Model reference · open weights

MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct

Embeddings ibm-research Embeddings 1 build Open weights 113k dl/mo

MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct is an open-weight embedding model from IBM. MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct (FP32) weighs 94 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct is a 47M parameter feature extraction model developed by IBM for processing SMILES string representations of small molecules.
  • It is designed to be fine-tuned for molecular property prediction tasks or used to generate embeddings for similarity measurements, with a context length of 202 tokens.
  • The model is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Summary of the ibm-research/MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byIBM
Released2023-10-20
Parameters47M
VRAM94 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct (FP32)

94 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What IBM says about MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct

Read the model card

MoLFormer is a class of models pretrained on SMILES string representations of up to 1.1B molecules from ZINC and PubChem. This repository is for the model pretrained on 10% of both datasets.

It was introduced in the paper Large-Scale Chemical Language Representations Capture Molecular Structure and Properties by Ross et al. and first released in this repository.

Model Details

Model Description

MoLFormer is a large-scale chemical language model designed with the intention of learning a model trained on small molecules which are represented as SMILES strings. MoLFormer leverges masked language modeling and employs a linear attention Transformer combined with rotary embeddings.

An overview of the MoLFormer pipeline is seen in the image above. One can see that the transformer-based neural network model is trained on a large collection of chemical molecules represented by SMILES sequences from two public chemical datasets PubChem and ZINC in a self-supervised fashion. The MoLFormer architecture was designed with an efficient linear attention mechanism and relative positional embeddings with the goal of learning a meaningful and compressed representation of chemical molecules. After training the MoLFormer foundation model was then adopted to different downstream molecular property prediction tasks via fine-tuning on task-specific data. To further test the representative power of MoLFormer, the MoLFormer encodings were used to recover molecular similarity, and analysis on the correspondence between the interatomic spatial distance and attention value for a given molecule was performed.

Intended use and limitations

You can use the model for masked language modeling, but it is mainly intended to be used as a feature extractor or to be fine-tuned for a prediction task. The "frozen" model embeddings may be used for similarity measurements, visualization, or training predictor models. The model may also be fine-tuned for sequence classification tasks (e.g., solubility, toxicity, etc.).

This model is not intended for molecule generation. It is also not tested for molecules larger than ~200 atoms (i.e., macromolecules). Furthermore, using invalid or noncanonical SMILES may result in worse performance.

Example code

Use the code below to get started with the model.

[!TIP] Tested with transformers v5.12.1. For compatibility with transformers v4, use revision="compat-v4".

import torch
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("ibm/MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct", deterministic_eval=True, trust_remote_code=True)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("ibm/MoLFormer-XL-both-10pct", trust_remote_code=True)

smiles = ["Cn1c(=O)c2c(ncn2C)n(C)c1=O", "CC(=O)Oc1ccccc1C(=O)O"]
inputs = tokenizer(smiles, padding=True, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)
outputs.pooler_output

Training Details

Data

We trained MoLFormer-XL on a combination of molecules from the ZINC15 and PubChem datasets. This repository contains the version trained on 10% ZINC + 10% PubChem.

Molecules were canonicalized with RDKit prior to training and isomeric information was removed. Also, molecules longer than 202 tokens were dropped.

Hardware

  • 16 x NVIDIA V100 GPUs

Evaluation

We evaluated MoLFormer by fine-tuning on 11 benchmark tasks from MoleculeNet. The tables below show the performance of different MoLFormer variants:

BBBPHIVBACESIDERClinToxTox21
10% ZINC + 10% PubChem91.581.386.668.994.684.5
10% ZINC + 100% PubChem92.279.286.369.094.784.5
100% ZINC89.978.487.766.882.283.2
MoLFormer-Base90.977,782.864.861.343.1
MoLFormer-XL93.782.288.269.094.884.7
QM9QM8ESOLFreeSolvLipophilicity
10% ZINC + 10% PubChem1.77540.01080.32950.22210.5472
10% ZINC + 100% PubChem1.90930.01020.27750.20500.5331
100% ZINC1.94030.01240.30230.29810.5440
MoLFormer-Base2.25000.01110.27980.25960.6492
MoLFormer-XL1.59840.01020.27870.23080.5298

We report AUROC for all classification tasks, average MAE for QM9/8, and RMSE for the remaining regression tasks.

Citation

@article{10.1038/s42256-022-00580-7,
  year = {2022},
  title = {{Large-scale chemical language representations capture molecular structure and   properties}},
  author = {Ross, Jerret and Belgodere, Brian and Chenthamarakshan, Vijil and Padhi, Inkit and   Mroueh, Youssef and Das, Payel},
  journal = {Nature Machine Intelligence},
  doi = {10.1038/s42256-022-00580-7},
  pages = {1256--1264},
  number = {12},
  volume = {4}
}
@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2106.09553,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2106.09553},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09553},
  author = {Ross, Jerret and Belgodere, Brian and Chenthamarakshan, Vijil and Padhi, Inkit and Mroueh, Youssef and Das, Payel},
  keywords = {Machine Learning (cs.LG), Computation and Language (cs.CL), Biomolecules (q-bio.BM), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Biological sciences, FOS: Biological sciences},
  title = {Large-Scale Chemical Language Representations Capture Molecular Structure and Propertie

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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