243 - TRACE: Transformation-Aware Graph Refinement for Reaction Condition Prediction

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Dongsheng Cao, Yujie Chen, Yuansheng Liu, Yiping Liu, Tengfei Ma, Leyi Wei, Shu Wu, Xiangxiang Zeng
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Identifying suitable reaction conditions is critical for chemical synthesis, as they directly affect yield, selectivity, and transformation feasibility. While recent methods have shown promising results, most approaches either encode reactants and products independently or rely on rule-based reaction graphs, both of which constrain the ability of the model to capture condition-relevant structural transformations. In this work, we propose TRACE, a transformation-aware graph refinement framework for reaction condition prediction. TRACE constructs atom-level joint graphs that integrate both reactant and product structures to represent condition-relevant transformations. A structure-aware encoder enriches atom features with local chemical context, followed by a dynamic interaction refinement module that adaptively infers task-specific edges. To further guide the model toward condition-relevant patterns, a mechanism regularized graph encoder incorporates reaction center information, enabling more accurate modeling of transformation mechanisms. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that TRACE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple condition types. The integration of transformation-aware refinement leads to improvements in prediction accuracy and generalization, while maintaining robust performance in challenging and realistic synthesis planning scenarios.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Computational Drug Discovery Methods Machine Learning in Materials Science History and advancements in chemistry

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN