Intelligent understanding of spectra: from structural elucidation to property design

Spectroscopy serves as a bridge between experimental observations and quantum mechanical principles, linking molecular microstructure to macroscopic material properties. Despite its central importance, establishing quantitative structure-property relationships from spectral data remains challenging, typically requiring expensive quantum chemistry calculations and specialized expertise. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with spectroscopy presents a transformative opportunity to overcome these limitations. AI models can leverage spectral data as molecular descriptors to construct predictive relationships-both spectrum-to-structure and spectrum-to-property mappings. This review presents representative advances at the AI-spectroscopy intersection, highlighting how these approaches address challenges in spectroscopic analysis: automated spectral interpretation, efficient spectral prediction, and accurate property determination from spectroscopic fingerprints. Beyond individual applications, we demonstrate how AI enables the development of unified spectrum-structure-property frameworks capable of predicting functional properties directly from spectral data. This integrated approach opens pathways for spectrum-guided, AI-driven inverse design of functional matters. In addition, we emphasize the importance of model interpretability, which can illuminate the fundamental physics underlying spectrum-structure-property relationships. Looking forward, we propose that integrating large-scale AI architectures with spectroscopic descriptors could establish universal spectrum-structure-property relationships, potentially revolutionizing chemical theory.