Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
αExtractor extracts structured chemical information from biomedical literature

αExtractor: Chemical Info from Biomedical Literature

A 2024 deep learning system for optical chemical structure recognition designed specifically for biomedical literature mining, using ResNet-Transformer architecture to handle challenging conditions including low-resolution images, noise, distortions, and even hand-drawn molecular diagrams from scientific documents.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Segment-based chemical structure recognition pipeline for low-quality patent images with touching characters and broken lines

ChemInfty: Chemical Structure Recognition in Patent Images

A 2011 rule-based OCSR system designed specifically for the challenging low-quality images in Japanese patent applications, using segment-based methods to handle pervasive problems like touching characters, merged atom labels with bonds, and broken lines.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
A colored molecule with annotations, representing the diverse drawing styles found in scientific papers that OCSR models must handle.

MolParser-7M & WildMol: Large-Scale OCSR Datasets

The MolParser project introduces two key datasets: MolParser-7M, the largest training dataset for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) with 7.7M pairs of images and E-SMILES strings, and WildMol, a new 20k-sample benchmark for evaluating models on challenging real-world data. The training data uniquely combines millions of diverse synthetic molecules with 400,000 manually annotated in-the-wild samples.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Optical chemical structure recognition example

MolParser: End-to-End Molecular Structure Recognition

A 2025 end-to-end OCSR system addressing both technical and data challenges, introducing MolParser-7M (7M+ image-text pairs) and MolDet (YOLO-based detector) for extracting and recognizing molecular structures from real-world documents with diverse quality and styles.

Molecular Representations
Aspirin molecular structure generated from SMILES string

Converting SMILES and SELFIES to 2D Molecular Images

Build a robust Python CLI tool that converts both SMILES and SELFIES notation into publication-quality 2D molecular images, complete with formulas and legends.

Molecular Representations
SELFIES representation of 2-Fluoroethenimine molecule

SELFIES: A Robust Molecular String Representation

SELFIES is a molecular string representation where every possible string decodes to a valid molecule, solving the invalid-output problem that limits SMILES in generative machine learning.

Computational Chemistry
MARCEL dataset Kraken ligand example in 3D conformation

MARCEL: Molecular Conformer Ensemble Learning Benchmark

MARCEL provides a comprehensive benchmark for molecular representation learning with 722K+ conformers across four diverse subsets (Drugs-75K, Kraken, EE, BDE), enabling evaluation of conformer ensemble methods for property prediction in drug discovery and catalysis.

Molecular Representations
Benzene molecule with SMILES notation

SMILES: A Compact Notation for Chemical Structures

Comprehensive overview of SMILES notation for chemical structures, covering syntax for atoms, bonds, branches, rings, and stereochemistry, plus its key limitations for machine learning.

Computational Chemistry
GEOM dataset example molecule: N-(4-pyrimidin-2-yloxyphenyl)acetamide

GEOM: Energy-Annotated Molecular Conformations Dataset

GEOM contains 450k+ molecules with 37M+ conformations, featuring energy annotations from semi-empirical (GFN2-xTB) and DFT methods for property prediction and molecular generation research.

Molecular Simulation
Potential energy surface showing molecular conformation space with equilibrium and low energy conformations

DenoiseVAE: Adaptive Noise for Molecular Pre-training

ICLR 2025 paper introducing DenoiseVAE, which learns adaptive, atom-specific noise distributions through a VAE framework to improve denoising-based pre-training for molecular force field prediction, outperforming fixed Gaussian noise approaches on quantum chemistry benchmarks.

Molecular Simulation
Adaptive grid merging visualization for benzene molecule showing multi-resolution spatial discretization

Beyond Atoms: 3D Space Modeling for Molecular Pretraining

ICML 2025 paper introducing SpaceFormer, a Transformer architecture that challenges the atom-centric paradigm by modeling the continuous 3D space surrounding molecules using adaptive multi-resolution grids, ranking first in 10 of 15 molecular property prediction tasks.

Computational Chemistry
3D conformer ensemble of a drug-like molecule from the GEOM dataset

GEOM Dataset: 3D Molecular Conformer Generation

Get a practical overview of the GEOM dataset and learn how it’s advancing 3D molecular machine learning by bridging static graphs and dynamic reality.