Papers › ChemGAN challenge for drug discovery: can AI reproduce natural chemical diversity?

ChemGAN challenge for drug discovery: can AI reproduce natural chemical diversity?

28 Aug 2017arXiv:1708.08227archive 2025-07-28

Mostapha Benhenda

Generating molecules with desired chemical properties is important for drug discovery. The use of generative neural networks is promising for this task. However, from visual inspection, it often appears that generated samples lack diversity. In this paper, we quantify this internal chemical diversity, and we raise the following challenge: can a nontrivial AI model reproduce natural chemical diversity for desired molecules? To illustrate this question, we consider two generative models: a Reinforcement Learning model and the recently introduced ORGAN. Both fail at this challenge. We hope this challenge will stimulate research in this direction.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

aricsvenz/AI_for_Drugs mentioned on GitHubtf report
cool21th/ai_drug_discovery mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

DiversityDrug DiscoveryReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections