Hunter Heidenreich | ML Research Scientist — Page 19

Molecular Representations
Vintage wooden device labeled 'The Molecular Interpreter - Model 1974' with vacuum tubes, showing SMILES to IUPAC name translation

STOUT: SMILES to IUPAC Names via Neural Machine Translation

STOUT (SMILES-TO-IUPAC-name translator) uses neural machine translation to convert chemical line notations to IUPAC names and vice versa, achieving ~90% BLEU score. It addresses the lack of open-source tools for algorithmic IUPAC naming.

Molecular Representations
Diagram showing Struct2IUPAC workflow: molecular structure (SMILES) passing through Transformer to generate IUPAC name, with round-trip verification loop

Struct2IUPAC: Translating SMILES to IUPAC via Transformers

This paper proposes a Transformer-based approach (Struct2IUPAC) to convert chemical structures to IUPAC names, challenging the dominance of rule-based systems. Trained on ~47M PubChem examples, it achieves near-perfect accuracy using a round-trip verification step with OPSIN.

Molecular Representations
Transformer encoder-decoder architecture processing InChI string character-by-character to produce IUPAC chemical name

Translating InChI to IUPAC Names with Transformers

This study presents a sequence-to-sequence Transformer model that translates InChI identifiers into IUPAC names character-by-character. Trained on 10 million PubChem pairs, it achieves 91% accuracy on organic compounds, performing comparably to commercial software.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
AtomLenz learns atom-level detection from hand-drawn molecular images with weak supervision

AtomLenz: Atom-Level OCSR with Limited Supervision

Introduces AtomLenz, an OCSR tool that combines object detection with a molecular graph constructor. Features a novel weakly supervised training scheme (ProbKT*) to learn atom-level localization from SMILES-only data, achieving state-of-the-art results on hand-drawn images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Precision and recall comparison of 8 OCSR tools on patent images

Benchmarking Eight OCSR Tools on Patent Images (2024)

Comprehensive evaluation of 8 optical chemical structure recognition tools using a newly curated dataset of 2,702 patent images. Proposes ChemIC, a ResNet-50 classifier to route images to specialized tools based on content type, demonstrating that no single tool excels at all tasks.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Overview of the ChemReco pipeline showing synthetic data generation and EfficientNet+Transformer architecture for hand-drawn chemical structure recognition

ChemReco: Hand-Drawn Chemical Structure Recognition

ChemReco automates the recognition of hand-drawn chemical structures using a synthetic data pipeline and an EfficientNet+Transformer architecture, achieving 96.90% accuracy on C-H-O molecules.

Computational Chemistry
ChemVLM architecture showing molecular structure and text inputs flowing through vision encoder and language model into multimodal LLM for chemical reasoning

ChemVLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Chemistry

A 2025 AAAI paper introducing ChemVLM, a domain-specific multimodal LLM (26B parameters). It achieves state-of-the-art performance on chemical OCR, reasoning benchmarks, and molecular understanding tasks by combining vision and language models trained on curated chemistry data.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Overview of the DECIMER.ai platform combining segmentation, classification, and image-to-SMILES recognition

DECIMER.ai: Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

DECIMER.ai addresses the lack of open tools for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) by providing a comprehensive, deep-learning-based workflow. It features a novel data generation pipeline (RanDepict), a web application, and models for segmentation and recognition that rival or exceed proprietary solutions.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Architecture diagram of the DGAT model showing dual-path decoder with CGFE and SDGLA modules

Dual-Path Global Awareness Transformer (DGAT) for OCSR

Proposes a new architecture (DGAT) to resolve global context loss in chemical structure recognition. Introduces Cascaded Global Feature Enhancement and Sparse Differential Global-Local Attention, achieving 84.0% BLEU-4 and handling complex chiral structures implicitly.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Diagram showing the DECIMER hand-drawn OCSR pipeline from hand-drawn chemical structure image through EfficientNetV2 encoder and Transformer decoder to predicted SMILES output

Enhanced DECIMER for Hand-Drawn Structure Recognition

This paper presents an enhanced deep learning architecture for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) specifically optimized for hand-drawn inputs. By pairing an EfficientNetV2 encoder with a Transformer decoder and training on over 150 million synthetic images, the model achieves 73.25% exact match accuracy on a real-world hand-drawn benchmark of 5,088 images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Diagram of the Image2InChI architecture showing a SwinTransformer encoder connected to an attention-based feature fusion decoder for converting molecular images to InChI strings.

Image2InChI: SwinTransformer for Molecular Recognition

Proposes Image2InChI, an OCSR model with improved SwinTransformer encoder and novel feature fusion network with attention mechanisms that achieves 99.8% InChI accuracy on the BMS dataset.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Architecture diagram of the MarkushGrapher dual-encoder system combining VTL and OCSR encoders for Markush structure recognition.

MarkushGrapher: Multi-modal Markush Structure Recognition

This paper introduces a multi-modal approach for extracting chemical Markush structures from patents, combining a Vision-Text-Layout encoder with a specialized chemical vision encoder. It addresses the lack of training data with a synthetic generation pipeline and introduces M2S, a new real-world benchmark.