A new approach called ChemAgent has been proposed to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) for chemistry and materials science tasks.
ChemAgent integrates 137 external chemical tools and a dataset curation pipeline to address challenges faced by LLMs, such as outdated pretraining knowledge and lack of specialized chemical expertise.
The approach utilizes a Hierarchical Evolutionary Monte Carlo Tree Search (HE-MCTS) framework for tool planning and execution optimization, enabling step-level fine-tuning of the policy model.
Experimental evaluations show that ChemAgent significantly improves performance in Chemistry QA and discovery tasks, providing a robust solution for integrating specialized tools with LLMs in advanced chemical applications.