skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 8:00 PM ET on Friday, March 21 until 8:00 AM ET on Saturday, March 22 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


Title: Interpretable Molecule Generation via Disentanglement Learning
Designing molecules with specific structural and functional properties (e.g., drug-likeness and water solubility) is central to advancing drug discovery and material science, but it poses outstanding challenges both in wet and dry laboratories. The search space is vast and rugged. Recent advances in deep generative models are motivating new computational approaches building over deep learning to tackle the molecular space. Despite rapid advancements, state-of-the-art deep generative models for molecule generation have many limitations, including lack of interpretability. In this paper we address this limitation by proposing a generic framework for interpretable molecule generation based on novel disentangled deep graph generative models with property control. Specifically, we propose a disentanglement enhancement strategy for graphs. We also propose new deep neural architecture to achieve the above learning objective for inference and generation for variable-size graphs efficiently. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our approach in various critical aspects, such as accuracy, novelty, and disentanglement.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1841520
PAR ID:
10318802
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract Motivation

    Expanding our knowledge of small molecules beyond what is known in nature or designed in wet laboratories promises to significantly advance cheminformatics, drug discovery, biotechnology and material science. In silico molecular design remains challenging, primarily due to the complexity of the chemical space and the non-trivial relationship between chemical structures and biological properties. Deep generative models that learn directly from data are intriguing, but they have yet to demonstrate interpretability in the learned representation, so we can learn more about the relationship between the chemical and biological space. In this article, we advance research on disentangled representation learning for small molecule generation. We build on recent work by us and others on deep graph generative frameworks, which capture atomic interactions via a graph-based representation of a small molecule. The methodological novelty is how we leverage the concept of disentanglement in the graph variational autoencoder framework both to generate biologically relevant small molecules and to enhance model interpretability.

    Results

    Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluation in comparison with state-of-the-art models demonstrate the superiority of our disentanglement framework. We believe this work is an important step to address key challenges in small molecule generation with deep generative frameworks.

    Availability and implementation

    Training and generated data are made available at https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/dataset-disentangled-representation-learning-interpretable-molecule-generation. All code is made available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/D-MolVAE-2799/.

    Supplementary information

    Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

     
    more » « less
  2. Representation learning via deep generative models is opening a new avenue for small molecule generation in silico. Linking chemical and biological space remains a key challenge. In this paper, we debut a graph-based variational autoencoder framework to address this challenge under the umbrella of disentangled representation learning. The framework permits several inductive biases that connect the learned latent factors to molecular properties. Evaluation on diverse benchmark datasets shows that the resulting models are powerful and open up an exciting line of research on controllable molecule generation in support of cheminformatics, drug discovery, and other application settings. 
    more » « less
  3. Generation of molecules with desired chemical and biological properties such as high drug-likeness, high binding affinity to target proteins, is critical for drug discovery. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic generative model to capture the joint distribution of molecules and their properties. Our model assumes an energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space. Conditional on the latent vector, the molecule and its properties are modeled by a molecule generation model and a property regression model respectively. To search for molecules with desired properties, we propose a sampling with gradual distribution shifting (SGDS) algorithm, so that after learning the model initially on the training data of existing molecules and their properties, the proposed algorithm gradually shifts the model distribution towards the region supported by molecules with desired values of properties. Our experiments show that our method achieves very strong performances on various molecule design tasks. 
    more » « less
  4. Recently, researches related to unsupervised disentanglement learning with deep generative models have gained substantial popularity. However, without introducing supervision, there is no guarantee that the factors of interest can be successfully recovered (Locatello et al. 2018). Motivated by a real-world problem, we propose a setting where the user introduces weak supervision by providing similarities between instances based on a factor to be disentangled. The similarity is provided as either a binary (yes/no) or real-valued label describing whether a pair of instances are similar or not. We propose a new method for weakly supervised disentanglement of latent variables within the framework of Variational Autoencoder. Experimental results demonstrate that utilizing weak supervision improves the performance of the disentanglement method substantially. 
    more » « less
  5. Generating new molecules with specified chemical and biological properties via generative models has emerged as a promising direction for drug discovery. However, existing methods require extensive training/fine-tuning with a large dataset, often unavailable in real-world generation tasks. In this work, we propose a new retrieval-based framework for controllable molecule generation. We use a small set of exemplar molecules, i.e., those that (partially) satisfy the design criteria, to steer the pre-trained generative model towards synthesizing molecules that satisfy the given design criteria. We design a retrieval mechanism that retrieves and fuses the exemplar molecules with the input molecule, which is trained by a new self-supervised objective that predicts the nearest neighbor of the input molecule. We also propose an iterative refinement process to dynamically update the generated molecules and retrieval database for better generalization. Our approach is agnostic to the choice of generative models and requires no task-specific fine-tuning. On various tasks ranging from simple design criteria to a challenging real-world scenario for designing lead compounds that bind to the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, we demonstrate our approach extrapolates well beyond the retrieval database, and achieves better performance and wider applicability than previous methods. 
    more » « less