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DiffNMR: Diffusion Models for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectra Elucidation

Published: July 9, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2507.08854v1

By: Qingsong Yang , Binglan Wu , Xuwei Liu and more

Potential Business Impact:

Helps scientists figure out what molecules look like.

Business Areas:
Nuclear Science and Engineering

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a central characterization method for molecular structure elucidation, yet interpreting NMR spectra to deduce molecular structures remains challenging due to the complexity of spectral data and the vastness of the chemical space. In this work, we introduce DiffNMR, a novel end-to-end framework that leverages a conditional discrete diffusion model for de novo molecular structure elucidation from NMR spectra. DiffNMR refines molecular graphs iteratively through a diffusion-based generative process, ensuring global consistency and mitigating error accumulation inherent in autoregressive methods. The framework integrates a two-stage pretraining strategy that aligns spectral and molecular representations via diffusion autoencoder (Diff-AE) and contrastive learning, the incorporation of retrieval initialization and similarity filtering during inference, and a specialized NMR encoder with radial basis function (RBF) encoding for chemical shifts, preserving continuity and chemical correlation. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffNMR achieves competitive performance for NMR-based structure elucidation, offering an efficient and robust solution for automated molecular analysis.

Country of Origin
🇨🇳 China

Page Count
16 pages

Category
Physics:
Chemical Physics