Molecular Generation
Taxonomy diagram showing the three axes of MolGenSurvey: molecular representations (1D string, 2D graph, 3D geometry), generative methods (deep generative models and combinatorial optimization), and eight generation tasks (1D/2D and 3D)

MolGenSurvey: Systematic Survey of ML for Molecule Design

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.

Molecular Generation
Bar chart comparing SMINA docking scores of CVAE, GVAE, and REINVENT against a random ZINC 10% baseline across eight protein targets

SMINA Docking Benchmark for De Novo Drug Design Models

Proposes a benchmark for de novo drug design using SMINA docking scores across eight drug targets, revealing that popular generative models fail to outperform random ZINC subsets.

Molecular Generation
2D structure of a phenyl-quaterthiophene, a conjugated organic molecule representative of the photovoltaic donor materials benchmarked in the Tartarus platform

Tartarus: Realistic Inverse Molecular Design Benchmarks

Tartarus introduces a modular suite of realistic molecular design benchmarks grounded in computational chemistry simulations. Benchmarking eight generative models reveals that no single algorithm dominates all tasks, and simple genetic algorithms often outperform deep generative models.

Predictive Chemistry
Three distribution plots showing RNN language models closely matching training distributions across peaked, multi-modal, and large-scale molecular generation tasks while graph models fail

Language Models Learn Complex Molecular Distributions

This study benchmarks RNN-based chemical language models against graph generative models on three challenging tasks: high penalized LogP distributions, multi-modal molecular distributions, and large-molecule generation from PubChem. The LSTM language models consistently outperform JTVAE and CGVAE.

Molecular Generation
Diagram of the LIMO pipeline showing gradient-based reverse optimization flowing backward through a frozen property predictor and VAE decoder to optimize the latent space z

LIMO: Latent Inceptionism for Targeted Molecule Generation

LIMO combines a SELFIES-based VAE with a novel stacked property predictor architecture (decoder output as predictor input) and gradient-based reverse optimization on the latent space. It is 6-8x faster than RL baselines and 12x faster than sampling methods while generating molecules with nanomolar binding affinities, including a predicted KD of 6e-14 M against the human estrogen receptor.

Predictive Chemistry
Regression Transformer dual-masking concept showing property prediction (mask numbers) and conditional generation (mask molecules) in a single model

Regression Transformer: Prediction Meets Generation

The Regression Transformer (RT) reformulates regression as conditional sequence modelling, enabling a single XLNet-based model to both predict continuous molecular properties and generate novel molecules conditioned on desired property values.

Molecular Generation
Diagram of the RetMol pipeline showing input molecule and retrieval database feeding into a frozen encoder, cross-attention fusion module, and frozen decoder to produce optimized molecules with iterative refinement

RetMol: Retrieval-Based Controllable Molecule Generation

RetMol plugs a lightweight cross-attention retrieval module into a pre-trained Chemformer backbone to guide molecule generation toward multi-property design criteria. It requires no task-specific fine-tuning and works with as few as 23 exemplar molecules. It achieves 94.5% success on QED optimization, 96.9% on GSK3b/JNK3 dual inhibitor design, and 2.84 kcal/mol average binding affinity improvement on SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitor optimization.

Molecular Generation
Diagram showing the UnCorrupt SMILES pipeline: invalid SMILES are corrected by a transformer seq2seq model into valid SMILES, with correction rates of 62-95% across generator types

UnCorrupt SMILES: Post Hoc Correction for De Novo Design

This paper trains a transformer model to correct invalid SMILES produced by de novo molecular generators (RNN, VAE, GAN). The corrector fixes 60-95% of invalid outputs, and the fixed molecules are comparable in novelty and similarity to valid generator outputs. The approach also enables local chemical space exploration by introducing and correcting errors in existing molecules.

Molecular Generation
MolGen overview showing two-stage pre-training (molecular language syntax learning and domain-agnostic prefix tuning) and chemical feedback paradigm

MolGen: Molecular Generation with Chemical Feedback

MolGen pre-trains on 100M+ SELFIES molecules, introduces domain-agnostic prefix tuning for cross-domain transfer, and applies a chemical feedback paradigm to reduce molecular hallucinations.

Generative Modeling
Diagram showing consistency models mapping points on a PF ODE trajectory to the same origin

Consistency Models: Fast One-Step Diffusion Generation

This paper introduces consistency models, a new family of generative models that map any point on a Probability Flow ODE trajectory to its origin. They support fast one-step generation by design, while allowing multi-step sampling for improved quality and zero-shot editing tasks like inpainting and colorization.

Generative Modeling
D3PM forward and reverse processes on a quantized swiss roll with uniform, Gaussian, and absorbing transition matrices

D3PM: Discrete Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

This paper introduces Discrete Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (D3PMs), which generalize diffusion to discrete state-spaces using structured Markov transition matrices. D3PMs include uniform, absorbing-state, and discretized Gaussian corruption processes, drawing a connection between diffusion and masked language models.

Generative Modeling
LDM architecture diagram showing conditioning via concatenation and cross-attention

Latent Diffusion Models for High-Res Image Synthesis

This paper introduces Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), which apply denoising diffusion in the latent space of pretrained autoencoders. By separating perceptual compression from generative learning and adding cross-attention conditioning, LDMs achieve FID 1.50 on Places inpainting and FID 3.60 on ImageNet class-conditional synthesis, with competitive text-to-image generation, at a fraction of the compute cost of pixel-space diffusion.