ChemSpacE: Toward Steerable and Interpretable Chemical Space Exploration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discovering new structures in the chemical space is a long-standing challenge and has important applications to various fields such as chemistry, material science, and drug discovery. Deep generative models have been used in de novo molecule design to embed molecules in a meaningful latent space and then sample new molecules from it. However, the steerability and interpretability of the learned latent space remain much less explored. In this paper, we introduce a new task named molecule manipulation, which aims to align the molecular properties of the generated molecule and its latent activation in order to achieve interactive molecule editing. Then we develop a method called Chemical Space Explorer (ChemSpacE), which identifies and traverses interpretable directions in the latent space that align with molecular structures and property changes. Specifically, ChemSpacE leverages the properties of the learned latent space by generative models and utilizes linear models to identify such directions and thus is highly efficient in terms of training/inference time, data, and the number of oracle calls. Experiments show that ChemSpacE can efficiently steer the latent spaces of multiple state-of-the-art molecule generative models for interactive molecule discovery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".