ChemActor: Enhancing Automated Extraction of Chemical Synthesis Actions with LLM-Generated Data
Automated extraction of chemical synthesis steps is hindered by textual ambiguity in scientific literature and the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. To address this, we propose ChemActor—a novel foundation model that achieves end-to-end, precise parsing of unstructured experimental text into machine-executable operation sequences. Methodologically, ChemActor integrates distribution-aware data filtering, a large-language-model-based multi-round iterative review mechanism, and a two-stage task learning paradigm (reaction → description → action), coupled with full-parameter fine-tuning and explicit modeling of machine-executable actions. On the Reaction-to-Description (R2D) and Description-to-Action (D2A) benchmarks—two core tasks for synthesis procedure understanding—ChemActor outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by 10% absolute gain, substantially improving operational identification accuracy and procedural executability. This establishes ChemActor as a robust foundation model for automating organic synthesis workflows.