AI Models Learn to Predict Chemical Reaction Products Using SMILES Sequences
Researchers have developed AI approaches to forward reaction prediction, which determines what products emerge from given reactants and reagents. Two main methods are used: sequence-to-sequence models that treat reaction SMILES strings as a translation problem, and graph-based models that predict which chemical bonds change during a reaction. Philippe Schwaller and colleagues introduced the Molecular Transformer in 2019, demonstrating that token probability scores can help prioritize predictions requiring expert review. A key challenge is atom-mapping — correctly tracking where each atom ends up — since models scored only on product strings may learn pattern matching rather than true chemical transformations. Inconsistent handling of reactants versus agents across datasets also makes published benchmark accuracies difficult to compare directly.
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