Organic synthesis is one of the key stumbling blocks in medicinal chemistry. A necessary yet unsolved step in planning synthesis is solving the forward problem: Given reactants and reagents, predict the products. Similar to other work, we treat reaction prediction as a machine translation problem between simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) strings (a text-based representation) of reactants, reagents, and the products. We show that a multihead attention Molecular Transformer model outperforms all algorithms in the literature, achieving a top-1 accuracy above 90 on a common benchmark data set. Molecular Transformer makes predictions by inferring the correlations between the presence and absence of chemical motifs in the reactant, reagent, and product present in the data set. Our model requires no handcrafted rules and accurately predicts subtle chemical transformations. Crucially, our model can accurately estimate its own uncertainty, with an uncertainty score that is 89 accurate in term...
@cite_35: There is an intuitive analogy of an organic chemist's understanding of a compound and a language speaker's understanding of a word. Based on this analogy, it is possible to introduce the basic concepts and analyze potential impacts of linguistic analysis to the world of organic chemistry. In this work, we cast the reaction prediction task as a translation problem by introducing a template-free sequence-to-sequence model, trained end-to-end and fully data-driven. We propose a tokenization, which is arbitrarily extensible with reaction information. Using an attention-based model borrowed from human language translation, we improve the state-of-the-art solutions in reaction prediction on the top-1 accuracy by achieving 80.3 without relying on auxiliary knowledge, such as reaction templates or explicit atomic features. Also, a top-1 accuracy of 65.4 is reached on a larger and noisier dataset.
@cite_21: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature.
@cite_1: Finding the main product of a chemical reaction is one of the important problems of organic chemistry. This paper describes a method of applying a neural machine translation model to the prediction of organic chemical reactions. In order to translate 'reactants and reagents' to 'products', a gated recurrent unit based sequence-to-sequence model and a parser to generate input tokens for model from reaction SMILES strings were built. Training sets are composed of reactions from the patent databases, and reactions manually generated applying the elementary reactions in an organic chemistry textbook of Wade. The trained models were tested by examples and problems in the textbook. The prediction process does not need manual encoding of rules (e.g., SMARTS transformations) to predict products, hence it only needs sufficient training reaction sets to learn new types of reactions.
In this work, we present a fully attention-based model adapted from @cite_21 , the Molecular Transformer, that outperforms all previous methods while being completely atom-mapping independent and not requiring to split the input into reactants and reagents. Similar to the work of Nam & Kim @cite_1 and @cite_35 , our current model is trained end-to-end, fully data-driven and is free of chemical knowledge rules.