Data-Efficient Graph Grammar Learning for Molecular Generation

The problem of molecular generation has received significant attention recently . Existing methods are typically based on deep neural networks and require training on large datasets with tens of thousands of samples . In practice , however , the size of class-specific chemical datasets is usually limited ( e.g. , dozens of samples ) due to labor-intensive experimentation and data collection . This presents a considerable challenge for the deep learning generative models to comprehensively describe the molecular design space . Another major challenge is to generate only physically synthesizable molecules . This is a non-trivial task for neural networkbased generative models since the relevant chemical knowledge can only be extracted and generalized from the limited training data . In this work , we propose a data-efficient generative model that can be learned from datasets with orders of magnitude smaller sizes than common benchmarks . At the heart of this method is a learnable graph grammar that generates molecules from a sequence of production rules . Without any human assistance , these production rules are automatically constructed from training data . Furthermore , additional chemical knowledge can be incorporated in the model by further grammar optimization . Our learned graph grammar yields state-of-the-art results on generating high quality molecules for three monomer datasets that contain only ∼20 samples each . Our approach also achieves remarkable performance in a challenging polymer generation task with only 117 training samples and is competitive against existing methods using 81k data points . 1 INTRODUCTION . The rise of computational approaches has started to have a significant impact on the discovery of materials and drugs . Recent advances in machine learning , especially deep learning ( DL ) , have driven rapid development on generating novel molecular structures ( Maziarka et al. , 2020 ; Xu et al. , 2019 ) .Various forms of generative models including generative adversarial networks ( De Cao & Kipf , 2018 ; Maziarka et al. , 2020 ) , variational autoencoders ( VAEs ) ( Jin et al. , 2018 ; 2020 ; Liu et al. , 2018 ; Sattarov et al. , 2019 ) , and reinforcement learning ( You et al. , 2018 ) have been exploited to represent the complicated molecular design space and generate new molecules . They typically formulate molecular generation as a problem of distribution learning , where the generative model first learns to reproduce the distribution of a training set before generating new molecular structures . Generative models have also managed to integrate certain chemical constraints ( e.g. , valency restrictions ) ( Jin et al. , 2018 ; Liu et al. , 2018 ) and shown promising results on the common benchmarks ( Irwin et al. , 2012 ; Ramakrishnan et al. , 2014 ) . However , DL-based generative models face a serious limitation : they require large amounts of training data to achieve reasonable performance . In practice , molecule data is not always abundant ( Stanley et al. , 2021 ; Altae-Tran et al. , 2017 ; Subramanian et al. , 2016 ) ; for instance , the focus may be on a specific type of molecules fulfilling certain ingredient requirements . Particularly in the context of polymers , large amounts of training data are not available , and therefore DL models use manually constructed or generated data ( St. John et al. , 2019 ; Jin et al. , 2020 ; Ma & Luo , 2020 ) . Real data sets , as used in one of the state-of-the-art papers on polyurethane property prediction , have as little as 20 samples ( Menon et al. , 2019 ) . In such scenarios , designing a pure DL-based model is challenging . Recent renewed interest in formal grammars ( Kajino , 2019 ; Krenn et al. , 2019 ; Nigam et al. , 2021 ; Guo et al. , 2021 ) provides an alternative to pure DL methods . In formal language theory , a grammar is a set of production rules describing how to generate valid strings according to the language ’ s syntax . A chemical grammar may thus be considered as an interpretable and compact design model that simultaneously serves as a molecular representation and a generative model ; even domain-specific constraints can be explicitly incorporated into the rules . Recent examples range from string-based ( Krenn et al. , 2019 ; Nigam et al. , 2021 ) to hypergraph-based ( Kajino , 2019 ) and polymer-specific grammars ( Guo et al. , 2021 ) . Grammar-based generative models do not rely on large training datasets and easily extrapolate to generate molecules outside the distribution of training samples . Yet , they have two major drawbacks . First , current approaches require that chemical grammars are manually designed by human experts ( Krenn et al. , 2019 ; Nigam et al. , 2021 ; Dai et al. , 2018 ) . This is a tedious process that heavily relies on expertise in chemistry . Moreover , the existing grammars are also very fine-grained ( i.e. , rules are mostly attaching atoms ) in order to cover the syntax of general molecules instead of a specific dataset . Hence , it is not straightforward how to incorporate the bias of given data ( e.g. , certain molecular substructures ) into such grammars . The second drawback is that it remains challenging to integrate chemistry knowledge beyond simple constraints ( e.g. , valency restrictions ) into the grammar . Current grammar construction approaches fail to capture more abstract or complex aspects such as the diversity or synthesizabilty of the generated molecules , which constrains their practicality . Solutions such as Kajino ( 2019 ) resort to costly optimization on the level of molecules ( or their latent representation ) after the grammar is built or learned . For a more detailed delimitation of related work , see Sec . 