Self-supervised Blending Structural Context of Visual Molecules for Robust Drug Interaction Prediction

Identifying drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is critical for ensuring drug safety and advancing drug development, a topic that has garnered significant research interest. While existing methods have made considerable progress, approaches relying solely on known DDIs face a key challenge when applied to drugs with limited data: insufficient exploration of the space of unlabeled pairwise drugs.

To address these issues, we innovatively introduce S${}^2$VM, a Self-supervised Visual pretraining framework for pair-wise Molecules, to fully fuse structural representations and explore the space of drug pairs for DDI prediction. S${}^2$VM incorporates the explicit structure and correlations of visual molecules, such as the positional relationships and connectivity between functional substructures.

Specifically, we blend the visual fragments of drug pairs into a unified input for joint encoding and then recover molecule-specific visual information for each drug individually. This approach integrates fine-grained structural representations from unlabeled drug pair data. By using visual fragments as anchors, S${}^2$VM effectively captures the spatial information of local molecular components within visual molecules, resulting in more comprehensive embeddings of drug pairs.

Experimental results show that S${}^2$VM achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks, with Macro-F1 score improvements of 4.21% and 3.31%, respectively. Further extensive results and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of S${}^2$VM for both few-shot and novel drugs.