用统一框架提升代谢物结构识别准确率,解决模型复现难题。
MSAlign: Aligning Molecule and Mass Spectra Foundation Models for Metabolite Identification

- 通过轻量MLP对齐分子与质谱的预训练模型,构建共享表示空间。
- 在多个基准上性能超越现有方法,最佳结果达87.3%命中率。
- 公开数据集、划分策略和代码,支持可复现研究,适合代谢组学开发者。
准确识别代谢物——即从质谱数据中解析小分子结构——是代谢组学的核心挑战,广泛应用于药物发现、环境分析和临床研究。本文聚焦分子检索任务:根据给定的MS/MS谱图,在候选分子集合中还原代谢物的化学结构。尽管近期发布的基准数据集(如MassSpecGym和Spectraverse)显著推动了机器学习方法的发展,但复杂的预处理流程和缺乏统一实现使得方法复现与对比困难。本文提出三项贡献:第一,构建一个涵盖基于表示对齐和对比学习的最新方法的统一框架;第二,提出MSAlign,受视觉-语言多模态对齐启发,通过候选样本的对比目标训练轻量级MLP投影,对齐两个冻结的基础模型(DreaMS用于质谱,ChemBERTa用于分子),实现简单、快速且一致优于现有方法;第三,揭示并量化分子检索中的数据划分问题:现有划分策略隐含地在数据泄露与领域偏移之间权衡,引入分布偏移的定量度量以评估不同策略。所有数据集、划分方案、候选集及统一实现代码均已公开,促进可复现研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurately identifying metabolites i.e. small molecules from mass spectrometry data remains a core challenge in metabolomics, with broad applications in drug discovery, environmental analysis, and clinical research. We address the Molecule Retrieval task, which consists in recovering the chemical structure of a metabolite from its MS/MS spectrum given a set of candidate molecules. While the recent release of benchmark datasets such as MassSpecGym and Spectraverse has considerably accelerated the development of novel machine learning approaches, the complexity of data preprocessing pipelines and the lack of unified implementations make methods and results difficult to reproduce and compare. We make three contributions. First, we propose a unified framework encompassing recent approaches based on representation alignment and contrastive learning. Second, we introduce MSAlign, inspired by multimodal alignment in vision-language models, which learns a shared representation space by aligning two frozen foundation models (DreaMS for mass spectra and ChemBERTa for molecules) through lightweight MLP projections trained with a candidate-based contrastive objective. MSAlign is simple to implement, fast to train and consistently outperforms existing approaches across all benchmarks. Third, we investigate a long-standing evaluation problem: data splitting strategies in molecule retrieval implicitly trade off data leakage against domain shift. We formalize this tension by introducing a quantitative measure of distribution shift, and use it to evaluate splitting strategies in existing benchmarks. All datasets, splits, candidate sets, and a unified implementation of MSAlign and baselines are publicly released to support reproducible research.
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