CREST: Chemical Reaction Extraction from Scientific Texts

Abstract

The development of large language models for the chemical domain relies heavily on high-quality structured data. However, key experimental information in chemical literature is often scattered across PDFs in multimodal forms, such as reaction schemes, experimental tables, figure captions, and footnotes. This makes structured information extraction much more challenging. To address problems such as the difficulty of finely segmenting reaction schemes in complex layouts, the challenge of unified semantic parsing across multiple modalities, and the lack of a workflow for local deployment and continuous optimization, this paper proposes CREST, a multimodal framework for reaction information extraction from chemical literature. CREST combines VisualHeist and MinerU to perform fine-grained segmentation of PDF content. It also extracts titles, descriptive text, and footnotes as auxiliary text prompts. Based on this, we build an end-to-end information extraction pipeline. The pipeline uses the Qwen3 multimodal model together with LoRA fine-tuning to jointly parse reaction schemes, experimental tables, and related text. We also design an evaluation mechanism that integrates automatic evaluation with expert verification. Experimental results show that CREST can effectively improve multimodal reaction information extraction from chemical literature on a self-built dataset. It also achieves performance comparable to some closed-source models, even with a relatively small model size. This demonstrates its practical value and application potential. Finally, we have launched an online information extraction system based on CREST, available at: https://ai4s.iflytek.com/1024/extract .