MolXPT: Wrapping Molecules with Text for Generative Pre-training

18 May 2023  ·  Zequn Liu, Wei zhang, Yingce Xia, Lijun Wu, Shufang Xie, Tao Qin, Ming Zhang, Tie-Yan Liu ·

Generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has demonstrates its great success in natural language processing and related techniques have been adapted into molecular modeling. Considering that text is the most important record for scientific discovery, in this paper, we propose MolXPT, a unified language model of text and molecules pre-trained on SMILES (a sequence representation of molecules) wrapped by text. Briefly, we detect the molecule names in each sequence and replace them to the corresponding SMILES. In this way, the SMILES could leverage the information from surrounding text, and vice versa. The above wrapped sequences, text sequences from PubMed and SMILES sequences from PubChem are all fed into a language model for pre-training. Experimental results demonstrate that MolXPT outperforms strong baselines of molecular property prediction on MoleculeNet, performs comparably to the best model in text-molecule translation while using less than half of its parameters, and enables zero-shot molecular generation without finetuning.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Molecular Property Prediction BACE MolXPT ROC-AUC 88.4 # 1
Molecular Property Prediction BBBP MolXPT ROC-AUC 80.5 ± 0.5 # 1
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolXPT BLEU-2 59.4 # 8
BLEU-4 50.5 # 9
ROUGE-1 66 # 6
ROUGE-2 51.1 # 7
ROUGE-L 59.7 # 6
METEOR 62.6 # 6
Text2Mol 59.4 # 2
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolXPT Text2Mol 57.8 # 7
Exact Match 21.5 # 9
MACCS FTS 85.9 # 9
RDK FTS 75.7 # 8
Morgan FTS 66.7 # 13
Frechet ChemNet Distance (FCD) 0.45 # 9
Validity 98.3 # 4
Parameter Count 350000000 # 16
Molecular Property Prediction ClinTox MolXPT ROC-AUC 95.3±0.2 # 1
Molecular Property Prediction HIV dataset MolXPT AUC 0.781 # 4
Molecular Property Prediction SIDER MolXPT ROC-AUC 71.7 # 2
Molecular Property Prediction Tox21 MolXPT ROC-AUC 77.1 # 7

Methods