Materials
Agriculture is ready for AI, but its data isn't
Agriculture is ready for AI, but its data isn't Data accuracy, structure, and governance are foundational components required for agricultural AI. Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in agriculture, but industry leaders should be wary of investing in AI without first laying the groundwork. The use cases are promising, especially for an industry navigating volatile fertilizer costs, unpredictable weather, and margins that leave little room for error. Research shows AI-enabled predictive models can improve crop yield by 26%, reduce water use by 41%, and cut chemical usage by 33%. However, what AI vendors usually won't tell you is that these solutions are only effective if you have a clean, solid data foundation. However, at Reltio, we have experience in this area, including leading technology strategy at a major agricultural distributor and building a data platform used by enterprises worldwide-we've seen it first hand.
China's mineral squeeze testing Japan's military buildup
Samples of rare earth luminescent materials displayed at an exhibition on China's manufacturing achievements at the National Museum in Beijing in March | REUTERS China's tightening export controls on dual-use materials and strategically important rare earths are beginning to disrupt Japanese industry -- including the defense sector. Chinese customs data tell the sharpest part of the story. Exports of dysprosium oxide to Japan ceased after October 2025, and shipments of terbium oxide ended a month later. No shipments of either material have been recorded since. The halt matters because dysprosium and terbium -- both heavy rare earth elements -- are among the most critical inputs for high-performance permanent magnets used in advanced military systems, electric vehicle motors, aerospace applications and industrial robotics.
Temporal Causal Prior-Data Fitted Networks for Panel Data with Learned Reliability Signals
Talupula, Shravan, Sharma, Saurabh
Estimating causal effects in industrial time series requires handling temporal dynamics, time-varying treatments, and unobserved confounders. Existing causal foundation models (CausalPFN, CausalFM) operate only on static cross-sectional data; neural temporal methods (CRN, G-Net) require per-dataset training; and concurrent temporal-PFN proposals have not been demonstrated at industrial scale. None output explicit per-pair reliability signals alongside their CATE estimates. We introduce Temporal Causal Prior-Data Fitted Networks (TCPFN), a foundation model for zero-shot temporal causal discovery with learned reliability signals. TCPFN makes four contributions: (1) a Causal Judgment Head that jointly predicts null-effect probability, confounding strength, identifiability, mediation fraction, and causal regime; (2) a mixed training prior covering six causal regimes (independent, direct, confounded, mediated, time-varying confounded, feedback) plus CausalFM-style front-door and instrumental-variable priors; (3) a discrete-token panel-data architecture with cross-attention masking that prevents inter-horizon leakage; (4) zero-shot inference at industrial scale via FAISS-based context selection and one-step posterior correction. On 19 benchmark datasets across five domains, TCPFN achieves competitive zero-shot causal discovery: AUROC 0.96 on Tennessee Eastman, 0.93 on SWaT, 0.98 on Causal Rivers, 0.97 on CAUSRCA. The null detector reaches NullF1 0.94, AUROC 0.99. TCPFN scales to V=1,275 on a proprietary Kraft pulp-and-paper dataset in 6 hours on a single GPU; PCMCI, a CPU-only library, on a V=666 sub-panel of the same data took 81.5 hours, extrapolating by O(V^2) to ~12.5 days at V=1,275. TCPFN's top edges identify cross-subsystem causal relationships while PCMCI's surface within-instrument controller-measurement coupling -- a scalability case study.
EnzyControl: Adding Functional and Substrate-Specific Control for Enzyme Backbone Generation
Designing enzyme backbones with substrate-specific functionality is a critical challenge in computational protein engineering. Current generative models excel in protein design but face limitations in binding data, substrate-specific control, and flexibility for de novo enzyme backbone generation. To address this, we introduce EnzyBind, a dataset with 11,100 experimentally validated enzyme-substrate pairs specifically curated from PDBbind. Building on this, we propose EnzyControl, a method that enables functional and substrate-specific control in enzyme backbone generation. Our approach generates enzyme backbones conditioned on MSAannotated catalytic sites and their corresponding substrates, which are automatically extracted from curated enzyme-substrate data. At the core of EnzyControl is EnzyAdapter, a lightweight, modular component integrated into a pretrained motifscaffolding model, allowing it to become substrate-aware. A two-stage training paradigm further refines the model's ability to generate accurate and functional enzyme structures. Experiments show that our EnzyControl achieves the best performance across structural and functional metrics on EnzyBind and EnzyBench benchmarks, with particularly notable improvements of 13% in designability and 13% in catalytic efficiency compared to the baseline models.
e0ed6d6c2ec6df05f929b8a67b78513a-Supplemental-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf
In this section, we propose the detailed information during our benchmark and dataset construction821 process, including the data source description, dataset composition, filtering strategies, and the822 rationale for dataset construction. Chemical reaction data are separately collected from patent databases, including USPTO [19], Pista-828 chio [37], and Reaxys [8]. For reaction mechanism annotation, we followed the processing pipeline829 described in [26].830 A.2 Dataset Composition and Filtering Strategies831 Molecular Samples (25% of Benchmark): Although the ZINC database contains 250,000832 molecules, we observed that its molecular weight distribution is relatively concentrated. To en-833 sure diversity, we carefully selected molecules from PubChem, ChEMBL, and ZINC based on834 molecular weight and structural complexity.
