Papers › RetroGraph: Retrosynthetic Planning with Graph Search

RetroGraph: Retrosynthetic Planning with Graph Search

23 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.11477archive 2025-07-28

Shufang Xie, Rui Yan, Peng Han, Yingce Xia, Lijun Wu, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang, Tao Qin

Retrosynthetic planning, which aims to find a reaction pathway to synthesize a target molecule, plays an important role in chemistry and drug discovery. This task is usually modeled as a search problem. Recently, data-driven methods have attracted many research interests and shown promising results for retrosynthetic planning. We observe that the same intermediate molecules are visited many times in the searching process, and they are usually independently treated in previous tree-based methods (e.g., AND-OR tree search, Monte Carlo tree search). Such redundancies make the search process inefficient. We propose a graph-based search policy that eliminates the redundant explorations of any intermediate molecules. As searching over a graph is more complicated than over a tree, we further adopt a graph neural network to guide the search over graphs. Meanwhile, our method can search a batch of targets together in the graph and remove the inter-target duplication in the tree-based search methods. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Especially on the widely used USPTO benchmark, we improve the search success rate to 99.47%, advancing previous state-of-the-art performance for 2.6 points.

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binghong-ml/retro_star officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Drug DiscoveryGraph Neural NetworkMulti-step retrosynthesis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multi-step retrosynthesis USPTO-190 RetroGraph Success Rate (100 model calls) 88.42 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-step retrosynthesis USPTO-190 RetroGraph Success Rate (500 model calls) 99.47 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Graph Neural Network

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