"Amide - amine + alcohol = carboxylic acid." Chemical reactions as linear algebraic analogies in graph neural networks.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In deep learning methods, especially in the context of chemistry, there is an increasing urgency to uncover the hidden learning mechanisms often dubbed as ``black box." In this work, we show that graph models built on computational chemical data behave similar to natural language processing (NLP) models built on text data. Crucially, we show that atom-embeddings, a.k.a atom-parsed graph neural activation patterns, exhibit arithmetic properties that represent valid reaction formulas. This is very similar to how word-embeddings can be combined to make word analogies, thus preserving the semantic meaning behind the words, as in the famous example ``King" $-$ ``Man" $+$ ``Woman" = ``Queen." For instance, we show how the reaction from an alcohol to a carbonyl is represented by a constant vector in the embedding space, implicitly representing ``-$\text{H}_{2}$," independent from the particular carbonyl reactant and alcohol product. This reveals a highly-structured vector space, wherein the directions in the embedding space are synonymous with chemical changes (ex. the oxidation direction), and distinct chemical changes are orthogonal. In contrast to natural language processing, we can explain the observed chemical analogies using algebraic manipulations on the local chemical composition that surrounds each atom-embedding. Furthermore, the observations find applications in transfer learning, for instance in the formal structure and prediction of atomistic properties, such as $^{1}$H-NMR and $^{13}$C-NMR. This work is in line with the recent push for interpretable explanations to graph neural network modeling of chemistry and uncovers a latent model of chemistry that is highly structured, consistent, and analogous to chemical syntax.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".