Pretraining molecular representations from large unlabeled data is essential
for molecular property prediction due to the high cost of obtaining
ground-truth labels. While there exist various 2D graph-based molecular
pretraining approaches, these methods struggle to show statistically
significant gains in predictive performance. Recent work have thus instead
proposed 3D conformer-based pretraining under the task of denoising, which led
to promising results. During downstream finetuning, however, models trained
with 3D conformers require accurate atom-coordinates of previously unseen
molecules, which are computationally expensive to acquire at scale. In light of
this limitation, we propose D&D, a self-supervised molecular representation
learning framework that pretrains a 2D graph encoder by distilling
representations from a 3D denoiser. With denoising followed by cross-modal
knowledge distillation, our approach enjoys use of knowledge obtained from
denoising as well as painless application to downstream tasks with no access to
accurate conformers. Experiments on real-world molecular property prediction
datasets show that the graph encoder trained via D&D can infer 3D information
based on the 2D graph and shows superior performance and label-efficiency
against other baselines.

D&D 是一种自监督的分子表示学习框架，通过从 3D 去噪器中提炼的表示来预训练 2D 图形编码器，并在下游任务中无需准确的构象器获得 3D 信息和卓越的性能。