This research investigates the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to predict the toxicity of nanoparticles, a pressing concern due to their pervasive use in various industries and the inherent challenges in assessing their biological interactions. Employing models such as Decision Trees, Random Forests, and XGBoost, the study focuses on analyzing physicochemical properties like size, shape, surface charge, and chemical composition to determine their influence on toxicity. Our findings highlight the significant role of oxygen atoms, particle size, surface area, dosage, and exposure duration in affecting toxicity levels. The use of machine learning allows for a nuanced understanding of the intricate patterns these properties form in biological contexts, surpassing traditional analysis methods in efficiency and predictive power. These advancements aid in developing safer nanomaterials through computational chemistry, reducing reliance on costly and time-consuming experimental methods. This approach not only enhances our understanding of nanoparticle behavior in biological systems but also streamlines the safety assessment process, marking a significant stride towards integrating computational techniques in nanotoxicology.

We introduce an approach aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through an iterative preference learning process inspired by the successful strategy employed by AlphaZero. Our work leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to iteratively collect preference data, utilizing its look-ahead ability to break down instance-level rewards into more granular step-level signals. To enhance consistency in intermediate steps, we combine outcome validation and stepwise self-evaluation, continually updating the quality assessment of newly generated data. The proposed algorithm employs Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to update the LLM policy using this newly generated step-level preference data. Theoretical analysis reveals the importance of using on-policy sampled data for successful self-improving. Extensive evaluations on various arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrate remarkable performance improvements over existing models. For instance, our approach outperforms the Mistral-7B Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) baseline on GSM8K, MATH, and ARC-C, with substantial increases in accuracy to $81.8\%$ (+$5.9\%$), $34.7\%$ (+$5.8\%$), and $76.4\%$ (+$15.8\%$), respectively. Additionally, our research delves into the training and inference compute tradeoff, providing insights into how our method effectively maximizes performance gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/MCTS-DPO.

Bio-oil molecule assessment is essential for the sustainable development of chemicals and transportation fuels. These oxygenated molecules have adequate carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that can be used for developing new value-added molecules (chemicals or transportation fuels). One motivation for our study stems from the fact that a liquid phase upgrading using mineral acid is a cost-effective chemical transformation. In this chemical upgrading process, adding a proton (positively charged atomic hydrogen) to an oxygen atom is a central step. The protonation energies of oxygen atoms in a molecule determine the thermodynamic feasibility of the reaction and likely chemical reaction pathway. A quantum chemical model based on coupled cluster theory is used to compute accurate thermochemical properties such as the protonation energies of oxygen atoms and the feasibility of protonation-based chemical transformations. However, this method is too computationally expensive to explore a large space of chemical transformations. We develop a graph neural network approach for predicting protonation energies of oxygen atoms of hundreds of bioxygenate molecules to predict the feasibility of aqueous acidic reactions. Our approach relies on an iterative local nonlinear embedding that gradually leads to global influence of distant atoms and a output layer that predicts the protonation energy. Our approach is geared to site-specific predictions for individual oxygen atoms of a molecule in comparison with commonly used graph convolutional networks that focus on a singular molecular property prediction. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in learning the location and magnitudes of protonation energies of oxygenated molecules.