Issue 4, 2023

Recent advances in the self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES) library

Abstract

String-based molecular representations play a crucial role in cheminformatics applications, and with the growing success of deep learning in chemistry, have been readily adopted into machine learning pipelines. However, traditional string-based representations such as SMILES are often prone to syntactic and semantic errors when produced by generative models. To address these problems, a novel representation, SELF-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES), was proposed that is inherently 100% robust, alongside an accompanying open-source implementation called selfies. Since then, we have generalized SELFIES to support a wider range of molecules and semantic constraints, and streamlined its underlying grammar. We have implemented this updated representation in subsequent versions of selfies, where we have also made major advances with respect to design, efficiency, and supported features. Hence, we present the current status of selfies (version 2.1.1) in this manuscript. Our library, selfies, is available at GitHub (https://github.com/aspuru-guzik-group/selfies).

Graphical abstract: Recent advances in the self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES) library

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Article information

Article type
Tutorial Review
Submitted
17 Mar 2023
Accepted
23 Jun 2023
First published
01 Jul 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Digital Discovery, 2023,2, 897-908

Recent advances in the self-referencing embedded strings (SELFIES) library

A. Lo, R. Pollice, A. Nigam, A. D. White, M. Krenn and A. Aspuru-Guzik, Digital Discovery, 2023, 2, 897 DOI: 10.1039/D3DD00044C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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