Enhancing foundation models for scientific discovery via multimodal knowledge graph representations

Foundation Models (FMs) hold transformative potential to accelerate scientific discovery, yet reaching their full capacity in complex, highly multimodal domains such as genomics, drug discovery, and materials science requires a deeper consideration of the contextual nature of the scientific knowledge. We revisit the synergy between FMs and Multimodal Knowledge Graph (MKG) representation and learning, exploring their potential to enhance predictive and generative tasks in biomedical contexts like drug discovery. We seek to exploit MKGs to improve generative AI models’ ability to capture intricate domain-specific relations and facilitate multimodal fusion. This integration promises to accelerate discovery workflows by providing more meaningful multimodal knowledge-enhanced representations and contextual evidence. Despite this potential, challenges and opportunities remain, including fusing multiple sequential, structural and knowledge modalities and models leveraging the strengths of each; developing scalable architectures for multi-task multi-dataset learning; creating end-to-end workflows to enhance the trustworthiness of biomedical FMs using knowledge from heterogeneous datasets and scientific literature; the domain data bottleneck and the lack of a unified representation between natural language and chemical representations; and benchmarking, specifically the transfer learning to tasks with limited data (e.g., unseen molecules and proteins, rear diseases). Finally, fostering openness and collaboration is key to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.