arXiv:2601.06289cs.CLcs.LG2026-01

用大模型推理质谱图,发现能生成合理结构但化学准确率不高。

How well can off-the-shelf LLMs elucidate molecular structures from mass spectra using chain-of-thought reasoning?

  • 设计链式思维提示框架,模仿专家解谱逻辑
  • 多模型零样本测试,仅部分结构符合化学规律
  • 适合研究化学AI推理与人机协作的学者参考

质谱法是鉴定小分子的强大技术,但直接从串联质谱(MS/MS)推断完整分子结构仍面临挑战,源于复杂的断裂模式和庞大的化学空间。近期大语言模型在复杂推理任务中展现潜力,但在化学解析方面能力尚不明确。本文提出链式思维(CoT)提示框架与评测基准,将专家解谱步骤——如不饱和度(DBE)分析、中性丢失识别、碎片拼接——形式化为结构化提示,评估多个前沿大模型(Claude-3.5-Sonnet、GPT-4o-mini、Llama-3系列)在零样本设置下的表现,使用MassSpecGym数据集。评估指标包括SMILES有效性、分子式一致性及结构相似性,结果表明:尽管模型可生成语法正确且部分合理的结构,但难以实现化学准确性,且推理过程与正确预测无可靠关联。研究揭示了大模型在分子解析中的解释潜力与当前局限,为未来结合领域知识与强化学习实现化学可信的AI推理提供基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful analytical technique for identifying small molecules, yet determining complete molecular structures directly from tandem mass spectra (MS/MS) remains a long-standing challenge due to complex fragmentation patterns and the vast diversity of chemical space. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has shown promise for reasoning-intensive scientific tasks, but their capability for chemical interpretation is still unclear. In this work, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting framework and benchmark that evaluate how LLMs reason about mass spectral data to predict molecular structures. We formalize expert chemists' reasoning steps-such as double bond equivalent (DBE) analysis, neutral loss identification, and fragment assembly-into structured prompts and assess multiple state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3 series) in a zero-shot setting using the MassSpecGym dataset. Our evaluation across metrics of SMILES validity, formula consistency, and structural similarity reveals that while LLMs can produce syntactically valid and partially plausible structures, they fail to achieve chemical accuracy or link reasoning to correct molecular predictions. These findings highlight both the interpretive potential and the current limitations of LLM-based reasoning for molecular elucidation, providing a foundation for future work that combines domain knowledge and reinforcement learning to achieve chemically grounded AI reasoning.

大模型质谱解析化学推理

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