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Building AI models that understand chemical principles

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence · news.mit.edu · By Anne Trafton | MIT News · May 20, 2026

Connor Coley works at the interface of chemistry and machine learning, to discover and design new drug compounds.

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 20, 2026

Paving the way for greener ammonia production

New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.

Related papers

#generative ai Open access Sep 2026

Adaptive Repayment Optimisation for SME Lending: A Stochastic Programming Framework with Generative AI Explanation

The Adaptive Repayment Optimisation Engine is introduced, a novel framework that applies constrained stochastic optimisation to the design of loan repayment schedules for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and contributes to the operations research literature by bridging stochastic programming, explainable AI, and financial regulation in a novel application domain.

John Christiansen · 0 citations
#large language models Open access Oct 2026

LLMs Leak Training Data Beyond Verbatim Memorization: Extraction via Membership Decoding

The Membership Decoding method is a plug-and-play replacement for standard decoding that requires only black-box token probabilities, and a new token-level membership inference method is proposed by leveraging likelihood from reference models, shifting the generation from the original token distribution to the member token distribution.

Zitai Chen, Reza Shokri · 0 citations

Reinforcement Loads Prediction of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil Structures Using Explainable and Nonexplainable Machine Learning Approaches

This study presents three advanced machine learning models: the evolutionary Gaussian process inference model, the artificial satellite search algorithm–moment balance machine (ASSA-MBM), and the Operation Rain Forest (ORF), which are designed to predict the maximum reinforcement load in geosynthetic-reinforced soil structures. These models were developed to enhance both predictive accuracy and model interpretability by incorporating state-of-the-art optimization algorithms and explainable machine learning frameworks. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted using 10-fold cross-validation, and the proposed models were benchmarked against previously developed AI models from literature, as well as traditional and semiempirical approaches such as Rankine, Coulomb, and K -stiffness. Among the proposed models, ASSA-MBM consistently achieved the best performance, recording the lowest testing root mean squared error (0.617), the highest correlation coefficient ( R = 0.918 ), and the highest reference index ( RI = 0.951 ). Additionally, the ORF model offers transparency by generating mathematical regression equations, which are crucial in geotechnical engineering.

Min-Yuan Cheng, Akhmad F. K. Khitam, Jia-Wang Liou · 0 citations