Mechanistic Reaction Prediction via Discrete Flow Matching on Graph-Structured Electron Occupation
Presents a fundamentally new approach to reaction prediction with mechanistic interpretability and strong OOD performance.
AI Summary
Researchers introduce MAELLE, a novel AI approach that models chemical reactions as discrete flow matching over electron occupation vectors rather than molecular topology.
Excerpt
Chemical reactions are fundamentally transformations in electron space, yet most machine learning approaches model them either through \textit{de novo} generation of product molecules or through heuristic graph edits that operate directly on molecular topology. We introduce MAELLE (\textbf{M}ech\textbf{A}nistic \textbf{E}dit f\textbf{L}ow-matching on e\textbf{L}ectron r\textbf{E}arrangements), which instead models reactions as discrete flow matching over electron occupation vectors. Concretely,
