Structural Hierarchy and Geometry in Molecular Representation Learning
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Structural Hierarchy and Geometry in Molecular Representation Learning
Abstract:Molecular self-supervised learning uses chemical structures to guide which molecular embeddings should be similar. We study whether explicitly encoding a molecule's Bemis-Murcko scaffold and using it to supervise the molecular embedding changes what the model learns. We further test whether this effect depends on the embedding geometry by comparing Euclidean and Lorentz contrastive objectives. Across two augmentation strengths, scaffold-supervised models consistently organize molecules according to both identical and structurally related scaffolds. The resulting embeddings also improve molecular property prediction on several tasks, while the exact gains depend on the predicted property. The effect of scaffold supervision on molecular organization is stronger under Lorentz objectives, but neither geometry provides a consistent overall advantage. These results show that explicitly teaching the relation between a molecule and its structural core can reliably shape the organization of molecular embedding space, while the extent of usefulness of this organization remains task dependent.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Biomolecules (q-bio.BM) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29886 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29886v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29886
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Lorenzo Di Fruscia [view email][v1] Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:34:17 UTC (2,203 KB)
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