ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents
About
Although LLM-based agents are proven to master tool orchestration in scientific fields, particularly chemistry, their single-task performance remains limited by underlying tool constraints. To this end, we propose tool amplification, a novel paradigm that enhances the collective capabilities of specialized tools through optimized, dynamic coordination within individual tasks. Instantiating this paradigm, we introduce ChemAmp, a computationally lightweight framework that dynamically treats chemistry tools (e.g., UniMol2, Chemformer) as composable building-block agents. It constructs task-specialized super-agents that transcend atomic tool constraints with limited data ($\leq$10 samples). Our evaluations across four core chemistry tasks molecular design, molecule captioning, reaction prediction, and property prediction demonstrate that ChemAmp outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. Critically, this bottom-up construction strategy enables 94\% inference token cost reductions versus vanilla multi-agent systems.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Molecule Captioning | ChEBI-20 MM (test) | BLEU-20.73 | 12 | |
| Reaction prediction | USPTO-MIT | Exact Match91 | 12 | |
| Text-based Molecule Design | ChEBI-20-MM | Exact Match38 | 11 | |
| Molecular property prediction | MoleculeNet BBBP | Accuracy68 | 9 | |
| Molecular property prediction | MoleculeNet ClinTox | Accuracy67 | 9 | |
| Molecular property prediction | MoleculeNet HIV | Accuracy96 | 9 | |
| Molecular property prediction | MoleculeNet BACE | Accuracy79 | 8 | |
| Molecular property prediction | MoleculeNet tox21 | Accuracy96 | 8 |