# MetaRF: Differentiable Random Forest for Reaction Yield Prediction with a Few Trails

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10083/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence has deeply revolutionized the field of medicinal chemistry with many impressive applications, but the success of these applications requires a massive amount of training samples with high-quality annotations, which seriously limits the wide usage of data-driven methods. In this paper, we focus on the reaction yield prediction problem, which assists chemists in selecting high-yield reactions in a new chemical space only with a few experimental trials. To attack this challenge, we first put forth MetaRF, an attention-based differentiable random forest model specially designed for the few-shot yield prediction, where the attention weight of a random forest is automatically optimized by the meta-learning framework and can be quickly adapted to predict the performance of new reagents while given a few additional samples. To improve the few-shot learning performance, we further introduce a dimension-reduction based sampling method to determine valuable samples to be experimentally tested and then learned. Our methodology is evaluated on three different datasets and acquires satisfactory performance on few-shot prediction. In high-throughput experimentation (HTE) datasets, the average yield of our methodology's top 10 high-yield reactions is relatively close to the results of ideal yield selection.