)and structured plan-based reasoning to improve the performance of the LLMs. Our compact {0.5B-parameter model}, \textbf{RxnNano} significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs ten times larger (>7B) and all the domain baselines, achieving a 23.5\% Top-1 accuracy improvement on rigorous benchmarks without test-time augmentation. https://github.com/rlisml/RxnNano.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02215
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RxnNano:Training Compact LLMs for Chemical Reaction and Retrosynthesis Prediction via Hierarchical Curriculum Learning
Li, Ran
Di, Shimin
LI, Haowei
Bu, Luanshi
Wang, Jiachuan
Ni, Wangze
Chen, Lei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Chemical reaction prediction is pivotal for accelerating drug discovery and synthesis planning. Despite advances in data-driven models, current approaches are hindered by an overemphasis on parameter and dataset scaling. Some methods coupled with evaluation techniques that bypass fundamental challenges in reaction representation and fail to capture deep chemical intuition like reaction common sense and {topological atom mapping logic}. We argue that the core challenge lies in instilling these knowledge into the models. To this end, we propose a unified framework that prioritizes chemical understanding over scale through three key innovations: (1) a {Latent Chemical Consistency} objective that models reactions as movements on a continuous chemical manifold, ensuring reversible and physically plausible transformations; (2) a {Hierarchical Cognitive Curriculum} that trains the model through progressive stages, from syntax mastery to semantic reasoning, building robust chemical intuition; (3) {Atom-Map Permutation Invariance (AMPI)}, which force the model to learn invariant relational topology and balance multi-task learning. (4)and structured plan-based reasoning to improve the performance of the LLMs. Our compact {0.5B-parameter model}, \textbf{RxnNano} significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs ten times larger (>7B) and all the domain baselines, achieving a 23.5\% Top-1 accuracy improvement on rigorous benchmarks without test-time augmentation. https://github.com/rlisml/RxnNano.
title RxnNano:Training Compact LLMs for Chemical Reaction and Retrosynthesis Prediction via Hierarchical Curriculum Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02215