2 . In this paper , we propose a generative model combining complex graph grammar construction with a relatively simple and effective learning technique . In particular , our grammar incorporates substructures of varying sizes ( i.e. , above atom level ) and the construction process directly optimizes various chemical metrics ( e.g. , distribution statistics and synthesizability ) while satisfying specific chemical constraints ( e.g. , valency restrictions ) . Moreover , we have the benefits of symbolic knowledge representation : explainability and data efficiency . Our evaluation focuses on polymers , particularly their monomer building blocks . Thus , we curate new , realistic polymer datasets gathered from literature that represent specific classes of monomers . Note that our model works for arbitrary molecules . Framework . Figure 1 outlines our approach . Given molecules and domain-specific metrics to be optimized , we iteratively construct and evaluate a graph grammar as our generative model . We consider the construction as a minimum spanning forest problem and combine it with optimization of the metrics , via a learnable function Fθ determining which rules to construct . Results . Our model successfully deals with extreme settings – from a DL perspective – learning meaningful production rules based on only ∼10 samples ( e.g. , of a specific class ) ; this is of significant importance in a practical setting ( Stanley et al. , 2021 ; Altae-Tran et al. , 2017 ) but has been ignored so far . In particular , our model is able to generate members of a specific monomer class with a decent success rate . No previous state-of-the-art system achieves similar performance in our experiments . Generally , our approach works on training data that is orders of magnitude smaller than the amount needed by DL-based systems to produce meaningful results . Given ∼100 samples , we achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art systems trained on 81k samples , across a wide range of common and new evaluation metrics . Besides , our grammar optimization method can adjust to any user-defined domain-specific metrics . The learned grammars can capture domainspecific knowledge explicitly , e.g. , the characteristic functional groups of a given class of polymers can be extracted from the production rules . 2 RELATED WORK . Generative Models for Molecules . Existing models can be categorized based on their molecule representation . It is common to use SMILES strings ( Weininger , 1988 ) . Yang et al . ( 2017 ) , Olivecrona et al . ( 2017 ) , and Gómez-Bombarelli et al . ( 2018 ) use recurrent neural networks to generate the strings in a sequential manner . For instance , Gómez-Bombarelli et al . ( 2018 ) propose a VAE based on sequence-to-sequence encoders and decoders . Guimaraes et al . ( 2017 ) , Sanchez-Lengeling et al . ( 2017 ) , and Dai et al . ( 2018 ) additionally apply optimization objectives to enforce similarity or semantic correctness to generate valid SMILES . Alternatively , molecules can be treated as graphs . Simonovsky & Komodakis ( 2018 ) , Ma et al . ( 2018 ) , and De Cao & Kipf ( 2018 ) generate the graphs in a single step , directly outputting adjacency matrices and node labels . GraphNVP ( Madhawa et al. , 2019 ) uses two steps to generate the node labels based on the adjacency matrix ; it exploits a model to encode molecules and uses the same model whose layers are reversed to generate new molecules . You et al . ( 2018 ) ; Li et al . ( 2018 ) ; Samanta et al . ( 2020 ) ; Liu et al . ( 2018 ) ; Liao et al . ( 2019 ) ; Jin et al . ( 2018 ; 2020 ) build molecule graphs iteratively based on either atom nodes or substructures . For example , JT-VAE ( Jin et al. , 2018 ) first generates a tree and then expands some of its nodes by attaching substructures based on a vocabulary mined from given molecules ; Similarly , HierVAE ( Jin et al. , 2020 ) also uses a vocabulary , but improves upon the combinatorial attachment process by directly applying a multi-resolution representation , allowing for generating much larger and diverse molecules . All these methods depend on DL and require large training datasets . Moreover , the resulting models are usually not interpretable . Our approach alleviates this obstacle and can deal with practically common setting of only dozens of available data points . Generative Models using Graph Grammars . Our approach belongs to the class of models generating new graphs based on the production rules of a graph grammar . These models are non-parametric , interpretable , and can incorporate meaningful graph properties into the rules . One option is to use grammars that are manually designed by human experts ( Dai et al. , 2018 ; Nigam et al. , 2021 ) . For instance , STONED ( Nigam et al. , 2021 ) generates new molecules based on a string-based representation of given molecules by replacing tokens ( representing atoms ) in accordance with the SELFIES grammar ( Krenn et al. , 2019 ) . While the simplicity of this approach is attractive , the generated molecules are not necessary reasonable from a chemical perspective ( e.g. , they might not be synthesizable ) . This problem can be overcome by mining the grammar from real data . Recently , several automatic techniques that explicitly construct a graph grammar have been proposed in the context of large-scale graphs to facilitate understanding and analysis ( Sikdar et al. , 2019 ; Aguinaga et al. , 2018 ; Hibshman et al. , 2019 ) . These works are domain-independent and do not allow specialization of the constructed grammar to reflect domain-specific knowledge . Closest to our method is MHG ( Kajino , 2019 ) , a framework that constructs a molecular hyperedge-replacement grammar based on Aguinaga et al . ( 2018 ) . From the given data , MHG learns a fine-grained grammar where the rules iteratively attach single atoms and therefore incorporates hard chemical constraints ( e.g. , valency restrictions ) . MHG then applies a VAE conditioned on the grammar to the molecules ’ tree decompositions in order to also learn soft constraints ( e.g. , stability ) . Finally , it uses Bayesian optimization to guide molecule generation . The fine-grained rules in MHG allows for rich diversity . However , our experiments show that these rules make it hard to capture distribution-specific properties , e.g. , characteristic substructures of a specific molecular class . Such a drawback limits the practical use of MHG . In contrast , our approach focuses on subgraphs instead of individual atoms only . It directly incorporates domain-specific knowledge into grammar construction and therefore avoids complicated post-processing to achieve high generation performance .

Summary: This paper proposed an interesting grammar learning-based data-efficient molecule generation model.  The key idea of this method is to learn a set of production rules via a hyper-edge selection process that optimizes a set of evaluation metrics.  This method achieves impressive performance on extremely small datasets and achieves competitive performance compared with end-to-end models trained on a large dataset.