Memory-assisted Reinforcement Learning for Diverse Molecular De Novo Design
Abstract In de novo molecular design, recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been shown to be effective methods for sampling and generating novel chemical structures. Using a technique called reinforcement learning (RL), an RNN can be tuned to target a particular section of chemical space with optimized desirable properties using a scoring function. However, ligands generated by current RL methods so far tend to have relatively low diversity, and sometimes even result in duplicate structures when optimizing towards particular properties. Here, we propose a new method to address the low diversity issue in RL. Memory-assisted RL is an extension of the known RL, with the introduction of a so-called memory unit. As proof of concept, we applied our method to generate structures with an optimized logP. In a second case study, we applied our method to design ligands for the dopamine 2 receptor and the 5-hydroxytryptamine 1A receptor. For both receptors, a machine learning model was developed to predict whether generated molecules were active or not for the receptor. In both case studies, it was found that memory-assisted RL led to the generation of more active compounds and with higher chemical diversity, thus achieving better coverage of chemical space of known ligands compared to established RL method.