It is common that these data themselves have inherently complicated 3D geometric structures.

It is common that these data themselves have inherently complicated 3D geometric structures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong abilities in natural language processing tasks have emerged and have been applied in various kinds of areas such as science, finance and software engineering.

The development of efficient machine learning models for molecular systems representation is becoming crucial in scientific research.

Prediction of complete step-by-step chemical reaction mechanisms (CRMs) remains a major challenge. Whereas the traditional approaches in CRM tasks rely on expert-driven experiments or costly quantum chemical computations, contemporary deep learning (DL) alternatives ignore key intermediates and mechanistic steps and often suffer from hallucinations. We present DeepMech, an interpretable graph-based DL framework employing atom- and bond-level attention, guided by generalized templates of mechanistic operations (TMOps), to generate CRMs. Trained on our curated ReactMech dataset (~30K CRMs with 100K atom-mapped and mass-balanced elementary steps), DeepMech achieves 98.98+/-0.12% accuracy in predicting elementary steps and 95.94+/-0.21% in complete CRM tasks, besides maintaining high fidelity even in out-of-distribution scenarios as well as in predicting side and/or byproducts. Extension to multistep CRMs relevant to prebiotic chemistry, demonstrates the ability of DeepMech in effectively reconstructing 2 pathways from simple primordial substrates to complex biomolecules such as serine and aldopentose. Attention analysis identifies reactive atoms/bonds in line with chemical intuition, rendering our model interpretable and suitable for reaction design.

Understanding and predicting polymer solubility in various solvents is critical for applications ranging from recycling to pharmaceutical formulation. This work presents a deep learning framework that predicts polymer solubility, expressed as weight percent (wt%), directly from SMILES representations of both polymers and solvents. A dataset of 8,049 polymer solvent pairs at 25 deg C was constructed from calibrated molecular dynamics simulations (Zhou et al., 2023), and molecular descriptors and fingerprints were combined into a 2,394 feature representation per sample. A fully connected neural network with six hidden layers was trained using the Adam optimizer and evaluated using mean squared error loss, achieving strong agreement between predicted and actual solubility values. Generalizability was demonstrated using experimentally measured data from the Materials Genome Project, where the model maintained high accuracy on 25 unseen polymer solvent combinations. These findings highlight the viability of SMILES based machine learning models for scalable solubility prediction and high-throughput solvent screening, supporting applications in green chemistry, polymer processing, and materials design.

Solution-processed electrochromic materials offer high potential for energy-efficient smart windows and displays. Their performance varies with material choice and processing conditions. Electrochromic thin film electrodes require a smooth, defect-free coating for optimal contrast between bleached and colored states. The complexity of optimizing the spin-coated electrochromic thin layer poses challenges for rapid development. This study demonstrates the use of self-driving laboratories to accelerate the development of electrochromic coatings by coupling automation with machine learning. Our system combines automated data acquisition, image processing, spectral analysis, and Bayesian optimization to explore processing parameters efficiently. This approach not only increases throughput but also enables a pointed search for optimal processing parameters. The approach can be applied to various solution-processed materials, highlighting the potential of self-driving labs in enhancing materials discovery and process optimization.