MMPCS: multi-view molecular pretraining based on consistency information and specific information

MOTIVATION: The goal of molecular representation learning is to automate the extraction of molecular features, a critical task in cheminformatics and drug discovery. While pretraining models using multiple views like SMILES, 2D graphs, and 3D conformations have advanced the field, integrating them effectively to produce superior representations remains a challenge. RESULTS: To bridge this gap, we propose a novel multi-view molecular pretraining method termed MMPCS, which explicitly factorizes representations into consistency and specific information. Our approach utilizes the Graph Isomorphism Network and the RoBERTa model to encode 2D molecular topological graphs and SMILES sequences, respectively. Each resulting molecular embedding is decomposed into a shared consistency component and a view-specific remainder. An autoencoder then aligns the consistency information across views. The combined consistency and view-specific representations serve as input for downstream tasks, enabling precise and task-aware predictions. When benchmarked against 16 state-of-the-art molecular pretraining methods, MMPCS achieved the highest average performance across both classification and regression tasks for molecular property prediction. It also delivered outstanding results in predicting drug-target binding affinity and cancer drug response, demonstrating its robustness and broad applicability. Additionally, a case study on the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant highlights the potential of MMPCS in facilitating drug repurposing efforts. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code and datasets supporting this study are publicly available at GitHub (https://github.com/xmubiocode/MMPCS) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18182748).