👃 GNNs Learn To Smell & Awesome NeurReps

1) Back in 2019, Google AI started a project on learning representations of smells. From basic chemistry we know that aromaticity depends on the molecular structure, e.g., cyclic compounds. In fact, the whole group of ”aromatic hydrocarbons” was named aromatic because they actually has some smell (compared to many non-organic molecules). If we have a molecular structure, we can employ a GNN on top of it and learn some representations - that is a tl;dr of smell representation learning with GNNs.

Recently, Google AI released a new blogpost describing the next phase of the project - the Principal Odor Map that is able to group molecules in “odor clusters”. The authors conducted 3 cool experiments: classifying 400 new molecules never smelled before and comparison to the averaged rating of a group of human panelists; linking odor quality to fundamental biology; and probing aromatic molecules on their mosquito repelling qualities. The GNN-based model shows very good results - now we can finally claim that GNNs can smell! Looking forward for GNNs transforming the perfume industry 📈

2) The NeurReps commnuity (Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations) is curating the Awesome List of resources and research related to the geometry of representations in the brain, deep networks, and beyond. A great resource for Neuroscience and Geometric DL folks to learn about the adjacent field!