10.5626/JOK.2025.52.5.379

Molecule graph Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performace across various tasks, with increasing focus on multimodal research. Notably, BLIP-2 can enhance performance by efficiently aligning images and text using a Q-Former, aided by an image encoder pre-trained on multimodal data. Inspired by this, the MolCA model extends BLIP-2 to the molecular domain to improve performance. However, the graph encoder in MolCA is pre-trained on unimodal data, necessitating updates during model training, which is a limitation. Therefore, this paper replaced it with a graph encoder pre-trained on multimodal data and frozen while training the model. Experimental results showed that using the graph encoder pre-trained on multimodal data generally enhanced performance. Additionally, unlike the graph encoder pre-trained on unimodal data, which performed better when updated, the graph encoder pre-trained on multimodal data achieved superior results across all metrics when frozen.