Boosting the performance of molecular property prediction via graph–text alignment and multi-granularity representation enhancement

Deep learning is playing an increasingly important role in accurate prediction of molecular properties. Prior to being processed by a deep learning model, a molecule is typically represented in the form of a text or a graph. While some methods attempt to integrate these two forms of molecular representations, the misalignment of graph and text embeddings presents a significant challenge to fuse two modalities. To solve this problem, we propose a method that aligns and fuses graph and text features in the embedding space by using contrastive loss and cross attentions. Additionally, we enhance the molecular representation by incorporating multi-granularity information of molecules on the levels of atoms, functional groups, and molecules. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in downstream tasks of molecular property prediction, achieving superior performance with less pretraining data. The source codes and data are available at https://github.com/zzr624663649/multimodal_molecular_property.