MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter

Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Yanchen Luo, Hao Fei, Yixin Cao, Kenji Kawaguchi, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua


Abstract
Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on various 1D text-related tasks. However, they inherently lack 2D graph perception — a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures. To bridge this gap, we propose MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter. MolCA enables an LM (i.e., Galactica) to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via the cross-modal projector. Specifically, the cross-modal projector is implemented as a Q-Former to connect a graph encoder’s representation space and an LM’s text space. Further, MolCA employs a uni-modal adapter (i.e., LoRA) for the LM’s efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Unlike previous studies that couple an LM with a graph encoder via cross-modal contrastive learning, MolCA retains the LM’s ability of open-ended text generation and augments it with 2D graph information. To showcase its effectiveness, we extensively benchmark MolCA on tasks of molecule captioning, IUPAC name prediction, and molecule-text retrieval, on which MolCA significantly outperforms the baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.966
Original:
2023.emnlp-main.966v1
Version 2:
2023.emnlp-main.966v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15623–15638
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.966
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.966
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Yanchen Luo, Hao Fei, Yixin Cao, Kenji Kawaguchi, Xiang Wang, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2023. MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15623–15638, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter (Liu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.966.pdf
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 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.966.mp4