MoleculeNet introduces a large-scale benchmark suite for molecular machine learning, curating over 700,000 compounds across 17 datasets with standardized metrics, data splits, and featurization methods integrated into the DeepChem open-source library.
MolGenBench introduces a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating molecular generative models in realistic drug discovery settings, spanning de novo design and hit-to-lead optimization across 120 protein targets with 220,005 experimentally validated actives.
MolScore is an open-source framework that unifies scoring functions, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks for generative molecular design, with configurable objectives and GUI support.
This study applies perplexity, a model-intrinsic metric from NLP, to rank de novo molecular designs generated by SMILES-based chemical language models and introduces a delta score to detect pretraining bias in transfer-learned CLMs.
A large-scale benchmark of 25 molecular optimization methods on 23 oracles under constrained oracle budgets, showing that sample efficiency is a critical and often neglected dimension of evaluation.
A comprehensive survey classifying molecular representation learning foundation models by input modality (sequence, graph, 3D, image, multimodal) and analyzing four pretraining paradigms for drug discovery tasks.
Introduces SPECTRA, a framework that generates spectral performance curves to measure how ML model accuracy degrades as train-test overlap decreases across molecular sequencing tasks.
STONED introduces simple string manipulation algorithms on SELFIES for molecular design, achieving competitive results with deep generative models while requiring no training data or GPU resources.
Introduces TamGen, a target-aware molecular generation method using a pre-trained GPT-like chemical language model with protein structure conditioning. A Design-Refine-Test pipeline discovers 14 inhibitors against tuberculosis ClpP protease, with IC50 values as low as 1.9 uM.
This paper introduces ROGI-XD, a reformulation of the ROuGhness Index that enables fair comparison of QSPR surface roughness across molecular representations of different dimensionalities. Evaluating VAE, GIN, ChemBERTa, and ChemGPT representations, the authors show that pretrained chemical models do not produce smoother structure-property landscapes than simple molecular fingerprints or descriptors.
This position paper demonstrates that genetic algorithms (GAs) perform surprisingly well on molecular generation benchmarks, often outperforming complex deep learning methods. The authors propose the GA criterion: new molecule generation algorithms should demonstrate a clear advantage over GAs.
MolGenSurvey systematically reviews ML models for molecule design, organizing the field by molecular representation (1D/2D/3D), generative method (deep generative models vs. combinatorial optimization), and task type (8 distinct generation/optimization tasks). It catalogs over 100 methods, unifies task definitions via input/output/goal taxonomy, and identifies key challenges including out-of-distribution generation, oracle costs, and lack of unified benchmarks.