ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

COMO: Closed-Loop Optical Molecule Recognition with Minimum Risk Training

ai-technology · 2026-04-29

A new AI framework called COMO (Closed-loop Optical Molecule recOgnition) addresses the challenge of optical chemical structure recognition (OCSR) in real-world documents. OCSR translates molecular images into machine-readable formats like SMILES strings or molecular graphs, but struggles with variations in chemical structures, shorthand conventions, and visual noise. Existing deep-learning methods use teacher forcing with token-level Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), which suffers from exposure bias and fails to optimize molecular-level criteria like chemical validity and structural similarity. COMO introduces Minimum Risk Training (MRT) to OCSR, creating a closed-loop framework that directly optimizes over molecular-level evaluation metrics, mitigating exposure bias. The paper is available on arXiv under identifier 2604.23546.

Key facts

  • COMO is a closed-loop framework for optical chemical structure recognition
  • It uses Minimum Risk Training to mitigate exposure bias
  • Existing methods rely on token-level Maximum Likelihood Estimation
  • OCSR translates molecular images into SMILES strings or molecular graphs
  • The paper is on arXiv with ID 2604.23546
  • Real-world documents have inexhaustible variations in chemical structures
  • Token-level MLE hinders optimization for chemical validity and structural similarity
  • COMO directly optimizes over molecular-level evaluation criteria

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

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