arrow
Return

Sample-efficient generative molecular design using memory manipulation

delete2026-03-17
delete0
PRE
AI
J
Jeff Guo *
J
Junwu Chen
A
Anthony Guanxun Chen
P
Philippe Schwaller *
DOI:10.1038/s42256-026-01200-4delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Generative molecular design for drug discovery has recently achieved a wave of experimental validation. Language models operating on string-based representations of molecules are amongst the most successful architectures. The most important factor for downstream success is whether an in silico oracle (computational predictor of a molecule property) is well correlated with the desired end point (such as binding affinity). To this end, current methods use cheaper proxy oracles with a higher throughput before evaluating the most promising subset with high-fidelity oracles. The ability to directly generate molecules with optimal properties as predicted by high-fidelity oracles (computationally expensive simulations with greater predictive accuracy) could greatly enhance generative design and improve hit rates. However, current models are not efficient enough to consider such a prospect, exemplifying the sample efficiency problem. Recently, the Mamba architecture has been proposed as an alternative to transformers, which are widely used in large language models. Existing works have validated Mamba’s performance on tasks spanning natural language completion to biology foundation models. In this work, we introduce a framework called Saturn, which demonstrates the application of the Mamba architecture for generative molecular design. Here we elucidate how experience replay with data augmentation improves the sample efficiency and how Mamba intensifies the effect of this mechanism. Next, we show that Mamba with experience replay outperforms 16 models on multiparameter optimization tasks relevant to drug discovery and possesses sufficient sample efficiency to directly optimize density functional theory simulations as a high-fidelity oracle. Guo et al. train a Mamba-based language model for molecule generation and find that data augmentation and experience replay can enable the efficient generation of property-optimized small molecules.
Keywords:
Cheminformatics
Drug discovery
Engineering
general

Journal

Nature Machine Intelligence cover
Nature Machine Intelligence
IF:
23.9
Papers:
1.3K
Citations:
1.5W

Organization

N
new york university
Scholars:
6.2K
Papers: 3.0K
Citations: 1
E
epfl
Scholars:
740
Papers: 283
Citations: 0
Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Chemical language models enable navigation in sparsely populated chemical space
err2021-07-19
err68
PREAI
errSkinnider, Michael A.; Stacey, R. Greg; Wishart, David S.; Foster, Leonard J.
errShare
errSave
Equivariant 3D-conditional diffusion model for molecular linker design
err2024-04-11
err17
errOAAI
errIgashov, Ilia; Stark, Hannes; Vignac, Clement; Schneuing, Arne; Satorras, Victor Garcia; Frossard, Pascal; Welling, Max; Bronstein, Michael; Correia, Bruno
errShare
errSave
An equivariant generative framework for molecular graph-structure Co-design
err2023-01-01
err0
errOAAI
errZaixi Zhang; Qi Liu; Chee-Kong Lee; Chang-Yu Hsieh; Enhong Chen
errShare
errSave
Long Short-Term Memory
err1997-11-01
err0
PREAI
errSepp Hochreiter; Jürgen Schmidhuber
errShare
errSave
Improving de novo molecular design with curriculum learning
err2022-06-22
err25
errOAAI
errGuo, Jeff; Fialkova, Vendy; Arango, Juan Diego; Margreitter, Christian; Janet, Jon Paul; Papadopoulos, Kostas; Engkvist, Ola; Patronov, Atanas
errShare
errSave
Parallel tempered genetic algorithm guided by deep neural networks for inverse molecular design
err2022-01-01
err32
errOAAI
errNigam, AkshatKumar; Pollice, Robert; Aspuru-Guzik, Alan
errShare
errSave
Chemical language modeling with structured state space sequence models
err2024-07-22
err2
errOAAI
errOzcelik, Riza; de Ruiter, Sarah; Criscuolo, Emanuele; Grisoni, Francesca
errShare
errSave
researcher View more