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Probing Chemical Language Models: Effects of Pre-training and Fine-tuning

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2607.02140 (cs)
[Submitted on 2 Jul 2026]

Title:Probing Chemical Language Models: Effects of Pre-training and Fine-tuning

View a PDF of the paper titled Probing Chemical Language Models: Effects of Pre-training and Fine-tuning, by Anna Karnysheva and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Chemical language models (CLMs) are trained with linearized representations such as SMILES, yet it remains unclear which chemically meaningful substructures they encode. To foster a better understanding of CLMs, we conduct a systematic study and probe for 78 molecular substructures across eight pre-trained and six randomly initialized models. We furthermore study how fine-tuning on chemical downstream tasks affects the learned representations of molecular substructures. Our results show that pre-training generally improves molecular structure awareness of CLMs, particularly in the upper layers. Moreover, randomly initialized models already encode ring structures well in the first layer. Our analysis on two chemical downstream tasks further reveals that, interestingly, fine-tuning affects task-relevant molecular substructures more than others, indicating that the changes in the representations follow chemical theory.
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.02140 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2607.02140v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.02140
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Anna Karnysheva [view email]
[v1] Thu, 2 Jul 2026 13:16:31 UTC (1,621 KB)
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