ReactGPT: Understanding of Chemical Reactions via In-Context Tuning

The interdisciplinary field of chemistry and artificial intelligence (AI) is an active area of research aimed at accelerating scientific discovery. Large language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in biochemical tasks, especially the molecule caption translation, which aims to align between molecules and natural language texts. However, existing works mainly focus on single molecules, while alignment between chemical reactions and natural language text remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the description of reactions is an essential part in biochemical patents and literature, and research on this aspect not only can help better understand chemical reactions but also promote research on automating chemical synthesis and retrosynthesis. In this work, we propose ReactGPT, a framework aiming to bridge the gap between chemical reaction and text. ReactGPT allows a new task: reaction captioning, by adapting LLMs to learn reaction-text alignment from context examples via In-Context Tuning. Specifically, ReactGPT jointly leverages a Fingerprints-based Reaction Retrieval module, a Domain-Specific Prompt Design module, and a two-stage In-Context Tuning module. We evaluate the effectiveness of ReactGPT on reaction captioning and experimental procedure prediction, both of these tasks can reflect the understanding of chemical reactions. Experimental results show that compared to previous models, ReactGPT exhibits competitive capabilities in resolving chemical reactions and generating high-quality text with correct structure.