Molecular Representations
Bar chart comparing SMILES-BERT accuracy against baselines on HIV, LogP, and PCBA tasks

SMILES-BERT: BERT-Style Pre-Training for Molecules

SMILES-BERT pre-trains a Transformer encoder on 18M+ SMILES from ZINC using a masked recovery task, then fine-tunes for molecular property prediction, outperforming prior methods on three datasets.

Molecular Representations
Visualization of tokenizer vocabulary coverage across chemical space

Smirk: Complete Tokenization for Molecular Models

Introduces Smirk and Smirk-GPE tokenizers that fully cover the OpenSMILES specification, proposes n-gram language models as low-cost proxies for evaluating tokenizer quality, and benchmarks 34 tokenizers across intrinsic and extrinsic metrics.

Molecular Representations
Bar chart showing SMILES Pair Encoding reduces mean sequence length from 40 to 6 tokens

SPE: Data-Driven SMILES Substructure Tokenization

Introduces SMILES Pair Encoding (SPE), a data-driven tokenization algorithm that learns high-frequency SMILES substrings from ChEMBL to produce shorter, chemically interpretable token sequences for deep learning.

Molecular Representations
Bar chart showing SPMM supports bidirectional tasks: molecule to property, property to molecule, molecule optimization, and property interpolation

SPMM: A Bidirectional Molecular Foundation Model

SPMM pre-trains a dual-stream transformer on SMILES and 53 molecular property vectors using contrastive learning and cross-attention, enabling bidirectional structure-property generation, property prediction, and reaction prediction through a single model.

Molecular Representations
Radial diagram showing 12 transformer architecture families connected to 5 molecular science application domains

Survey of Transformer Architectures in Molecular Science

Jiang et al. survey 12 families of transformer architectures in molecular science, covering GPT, BERT, BART, graph transformers, Transformer-XL, T5, ViT, DETR, Conformer, CLIP, sparse transformers, and mobile/efficient variants, with detailed algorithmic descriptions and molecular applications.

Molecular Representations
Bar chart showing CLM architecture publication trends from 2020 to 2024, with transformers overtaking RNNs

Systematic Review of Deep Learning CLMs (2020-2024)

PRISMA-based systematic review of 72 papers on chemical language models for molecular generation, comparing architectures and biased methods using MOSES metrics.

Molecular Representations
Diagram showing the t-SMILES pipeline from molecular graph fragmentation to binary tree traversal producing a string representation

t-SMILES: Tree-Based Fragment Molecular Encoding

t-SMILES represents molecules by fragmenting them into substructures, building full binary trees, and traversing them breadth-first to produce SMILES-type strings that reduce nesting depth and outperform SMILES, DeepSMILES, and SELFIES on generation benchmarks.

Molecular Representations
Taxonomy of transformer-based chemical language models organized by architecture type

Transformer CLMs for SMILES: Literature Review 2024

A comprehensive review of transformer-based chemical language models operating on SMILES, categorizing encoder-only (BERT variants), decoder-only (GPT variants), and encoder-decoder models with analysis of tokenization strategies, pre-training approaches, and future directions.

Molecular Representations
Diagram showing sequence-to-sequence translation from chemical names to SMILES with atom count constraints

Transformer Name-to-SMILES with Atom Count Losses

This paper applies a Transformer sequence-to-sequence model to predict SMILES strings from chemical compound names (Synonyms). Two enhancements, an atom-count constraint loss and SMILES/InChI multi-task learning, improve F-measure over rule-based and vanilla Transformer baselines.

Molecular Representations
Horizontal bar chart showing X-MOL achieves best performance across five molecular tasks

X-MOL: Pre-training on 1.1B Molecules for SMILES

X-MOL applies large-scale Transformer pre-training on 1.1 billion molecules with a generative SMILES-to-SMILES strategy, then fine-tunes for five molecular analysis tasks including property prediction, reaction analysis, and de novo generation.

Molecular Representations
Bar chart showing retrieval accuracy of chemical language models across four SMILES augmentation types

AMORE: Testing ChemLLM Robustness to SMILES Variants

Introduces AMORE, an embedding-based retrieval framework that evaluates whether chemical language models can recognize the same molecule across different SMILES representations. Results show current models are not robust to identity-preserving augmentations.

Molecular Representations
Taxonomy of molecular representation learning foundation models organized by input modality

Review of Molecular Representation Learning Models

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.