Multi-constraint molecular generation based on conditional transformer, knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning

Jike Wang, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Mingyang Wang, Xiaorui Wang, Zhenxing Wu, Dejun Jiang, Benben Liao, Xujun Zhang, Bo Yang, Qiaojun He, Dongsheng Cao, Xi Chen, Tingjun Hou

Abstract: Combining generative models and reinforcement learning has become a promising direction for computational drug design, but it is challenging to train an efficient model that produces candidate molecules with high diversity. Jike Wang and colleagues present a method, using knowledge distillation, to condense a conditional transformer model to make it usable in reinforcement learning while still generating diverse molecules that optimize multiple molecular properties.