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Collaborating Authors

 Gao, Zhifeng


Uni-3DAR: Unified 3D Generation and Understanding via Autoregression on Compressed Spatial Tokens

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in large language models and their multi-modal extensions have demonstrated the effectiveness of unifying generation and understanding through autoregressive next-token prediction. However, despite the critical role of 3D structural generation and understanding (3D GU) in AI for science, these tasks have largely evolved independently, with autoregressive methods remaining underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce Uni-3DAR, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates 3D GU tasks via autoregressive prediction. At its core, Uni-3DAR employs a novel hierarchical tokenization that compresses 3D space using an octree, leveraging the inherent sparsity of 3D structures. It then applies an additional tokenization for fine-grained structural details, capturing key attributes such as atom types and precise spatial coordinates in microscopic 3D structures. We further propose two optimizations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. The first is a two-level subtree compression strategy, which reduces the octree token sequence by up to 8x. The second is a masked next-token prediction mechanism tailored for dynamically varying token positions, significantly boosting model performance. By combining these strategies, Uni-3DAR successfully unifies diverse 3D GU tasks within a single autoregressive framework. Extensive experiments across multiple microscopic 3D GU tasks, including molecules, proteins, polymers, and crystals, validate its effectiveness and versatility. Notably, Uni-3DAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art diffusion models by a substantial margin, achieving up to 256\% relative improvement while delivering inference speeds up to 21.8x faster. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/dptech-corp/Uni-3DAR.


Beyond Atoms: Enhancing Molecular Pretrained Representations with 3D Space Modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Molecular pretrained representations (MPR) has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing the challenge of limited supervised data in applications such as drug discovery and material design. While early MPR methods relied on 1D sequences and 2D graphs, recent advancements have incorporated 3D conformational information to capture rich atomic interactions. However, these prior models treat molecules merely as discrete atom sets, overlooking the space surrounding them. We argue from a physical perspective that only modeling these discrete points is insufficient. We first present a simple yet insightful observation: naively adding randomly sampled virtual points beyond atoms can surprisingly enhance MPR performance. In light of this, we propose a principled framework that incorporates the entire 3D space spanned by molecules. We implement the framework via a novel Transformer-based architecture, dubbed SpaceFormer, with three key components: (1) grid-based space discretization; (2) grid sampling/merging; and (3) efficient 3D positional encoding. Extensive experiments show that SpaceFormer significantly outperforms previous 3D MPR models across various downstream tasks with limited data, validating the benefit of leveraging the additional 3D space beyond atoms in MPR models.


Inverse Materials Design by Large Language Model-Assisted Generative Framework

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

These authors contributed equally: Y un Hao, Che Fan. Here, we introduce AlloyGAN, a closed-loop framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-assisted text mining with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs) to enhance data diversity and improve inverse design. For metallic glasses, the framework predicts thermodynamic properties with discrepancies of less than 8% from experiments, demonstrating its robustness. By bridging generative AI with domain knowledge and validation workflows, AlloyGAN offers a scalable approach to accelerate the discovery of materials with tailored properties, paving the way for broader applications in materials science. Materials design typically involves two fundamental problems: forward and inverse problems. The forward problem focuses on understanding the relationship between composition, processing conditions, and material properties. This understanding enables researchers to optimize alloy compositions and processing conditions to achieve enhanced performance. Conversely, the inverse problem is more prevalent in material design and poses the question: "Given the desired material properties, what composition and processing conditions are required to achieve them?" The inverse problem is particularly challenging for multi-component materials due to the vast composition space and complex interactions among components. Traditional "trial-and-error" experimental approaches are often prohibitively time-consuming and cost-ineffective [1] for such problems. Addressing these challenges thus requires innovative approaches to efficiently navigate the composition space and identify optimal solutions for materials design.


A Simple yet Effective DDG Predictor is An Unsupervised Antibody Optimizer and Explainer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The proteins that exist today have been optimized over billions of years of natural evolution, during which nature creates random mutations and selects them. The discovery of functionally promising mutations is challenged by the limited evolutionary accessible regions, i.e., only a small region on the fitness landscape is beneficial. There have been numerous priors used to constrain protein evolution to regions of landscapes with high-fitness variants, among which the change in binding free energy (DDG) of protein complexes upon mutations is one of the most commonly used priors. However, the huge mutation space poses two challenges: (1) how to improve the efficiency of DDG prediction for fast mutation screening; and (2) how to explain mutation preferences and efficiently explore accessible evolutionary regions. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight DDG predictor (Light-DDG), which adopts a structure-aware Transformer as the backbone and enhances it by knowledge distilled from existing powerful but computationally heavy DDG predictors. Additionally, we augmented, annotated, and released a large-scale dataset containing millions of mutation data for pre-training Light-DDG. We find that such a simple yet effective Light-DDG can serve as a good unsupervised antibody optimizer and explainer. For the target antibody, we propose a novel Mutation Explainer to learn mutation preferences, which accounts for the marginal benefit of each mutation per residue. To further explore accessible evolutionary regions, we conduct preference-guided antibody optimization and evaluate antibody candidates quickly using Light-DDG to identify desirable mutations.


