Learning Transferable Reaction Mechanisms from Visual Chemical Knowledge

Reaction mechanisms describe the step-by-step transformations underlying chemical reactions and are central to reaction analysis and synthesis. Learning-based models have achieved strong performance on established mechanism-prediction benchmarks, but transferring them to unseen chemistry remains challenging. Such transfer is difficult because familiar mechanisms must be applied to unfamiliar molecular structures, and some target mechanisms may be poorly covered by the training data. To address these challenges, we introduce MechaVLM, a visual framework that combines transferable chemical representations with external mechanistic knowledge. It learns reusable visual features through multiscale chemical grounding and cross-rendering contrastive learning. For open-book prediction, MechaVLM retrieves a fixed set of precedents from 70,384 literature mechanism figures and re-reads relevant visual evidence as the molecular state evolves, directly using the figures without symbolic mechanism parsing. An atom-indexed language decoder then recursively generates executable electron edits to construct the complete mechanism. We further introduce MechBench, a challenging literature-derived benchmark with 2,184 mechanisms and 9,146 elementary steps. Across cross-dataset and literature-derived benchmarks, MechaVLM establishes strong zero-shot mechanism prediction. Its closed-book model alone improves Step/Pathway Top-1 by 12.50/13.93 percentage points on FlowER-to-ReactMech transfer, while external visual precedents unlock further gains on challenging OOD reactions. The learned representation also generalizes beyond mechanism prediction to atom mapping and reaction center prediction.