ACL2026
BiMol-Diff: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Molecular Generation and Captioning
Aditya Hemant Shahane, Anuj Kumar Sirohi, Devansh Arora, Nitin Kumar, Prathosh AP, Sandeep Kumar
Abstract
Bridging molecular structures and natural language is essential for controllable design. Autoregressive models struggle with long-range dependencies, while standard diffusion processes apply uniform corruption across positions, which can distort structurally informative tokens. We present BiMol-Diff, a unified diffusion framework for the paired tasks of text-conditioned molecule generation and molecule captioning. Our key component is a Token-aware noise schedule that assigns position-dependent corruption based on token recovery difficulty, preserving harder-torecover substructures during the forward process. On ChEBI-20 and M3-20M, BiMol-Diff improves molecule reconstruction with a 15.4% relative gain in Exact Match and achieves strong captioning results, attaining the best BLEU and BERTScore among compared baselines. These results indicate token-aware noising improves fidelity in molecular structurelanguage modeling. Code link GitHub.