Intelligent System for Automated Molecular Patent Infringement Assessment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automated drug discovery offers significant potential for accelerating the development of novel therapeutics by substituting labor-intensive human workflows with machine-driven processes. However, molecules generated by artificial intelligence may unintentionally infringe on existing patents, posing legal and financial risks that impede the full automation of drug discovery pipelines. This paper introduces PatentFinder, a novel multi-agent and tool-enhanced intelligence system that can accurately and comprehensively evaluate small molecules for patent infringement. PatentFinder features five specialized agents that collaboratively analyze patent claims and molecular structures with heuristic and model-based tools, generating interpretable infringement reports. To support systematic evaluation, we curate MolPatent-240, a benchmark dataset tailored for patent infringement assessment algorithms. On this benchmark, PatentFinder outperforms baseline methods that rely solely on large language models or specialized chemical tools, achieving a 13.8% improvement in F1-score and a 12% increase in accuracy. Additionally, PatentFinder autonomously generates detailed and interpretable patent infringement reports, showcasing enhanced accuracy and improved interpretability. The high accuracy and interpretability of PatentFinder make it a valuable and reliable tool for automating patent infringement assessments, offering a practical solution for integrating patent protection analysis into the drug discovery pipeline.


Uni-ELF: A Multi-Level Representation Learning Framework for Electrolyte Formulation Design

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Advancements in lithium battery technology heavily rely on the design and engineering of electrolytes. However, current schemes for molecular design and recipe optimization of electrolytes lack an effective computational-experimental closed loop and often fall short in accurately predicting diverse electrolyte formulation properties. In this work, we introduce Uni-ELF, a novel multi-level representation learning framework to advance electrolyte design. Our approach involves two-stage pretraining: reconstructing three-dimensional molecular structures at the molecular level using the Uni-Mol model, and predicting statistical structural properties (e.g., radial distribution functions) from molecular dynamics simulations at the mixture level. Through this comprehensive pretraining, Uni-ELF is able to capture intricate molecular and mixture-level information, which significantly enhances its predictive capability. As a result, Uni-ELF substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting both molecular properties (e.g., melting point, boiling point, synthesizability) and formulation properties (e.g., conductivity, Coulombic efficiency). Moreover, Uni-ELF can be seamlessly integrated into an automatic experimental design workflow. We believe this innovative framework will pave the way for automated AI-based electrolyte design and engineering.


Uni-Mol2: Exploring Molecular Pretraining Model at Scale

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, pretraining models have made significant advancements in the fields of natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), and life sciences. The significant advancements in NLP and CV are predominantly driven by the expansion of model parameters and data size, a phenomenon now recognized as the scaling laws. However, research exploring scaling law in molecular pretraining models remains unexplored. In this work, we present Uni-Mol2 , an innovative molecular pretraining model that leverages a two-track transformer to effectively integrate features at the atomic level, graph level, and geometry structure level. Along with this, we systematically investigate the scaling law within molecular pretraining models, characterizing the power-law correlations between validation loss and model size, dataset size, and computational resources. Consequently, we successfully scale Uni-Mol2 to 1.1 billion parameters through pretraining on 800 million conformations, making it the largest molecular pretraining model to date. Extensive experiments show consistent improvement in the downstream tasks as the model size grows. The Uni-Mol2 with 1.1B parameters also outperforms existing methods, achieving an average 27% improvement on the QM9 and 14% on COMPAS-1D dataset.


SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language understanding and generation, sparking significant interest in applying them to scientific literature analysis. However, existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in this domain, particularly in scenarios requiring higher-level abilities beyond mere memorization and the handling of multimodal data. In response to this gap, we introduce SciAssess, a benchmark specifically designed for the comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in scientific literature analysis. SciAssess aims to thoroughly assess the efficacy of LLMs by focusing on their capabilities in Memorization (L1), Comprehension (L2), and Analysis \& Reasoning (L3). It encompasses a variety of tasks drawn from diverse scientific fields, including fundamental science, alloy materials, biomedicine, drug discovery, and organic materials. To ensure the reliability of SciAssess, rigorous quality control measures have been implemented, ensuring accuracy, anonymization, and compliance with copyright standards. SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs, including GPT, Claude, and Gemini, highlighting their strengths and areas for improvement. This evaluation supports the ongoing development of LLM applications in the analysis of scientific literature. SciAssess and its resources are available at \url{https://sci-assess.github.io/}.


Uni-SMART: Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as tables, charts, and molecule, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present \textbf{Uni-SMART} (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over other text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.


Predicting Polymer Properties Based on Multimodal Multitask Pretraining

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the past few decades, polymers, high-molecular-weight compounds formed by bonding numerous identical or similar monomers covalently, have played an essential role in various scientific fields. In this context, accurate prediction of their properties is becoming increasingly crucial. Typically, the properties of a polymer, such as plasticity, conductivity, bio-compatibility, and so on, are highly correlated with its 3D structure. However, current methods for predicting polymer properties heavily rely on information from polymer SMILES sequences (P-SMILES strings) while ignoring crucial 3D structural information, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we propose MMPolymer, a novel multimodal multitask pretraining framework incorporating both polymer 1D sequential information and 3D structural information to enhance downstream polymer property prediction tasks. Besides, to overcome the limited availability of polymer 3D data, we further propose the "Star Substitution" strategy to extract 3D structural information effectively. During pretraining, MMPolymer not only predicts masked tokens and recovers 3D coordinates but also achieves the cross-modal alignment of latent representation. Subsequently, we further fine-tune the pretrained MMPolymer for downstream polymer property prediction tasks in the supervised learning paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that MMPolymer achieves state-of-the-art performance in various polymer property prediction tasks. Moreover, leveraging the pretrained MMPolymer and using only one modality (either P-SMILES string or 3D conformation) during fine-tuning can also surpass existing polymer property prediction methods, highlighting the exceptional capability of MMPolymer in polymer feature extraction and utilization. Our online platform for polymer property prediction is available at https://app.bohrium.dp.tech/mmpolymer.