Papers › MolFM: A Multimodal Molecular Foundation Model

MolFM: A Multimodal Molecular Foundation Model

6 Jun 2023arXiv:2307.09484archive 2025-07-28

Yizhen Luo, Kai Yang, Massimo Hong, Xing Yi Liu, Zaiqing Nie

Molecular knowledge resides within three different modalities of information sources: molecular structures, biomedical documents, and knowledge bases. Effective incorporation of molecular knowledge from these modalities holds paramount significance in facilitating biomedical research. However, existing multimodal molecular foundation models exhibit limitations in capturing intricate connections between molecular structures and texts, and more importantly, none of them attempt to leverage a wealth of molecular expertise derived from knowledge graphs. In this study, we introduce MolFM, a multimodal molecular foundation model designed to facilitate joint representation learning from molecular structures, biomedical texts, and knowledge graphs. We propose cross-modal attention between atoms of molecular structures, neighbors of molecule entities and semantically related texts to facilitate cross-modal comprehension. We provide theoretical analysis that our cross-modal pre-training captures local and global molecular knowledge by minimizing the distance in the feature space between different modalities of the same molecule, as well as molecules sharing similar structures or functions. MolFM achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks. On cross-modal retrieval, MolFM outperforms existing models with 12.13% and 5.04% absolute gains under the zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, respectively. Furthermore, qualitative analysis showcases MolFM's implicit ability to provide grounding from molecular substructures and knowledge graphs. Code and models are available on https://github.com/BioFM/OpenBioMed.

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Code

biofm/openbiomed officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
pharmolix/openbiomed mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Cross-Modal RetrievalKnowledge GraphsMolecule CaptioningRepresentation LearningRetrievalText-based de novo Molecule Generationmodel

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base BLEU-2 58.5 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base BLEU-4 49.8 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base METEOR 60.7 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base ROUGE-1 65.3 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base ROUGE-2 50.8 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base ROUGE-L 59.4 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Text2Mol 57.6 #18 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small BLEU-2 54.2 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small BLEU-4 45.2 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small METEOR 56.4 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small ROUGE-1 62.3 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small ROUGE-2 46.9 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small ROUGE-L 56.2 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Molecule Captioning ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Text2Mol 55.7 #26 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base BLEU 82.2 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Exact Match 21.0 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Levenshtein 19.445 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base MACCS FTS 85.4 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Morgan FTS 75.8 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Parameter Count 296200000 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base RDK FTS 69.7 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Text2Mol 58.3 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Base Validity 89.2 #10 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small BLEU 80.3 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Exact Match 16.9 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Levenshtein 20.868 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small MACCS FTS 83.4 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Morgan FTS 72.1 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Parameter Count 13620000 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small RDK FTS 66.2 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Text2Mol 57.3 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report
Text-based de novo Molecule Generation ChEBI-20 MolFM-Small Validity 85.9 #13 of 20 Archive leaderboard report

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