ChemDFM-R: An Chemical Reasoner LLM Enhanced with Atomized Chemical Knowledge

🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.CE, cs.AI

Authors:
Zihan Zhao, Bo Chen, Ziping Wan, Lu Chen, Xuanze Lin, Shiyang Yu, Situo Zhang, Da Ma, Zichen Zhu, Danyang Zhang, Huayang Wang, Zhongyang Dai, Liyang Wen, Xin Chen, Kai Yu

Title:
ChemDFM-R: An Chemical Reasoner LLM Enhanced with Atomized Chemical Knowledge

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21990v2

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive progress, their application in scientific domains such as chemistry remains hindered by shallow domain understanding and limited reasoning capabilities. In this work, we focus on the specific field of chemistry and develop a Chemical Reasoner LLM, ChemDFM-R. We first construct a comprehensive dataset of atomized knowledge points to enhance the model's understanding of the fundamental principles and logical structure of chemistry. Then, we propose a mix-sourced distillation strategy that integrates expert-curated knowledge with general-domain reasoning skills, followed by domain-specific reinforcement learning to enhance chemical reasoning. Experiments on diverse chemical benchmarks demonstrate that ChemDFM-R achieves cutting-edge performance while providing interpretable, rationale-driven outputs. Further case studies illustrate how explicit reasoning chains significantly improve the reliability, transparency, and practical utility of the model in real-world human-AI collaboration scenarios.