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Information Routing in Atomistic Foundation Models: How Task Alignment and Equivariance Shape Linear Disentanglement

arXiv:2603.03155v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: What determines whether a molecular property prediction model organizes its representations so that geometric and compositional information can be cleanly separated? We introduce Compositional Probe Decomposition (CPD), which linearly projects out composition signal and measures how much geometric information remains accessible to a Ridge probe. We validate CPD with four independent checks, including a structural isomer benchmark where compositional projections score at chance while geometric residuals reach 94.6\% pairwise classification accuracy. Across ten models from five architectural families on QM9, we find a \emph{linear accessibility gradient}: models differ by $6.6\times$ in geometric information accessible after composition removal ($R^2_{\mathrm{geom}}$ from 0.081 to 0.533 for HOMO-LUMO gap). Three factors explain this gradient. Task alignment dominates: models trained on HOMO-LUMO gap ($R^2_{\mathrm{geom}}$ 0.44--0.53) outscore energy-trained models by $\sim$0.25 $R^2$ regardless of architecture. Within-architecture ablations on two independent architectures confirm this: PaiNN drops from 0.53 to 0.31 when retrained on energy, and MACE drops from 0.44 to 0.08. Data diversity partially compensates for misaligned objectives, with MACE pretrained on MPTraj (0.36) outperforming QM9-only energy models. Inside MACE's representations, information routes by symmetry type: $L{=}1$ (vector) channels preferentially encode dipole moment ($R^2 = 0.59$ vs.\ 0.38 in $L{=}0$), while $L{=}0$ (scalar) channels encode HOMO-LUMO gap ($R^2 = 0.76$ vs.\ 0.34 in $L{=}1$). This pattern is absent in ViSNet. We also show that nonlinear probes produce misleading results on residualized representations, recovering $R^2 = 0.68$--$0.95$ on a purely compositional target, and recommend linear probes for this setting.
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Information Routing in Atomistic Foundation Models: How Equivariance Creates Linearly Disentangled Representations

arXiv:2603.03155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What do atomistic foundation models encode in their intermediate representations, and how is that information organized? We introduce Composition Projection Decomposition (CPD), which uses QR projection to linearly remove composition signal from learned representations and probes the geometric residual. Across eight models from five architectural families on QM9 molecules and Materials Project crystals, we find a disentanglement gradient: tensor product equivariant architectures (MACE) produce representations where geometry is almost fully linearly accessible after composition removal ($R^2_{\text{geom}} = 0.782$ for HOMO-LUMO gap), while handcrafted descriptors (ANI-2x) entangle the same information nonlinearly ($R^2_{\text{geom}} = -0.792$ under Ridge; $R^2 = +0.784$ under MLP). MACE routes target-specific signal through irreducible representation channels -- dipole to $L = 1$, HOMO-LUMO gap to $L = 0$ -- a pattern not observed in ViSNet's vector-scalar architecture under the same probe. We show that gradient boosted tree probes on projected residuals are systematically inflated, recovering $R^2 = 0.68$--$0.95$ on a purely compositional target, and recommend linear probes as the primary metric. Linearly disentangled representations are more sample-efficient under linear probing, suggesting a practical advantage for equivariant architectures beyond raw prediction accuracy.
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AgentCAT: An LLM Agent for Extracting and Analyzing Catalytic Reaction Data from Chemical Engineering Literature

arXiv:2602.18479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a large language model (LLM) agent named AgentCAT, which extracts and analyzes catalytic reaction data from chemical engineering papers, %and supports natural language based interactive analysis of the extracted data. AgentCAT serves as an alternative to overcome the long-standing data bottleneck in chemical engineering field, and its natural language based interactive data analysis functionality is friendly to the community. AgentCAT also presents a formal abstraction and challenge analysis of the catalytic reaction data extraction task in an artificial intelligence-friendly manner. This abstraction would help the artificial intelligence community understand this problem and in turn would attract more attention to address it. Technically, the complex catalytic process leads to complicated dependency structure in catalytic reaction data with respect to elementary reaction steps, molecular behaviors, measurement evidence, etc. This dependency structure makes it challenging to guarantee the correctness and completeness of data extraction, as well as representing them for analysis. AgentCAT addresses this challenge and it makes four folds of technical contributions: (1) a schema-governed extraction pipeline with progressive schema evolution, enabling robust data extraction from chemical engineering papers; (2) a dependency-aware reaction-network knowledge graph that links catalysts/active sites, synthesis-derived descriptors, mechanistic claims with evidence, and macroscopic outcomes, preserving process coupling and traceability; (3) a general querying module that supports natural-language exploration and visualization over the constructed graph for cross-paper analysis; (4) an evaluation on $\sim$800 peer-reviewed chemical engineering publications demonstrating the effectiveness of AgentCAT.
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From Static Spectra to Operando Infrared Dynamics: Physics Informed Flow Modeling and a Benchmark

arXiv:2602.18551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Solid Electrolyte Interphase (SEI) is critical to the performance of lithium-ion batteries, yet its analysis via Operando Infrared (IR) spectroscopy remains experimentally complex and expensive, which limits its accessibility for standard research facilities. To overcome this bottleneck, we formulate a novel task, Operando IR Prediction, which aims to forecast the time-resolved evolution of spectral ``fingerprints'' from a single static spectrum. To facilitate this, we introduce OpIRSpec-7K, the first large-scale operando dataset comprising 7,118 high-quality samples across 10 distinct battery systems, alongside OpIRBench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark with carefully designed protocols. Addressing the limitations of standard spectrum, video, and sequence models in capturing voltage-driven chemical dynamics and complex composition, we propose Aligned Bi-stream Chemical Constraint (ABCC), an end-to-end physics-aware framework. It reformulates MeanFlow and introduces a novel Chemical Flow to explicitly model reaction trajectories, employs a two-stream disentanglement mechanism for solvent-SEI separation, and enforces physics and spectrum constraints such as mass conservation and peak shifts. ABCC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art static, sequential, and generative baselines. ABCC even generalizes to unseen systems and enables interpretable downstream recovery of SEI formation pathways, supporting AI-driven electrochemical discovery.
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Bayesian Flow Is All You Need to Sample Out-of-Distribution Chemical Spaces

arXiv:2412.11439v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generating novel molecules with higher properties than the training space, namely the out-of-distribution generation, is important for de novo drug design. However, it is not easy for distribution learning-based models, for example diffusion models, to solve this challenge as these methods are designed to fit the distribution of training data as close as possible. In this paper, we show that Bayesian flow network, especially ChemBFN model, is capable of intrinsically generating high quality out-of-distribution samples that meet several scenarios. A reinforcement learning strategy is added to the ChemBFN and a controllable ordinary differential equation solver-like generating process is employed that accelerate the sampling processes. Most importantly, we introduce a semi-autoregressive strategy during training and inference that enhances the model performance and surpass the state-of-the-art models. A theoretical analysis of out-of-distribution generation in ChemBFN with semi-autoregressive approach is included as well.
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