RLSynC: Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning for Synthon Completion

Retrosynthesis is the process of determining the set of reactant molecules that can react to form a desired product. Semi-template-based retrosynthesis methods, which imitate the reverse logic of synthesis reactions, first predict the reaction centers in the products, and then complete the resulting synthons back into reactants. These methods enable necessary interpretability and high practical utility to inform synthesis planning. We develop a new offline-online reinforcement learning method RLSynC for synthon completion in semi-template-based methods. RLSynC assigns one agent to each synthon, all of which complete the synthons by conducting actions step by step in a synchronized fashion. RLSynC learns the policy from both offline training episodes and online interactions which allow RLSynC to explore new reaction spaces. RLSynC uses a forward synthesis model to evaluate the likelihood of the predicted reactants in synthesizing a product, and thus guides the action search. We compare RLSynC with the state-of-the-art retrosynthesis methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that RLSynC can outperform these methods with improvement as high as 14.9% on synthon completion, and 14.0% on retrosynthesis, highlighting its potential in synthesis planning.