Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning but struggle in molecular science due to the lack of explicit priors required for precise chemical reasoning. Current solutions inject priors into parameters, but this static coupling hinders rapid knowledge updates and often compromises the model’s general capabilities. To address this, we introduce REAP, a training-free framework that equips LLMs with an external knowledge base, enabling them to reason over retrieved chemical priors dynamically. REAP implements a structured reasoning pipeline that autonomously selects relevant priors from our constructed atom-level knowledge base, retrieves analogue exemplars, and synthesizes these information to guide the LLM’s decision-making. This architecture ensures interpretability and adaptability while preserving the LLM’s intrinsic general intelligence. Experiments show that REAP outperforms current reasoning methods and rivals state-of-the-art training-based models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

Reference-conditioned image generation increasingly relies on visual histories that rarely speak with one voice: one example pins the subject, another fixes a layout, a third only suggests a palette. Current image-conditioned diffusion methods encode these references once, average them into a single vector, and inject it at every denoising step, so conflicting cues collide and the output is faithful to none. We propose the Hierarchical Temporal Guidance Framework (HTGF), a training-free pipeline that reframes multi-reference conditioning as a *temporal routing* problem. A semantic decomposer reads each reference and emits a soft routing distribution over three axes (Subject, Structure, Detail), and a closed-form SNR-sensitivity argument places each axis in the denoising window where it has the most leverage. A short manifold-aware corrector then smooths the trajectory at the stage boundaries where the active condition changes. HTGF adds no training and no architectural change to the diffusion backbone. On three datasets it outperforms strong VLM- and diffusion-based baselines, gaining +11.7 CIS over LaVIT on Movie Poster and FID 38.87 vs. 50.12 for the best baseline under noisy histories, and degrading gracefully down to the zero-reference limit.