STRIDE: Structure-guided Generation for Inverse Design of Molecules

Abstract: Machine learning and especially deep learning has had an increasing impact on molecule and materials design. In particular, given the growing access to an abundance of high-quality small molecule data for generative modeling for drug design, results for drug discovery have been promising. However, for many important classes of materials such as catalysts, antioxidants, and metal-organic frameworks, such large datasets are not available. Such families of molecules with limited samples and structural similarities are especially prevalent for industrial applications. As is well-known, retraining and even fine-tuning are challenging on such small datasets. Novel, practically applicable molecules are most often derivatives of well-known molecules, suggesting approaches to addressing data scarcity. To address this problem, we introduce $\textbf{STRIDE}$, a generative molecule workflow that generates novel molecules with an unconditional generative model guided by known molecules without any retraining. We generate molecules outside of the training data from a highly specialized set of antioxidant molecules. Our generated molecules have on average 21.7% lower synthetic accessibility scores and also reduce ionization potential by 5.9% of generated molecules via guiding.