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Main Authors: Su, Yanyi, Wang, Hongshuai, Gao, Zhifeng, Cheng, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10452
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author Su, Yanyi
Wang, Hongshuai
Gao, Zhifeng
Cheng, Jun
author_facet Su, Yanyi
Wang, Hongshuai
Gao, Zhifeng
Cheng, Jun
contents Olfaction lies at the intersection of chemical structure, neural encoding, and linguistic perception, yet existing representation methods fail to fully capture this pathway. Current approaches typically model only isolated segments of the olfactory pathway, overlooking the complete chain from molecule to receptors to linguistic descriptions. Such fragmentation yields learned embeddings that lack both biological grounding and semantic interpretability. We propose NOSE (Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding), a representation learning framework that aligns three modalities along the olfactory pathway: molecular structure, receptor sequence, and natural language description. Rather than simply fusing these signals, we decouple their contributions via orthogonal constraints, preserving the unique encoded information of each modality. To address the sparsity of olfactory language, we introduce a weak positive sample strategy to calibrate semantic similarity, preventing erroneous repulsion of similar odors in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NOSE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and excellent zero-shot generalization, confirming the strong alignment between its representation space and human olfactory intuition.Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xianyusyy/NOSE
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NOSE: Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding with Tri-Modal Orthogonal Contrastive Learning
Su, Yanyi
Wang, Hongshuai
Gao, Zhifeng
Cheng, Jun
Computation and Language
Olfaction lies at the intersection of chemical structure, neural encoding, and linguistic perception, yet existing representation methods fail to fully capture this pathway. Current approaches typically model only isolated segments of the olfactory pathway, overlooking the complete chain from molecule to receptors to linguistic descriptions. Such fragmentation yields learned embeddings that lack both biological grounding and semantic interpretability. We propose NOSE (Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding), a representation learning framework that aligns three modalities along the olfactory pathway: molecular structure, receptor sequence, and natural language description. Rather than simply fusing these signals, we decouple their contributions via orthogonal constraints, preserving the unique encoded information of each modality. To address the sparsity of olfactory language, we introduce a weak positive sample strategy to calibrate semantic similarity, preventing erroneous repulsion of similar odors in the feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NOSE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and excellent zero-shot generalization, confirming the strong alignment between its representation space and human olfactory intuition.Code and data are available at https://github.com/Xianyusyy/NOSE
title NOSE: Neural Olfactory-Semantic Embedding with Tri-Modal Orthogonal Contrastive Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10452