Enhanced Template-Free Reaction Prediction with Molecular Graphs and Sequence-based Data Augmentation

Retrosynthesis and forward synthesis prediction are fundamental challenges in organic synthesis, computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP), and computer-aided drug design (CADD). The objective is to predict plausible reactants for a given target product and its corresponding inverse task. With the rapid development of deep learning, numerous approaches have been proposed to solve this problem from various perspectives. The methods based on molecular graphs benefit from their rich features embedded inside but face difficulties in applying existing sequence-based data augmentations due to the permutation invariance of graph structures. In this work, we propose SeqAGraph, a template-free approach that annotates input graphs with its root atom index to ensure compatibility with sequence-based data augmentation. The matrix product for global attention in graph encoders is implemented by indexing, elementwise product, and aggregation to fuse global attention with local message passing without graph padding. Experiments demonstrate that SeqAGraph fully benefits from molecular graphs and sequence-based data augmentation and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in template-free approaches.