While olfaction is central to how animals perceive the world, this rich chemical sensory modality remains largely inaccessible to machines. One key bottleneck is the lack of diverse, multimodal olfactory training data collected in natural settings. We present New York Smells, a large dataset of paired image and olfactory signals captured ``in the wild.'' Our dataset contains 7,000 smell-image pairs from 3,500 distinct objects across indoor and outdoor environments, with approximately 70$\times$ more objects than existing olfactory datasets. Our benchmark has three tasks: cross-modal smell-to-image retrieval, recognizing scenes, objects, and materials from smell alone, and fine-grained discrimination between grass species. Through experiments on our dataset, we find that visual data enables cross-modal olfactory representation learning, and that our learned olfactory representations outperform widely-used hand-crafted features.

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This study investigates two algorithms for fast inference in generative models of olfaction. Their goal is to compute the most likely, linear mixture of odors comprising an olfactory stimulus. One of the algorithms employs variational inference, while the other is based on a sampling scheme. Simulations demonstrate that both algorithms perform suitably well, and the authors claim that inference is performed rapidly within the first 100 ms, while eliminating false positives (detection of odors not present in a particular stimulus) takes much longer and is difficult when more than two odors are present.

The olfactory system faces a difficult inference problem: it has to determine what odors are present based on the distributed activation of its receptor neurons. Here we derive neural implementations of two approximate inference algorithms that could be used by the brain. One is a variational algorithm (which builds on the work of Beck.

The prediction of odor characters is still impossible based on the odorant molecular structure. We designed a CNN-based regressor for computed parameters in molecular vibrations (CNN\_vib), in order to investigate the ability to predict odor characters of molecular vibrations. In this study, we explored following three approaches for the predictability; (i) CNN with molecular vibrational parameters, (ii) logistic regression based on vibrational spectra, and (iii) logistic regression with molecular fingerprint(FP). Our investigation demonstrates that both (i) and (ii) provide predictablity, and also that the vibrations as an explanatory variable (i and ii) and logistic regression with fingerprints (iii) show nearly identical tendencies. The predictabilities of (i) and (ii), depending on odor descriptors, are comparable to those of (iii). Our research shows that odor is predictable by odorant molecular vibration as well as their shapes alone. Our findings provide insight into the representation of molecular motional features beyond molecular structures.

Despite extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence (AI), modern systems remain incomplete representations of human cognition. Vision, audition, and language have received disproportionate attention due to well-defined benchmarks, standardized datasets, and consensus-driven scientific foundations. In contrast, olfaction - a high-bandwidth, evolutionarily critical sense - has been largely overlooked. This omission presents a foundational gap in the construction of truly embodied and ethically aligned super-human intelligence. We argue that the exclusion of olfactory perception from AI architectures is not due to irrelevance but to structural challenges: unresolved scientific theories of smell, heterogeneous sensor technologies, lack of standardized olfactory datasets, absence of AI-oriented benchmarks, and difficulty in evaluating sub-perceptual signal processing. These obstacles have hindered the development of machine olfaction despite its tight coupling with memory, emotion, and contextual reasoning in biological systems. In this position paper, we assert that meaningful progress toward general and embodied intelligence requires serious investment in olfactory research by the AI community. We call for cross-disciplinary collaboration - spanning neuroscience, robotics, machine learning, and ethics - to formalize olfactory benchmarks, develop multimodal datasets, and define the sensory capabilities necessary for machines to understand, navigate, and act within human environments. Recognizing olfaction as a core modality is essential not only for scientific completeness, but for building AI systems that are ethically grounded in the full scope of the human experience.

Olfaction sensing in autonomous robotics faces challenges in dynamic operations, energy efficiency, and edge processing. It necessitates a machine learning algorithm capable of managing real-world odor interference, ensuring resource efficiency for mobile robotics, and accurately estimating gas features for critical tasks such as odor mapping, localization, and alarm generation. This paper introduces a hybrid approach that exploits neuromorphic computing in combination with probabilistic inference to address these demanding requirements. Our approach implements a combination of a convolutional spiking neural network for feature extraction and a Bayesian spiking neural network for odor detection and identification. The developed algorithm is rigorously tested on a dataset for sensor drift compensation for robustness evaluation. Additionally, for efficiency evaluation, we compare the energy consumption of our model with a non-spiking machine learning algorithm under identical dataset and operating conditions. Our approach demonstrates superior efficiency alongside comparable accuracy outcomes.

Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they are sensed and analyzed in the olfactory system from the nose to the brain. Drawing distinctions to color vision, we argue that smell presents unique measurement challenges, including the complexity of stimuli, the high dimensionality of the sensory apparatus, as well as what constitutes ground truth. In the face of these challenges, we argue for the centrality of odorant-receptor interactions in developing a theory of olfaction. Such a theory is likely to find widespread industrial applications, and enhance our understanding of smell, and in the longer-term, how it relates to other senses and language. As an initial use case of the data, we present results using machine learning-based classification of neural responses to odors as they are recorded in the mouse olfactory bulb with calcium imaging.

Researchers have long known that the chemical structure of the molecules we inhale influences what we smell. But in most cases, no one can figure out exactly how. Scientists have deciphered a few specific rules that govern how the nose and brain perceive an airborne molecule based on its characteristics. It has become clear that we quickly recognize some sulfur-containing compounds as the scent of garlic, for example, and certain ammonia-derived amines as a fishy odor. It turns out that structurally unrelated molecules can have similar scents.

Alex Wiltschko began collecting perfumes as a teenager. His first bottle was Azzaro Pour Homme, a timeless cologne he spotted on the shelf at a T.J. Maxx department store. He recognized the name from Perfumes: The Guide, a book whose poetic descriptions of aroma had kick-started his obsession. Enchanted, he saved up his allowance to add to his collection. "I ended up going absolutely down the rabbit hole," he said.

Google has built an artificial intelligence model with human like capability of predicting odour. The map developed by the team of Google AI links molecule structure to the aroma of substance and can even predict smell that is still unnoticeable by humans. Smells are sensed when molecules riding on the air stick to the sensory receptors present in the nose. However, it is more difficult to predict smell than colour. Because, unlike the human eye, which has only three sensory receptors for sensing the photons of red, green and blue colour, our nose has over 300 receptors.