用Transformer和SELFIES实现可控制的分子生成,速度快且效果好。
STAR-VAE: Latent Variable Transformers for Scalable and Controllable Molecular Generation
- 基于Transformer的变分自编码器,用SELFIES表示分子并保证语法正确。
- 在7900万分子上训练,条件生成时能精准调控分子性质。
- 通过低秩适配器高效微调,少量数据即可快速适应新任务。
药物样分子的化学空间极为庞大,亟需生成模型能学习广泛化学分布、通过结构-性质关联实现条件生成,并支持快速生成。为此,我们提出STAR-VAE(SELFIES编码的、基于Transformer的自回归变分自编码器),一个可扩展的潜在变量框架,包含Transformer编码器与自回归解码器。该模型在来自PubChem的7900万药物样分子上训练,使用SELFIES表示以确保语法有效性。潜在变量框架支持条件生成:属性预测器提供条件信号,一致应用于潜在先验、推断网络和解码器。主要贡献包括:(i) 基于自我编码的潜在变量架构,采用SELFIES表示;(ii) 面向性质引导生成的合理条件化潜在变量形式;(iii) 在编码器和解码器中使用低秩适配器(LoRA)进行高效微调,仅需少量性质与活性数据即可快速适应。在GuacaMol和MOSES基准测试中,性能达到或超过基线;潜在空间分析显示其具有平滑且语义结构化的表征,支持无条件探索与性质感知生成。在Tartarus基准测试中,条件模型使对接得分分布向更高预测结合强度偏移。结果表明,当结合合理条件化与参数高效微调时,现代规模化变分自编码器在分子生成任务中仍具竞争力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The chemical space of drug-like molecules is vast, motivating the development of generative models that must learn broad chemical distributions, enable conditional generation by capturing structure-property representations, and provide fast molecular generation. Meeting the objectives depends on modeling choices, including the probabilistic modeling approach, the conditional generative formulation, the architecture, and the molecular input representation. To address the challenges, we present STAR-VAE (Selfies-encoded, Transformer-based, AutoRegressive Variational Auto Encoder), a scalable latent-variable framework with a Transformer encoder and an autoregressive Transformer decoder. It is trained on 79 million drug-like molecules from PubChem, using SELFIES to guarantee syntactic validity. The latent-variable formulation enables conditional generation: a property predictor supplies a conditioning signal that is applied consistently to the latent prior, the inference network, and the decoder. Our contributions are: (i) a Transformer-based latent-variable encoder-decoder model trained on SELFIES representations; (ii) a principled conditional latent-variable formulation for property-guided generation; and (iii) efficient finetuning with low-rank adapters (LoRA) in both encoder and decoder, enabling fast adaptation with limited property and activity data. On the GuacaMol and MOSES benchmarks, our approach matches or exceeds baselines, and latent-space analyses reveal smooth, semantically structured representations that support both unconditional exploration and property-aware generation. On the Tartarus benchmarks, the conditional model shifts docking-score distributions toward stronger predicted binding. These results suggest that a modernized, scale-appropriate VAE remains competitive for molecular generation when paired with principled conditioning and parameter-efficient finetuning.
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