Beyond Chemical QA: Evaluating LLM's Chemical Reasoning with Modular Chemical Operations
While large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning excel in mathematics and coding, their potential for systematic reasoning in chemistry, a domain demanding rigorous structural analysis for real-world tasks like drug design and reaction engineering, remains untapped. Current benchmarks focus on simple knowledge retrieval, neglecting step-by-step reasoning required for complex tasks such as molecular optimization and reaction prediction. To address this, we introduce ChemCoTBench, a reasoning framework that bridges molecular structure understanding with arithmetic-inspired operations, including addition, deletion, and substitution, to formalize chemical problem-solving into transparent, step-by-step workflows. By treating molecular transformations as modular "chemical operations", the framework enables slow-thinking reasoning, mirroring the logic of mathematical proofs while grounding solutions in real-world chemical constraints. We evaluate models on two high-impact tasks: Molecular Property Optimization and Chemical Reaction Prediction. These tasks mirror real-world challenges while providing structured evaluability. We further provide ChemCoTDataset, a pioneering 22,000-instance chemical reasoning dataset with expert-annotated chains of thought to facilitate LLM fine-tuning.
scGeneScope: ATreatment-Matched Single Cell Imaging and Transcriptomics Dataset and Benchmark for Treatment Response Modeling
Understanding cellular responses to chemical interventions is critical to the discovery of effective therapeutics. Because individual biological techniques often measure only one axis of cellular response at a time, high-quality multimodal datasets are needed to unlock a holistic understanding of how cells respond to treatments and to advance computational methods that integrate modalities. However, many techniques destroy cells and thus preclude paired measurements, and attempts to match disparate unimodal datasets are often confounded by data being generated in incompatible experimental settings. Here we introduce scGeneScope, a multimodal single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and Cell Painting microscopy image dataset conditionally paired by chemical treatment, designed to facilitate the development and benchmarking of unimodal, multimodal, and multiple profile machine learning methods for cellular profiling.
LaM-SLidE: Latent Space Modeling of Spatial Dynamical Systems via Linked Entities
Generative models are spearheading recent progress in deep learning, showcasing strong promise for trajectory sampling in dynamical systems as well. However, whereas latent space modeling paradigms have transformed image and video generation, similar approaches are more difficult for most dynamical systems. Such systems - from chemical molecule structures to collective human behavior - are described by interactions of entities, making them inherently linked to connectivity patterns, entity conservation, and the traceability of entities over time. Our approach, LAM-SLIDE (Latent Space Modeling of Spatial Dynamical Systems via Linked Entities), bridges the gap between: (1) keeping the traceability of individual entities in a latent system representation, and (2) leveraging the efficiency and scalability of recent advances in image and video generation, where pre-trained encoder and decoder enable generative modeling directly in latent space. The core idea of LAM-SLIDE is the introduction of identifier representations (IDs) that enable the retrieval of entity properties and entity composition from latent system representations, thus fostering traceability. Experimentally, across different domains, we show that LAM-SLIDE performs favorably in terms of speed, accuracy, and generalizability.
Bridging the Gap Between Cross-Domain Theory and Practical Application: ACase Study on Molecular Dissolution
Artificial intelligence (AI) has played a transformative role in chemical research, greatly facilitating the prediction of small molecule properties, simulation of catalytic processes, and material design. These advances are driven by increases in computing power, open source machine learning frameworks, and extensive chemical datasets. However, a persistent challenge is the limited amount of high-quality real-world data, while models calculated based on large amounts of theoretical data are often costly and difficult to deploy, which hinders the applicability of AI models in practical scenarios. In this study, we enhance the prediction of solutesolvent properties by proposing a novel sample selection method: Core Subset Iterative Extraction (CSIE). CSIE iteratively updates the core sample subset based on information gain to remove redundant samples in theoretical data and optimize the performance of the model on real chemical datasets. Furthermore, we introduce an asymmetric molecular interaction graph neural network (AMGNN) that combines positional information and bidirectional edge connections to simulate real-world chemical reaction scenarios to better capture solute-solvent interactions. Experimental results show that our method can accurately extract the core subset and improve the prediction accuracy. Code is available at: https://CISE-AMGNN.