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Cited by 660

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES): A 100% robust molecular string representation

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Krenn, Mario, Häse, Florian, Nigam, AkshatKumar, Friederich, Pascal, Aspuru-Guzik, Alan·2020·Machine Learning: Science and Technology

Abstract

The discovery of novel materials and functional molecules can help to solve some of society’s most urgent challenges, ranging from efficient energy harvesting and storage to uncovering novel pharmaceutical drug candidates. Traditionally matter engineering–generally denoted as inverse design–was based massively on human intuition and high-throughput virtual screening. The last few years have seen the emergence of significant interest in computer-inspired designs based on evolutionary or deep learning methods. The major challenge here is that the standard strings molecular representation SMILES shows substantial weaknesses in that task because large fractions of strings do not correspond to valid molecules. Here, we solve this problem at a fundamental level and introduce S ELFIES (SELF-referencIng Embedded Strings), a string-based representation of molecules which is 100% robust. Every S ELFIES string corresponds to a valid molecule, and S ELFIES can represent every molecule. S ELFIES can be directly applied in arbitrary machine learning models without the adaptation of the models; each of the generated molecule candidates is valid. In our experiments, the model’s internal memory stores two orders of magnitude more diverse molecules than a similar test with SMILES. Furthermore, as all molecules are valid, it allows for explanation and interpretation of the internal working of the generative models.

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Metadata

Authors
Krenn, M., Häse, F., Nigam, A., Friederich, P., & Aspuru-Guzik, A.
Venue
Machine Learning: Science and Technology
Published
2020-10-28
Volume
1
Issue
4
Pages
045024
ISSN
2632-2153 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3009321976
Cited by
660
References
10
FWCI
29.42
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES): A 100% robust molecular string representation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1088/2632-2153/aba947
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Krenn, M., Häse, F., Nigam, A., Friederich, P., & Aspuru-Guzik, A. (2020). Self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES): A 100% robust molecular string representation. Machine Learning: Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1088/2632-2153/aba947

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.