Papers › Predicting Retrosynthetic Reaction using Self-Corrected Transformer Neural Networks

Predicting Retrosynthetic Reaction using Self-Corrected Transformer Neural Networks

2 Jul 2019arXiv:1907.01356archive 2025-07-28

Shuangjia Zheng, Jiahua Rao, Zhongyue Zhang, Jun Xu, Yuedong Yang

Synthesis planning is the process of recursively decomposing target molecules into available precursors. Computer-aided retrosynthesis can potentially assist chemists in designing synthetic routes, but at present it is cumbersome and provides results of dissatisfactory quality. In this study, we develop a template-free self-corrected retrosynthesis predictor (SCROP) to perform a retrosynthesis prediction task trained by using the Transformer neural network architecture. In the method, the retrosynthesis planning is converted as a machine translation problem between molecular linear notations of reactants and the products. Coupled with a neural network-based syntax corrector, our method achieves an accuracy of 59.0% on a standard benchmark dataset, which increases >21% over other deep learning methods, and >6% over template-based methods. More importantly, our method shows an accuracy 1.7 times higher than other state-of-the-art methods for compounds not appearing in the training set.

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Machine TranslationRetrosynthesisTranslation

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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