Do LLMs Truly Generalize in the Molecular Domain? A Perturbation-Based Analysis
arXiv:2607.01800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in molecular discovery, yet a gap remains between their probabilistic nature over discrete sequential tokens and the rigid topological constraints of chemical space. This raises the question of whether molecular LLMs can generalize beyond the local neighborhoods induced by their sequence-based representations. To systematically investigate this question, we introduce a Molecular Perturbation