High-Accuracy Physical Property Prediction for Organics via Molecular Representation Learning: Bridging Data to Discovery

Abstract

The ongoing energy crisis has underscored the urgent need for energy-efficient materials with high energy utilization efficiency, prompting a surge in research into organic compounds due to their environmental compatibility, cost-effective processing, and versatile modifiability. To address the high experimental costs and time-consuming nature of traditional trial-and-error methods in the discovery of highly functional organic compounds, we apply the 3D transformer-based molecular representation learning algorithm to construct a pre-trained model using 60 million semi-empirically optimized structures of small organic molecules, namely, Org-Mol, which is then fine-tuned with public experimental data to obtain prediction models for various physical properties. Despite the pre-training process relying solely on single molecular coordinates, the fine-tuned models achieves high accuracy (with $R^2$ values for the test set exceeding 0.95). These fine-tuned models are applied in a high-throughput screening process to identify novel immersion coolants among millions of automatically constructed ester molecules, resulting in the experimental validation of two promising candidates. This work not only demonstrates the potential of Org-Mol in predicting bulk properties for organic compounds but also paves the way for the rational and efficient development of ideal candidates for energy-saving materials.