ReactionT5: a pre-trained transformer model for accurate chemical reaction prediction with limited data

Accurate chemical reaction prediction is critical for reducing both cost and time in drug development. This study introduces ReactionT5, a transformer-based chemical reaction foundation model pre-trained on the Open Reaction Database—a large publicly available reaction dataset. In benchmarks for product prediction, retrosynthesis, and yield prediction, ReactionT5 outperformed existing models. Specifically, ReactionT5 achieved 97.5% accuracy in product prediction, 71.0% in retrosynthesis, and a coefficient of determination of 0.947 in yield prediction. Remarkably, ReactionT5, when fine-tuned with only a limited dataset of reactions, achieved performance on par with models fine-tuned on the complete dataset. Additionally, the visualization of ReactionT5 embeddings illustrates that the model successfully captures and represents the chemical reaction space, indicating effective learning of reaction properties.

Graphical Abstract