Reflections from the 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.

Ranking over Regression for Bayesian Optimization and Molecule Selection

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become an indispensable tool for autonomous decision-making across diverse applications from autonomous vehicle control to accelerated drug and materials discovery. With the growing interest in self-driving laboratories, BO of chemical systems is crucial for machine learning (ML) guided experimental planning. Typically, BO employs a regression surrogate model to predict the distribution of unseen parts of the search space. However, for the selection of molecules, picking the top candidates with respect to a distribution, the relative ordering of their properties may be more important than their exact values. In this paper, we introduce Rank-based Bayesian Optimization (RBO), which utilizes a ranking model as the surrogate. We present a comprehensive investigation of RBO's optimization performance compared to conventional BO on various chemical datasets. Our results demonstrate similar or improved optimization performance using ranking models, particularly for datasets with rough structure-property landscapes and activity cliffs. Furthermore, we observe a high correlation between the surrogate ranking ability and BO performance, and this ability is maintained even at early iterations of BO optimization when using ranking surrogate models. We conclude that RBO is an effective alternative to regression-based BO, especially for optimizing novel chemical compounds.