ChemOrch: Empowering LLMs with Chemical Intelligence via Groundbreaking Synthetic Instructions

Yanbo Wang (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) · Yue Huang (Xiamen University) · Xiangliang Zhang (University of Notre Dame) · Zhengzhe Jiang (Sichuan University) · Xiaonan Luo (University of Notre Dame) · Kehan Guo (university of notre dame) · Haomin Zhuang (University of Notre Dame) · Yujun Zhou (University of Notre Dame) · Zhengqing Yuan (University of Notre Dame) · Xiaoqi Sun (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · Jules Schleinitz (California Institute of Technology) · Shuhao Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University) · Mihir Surve (University of Notre Dame) · Nitesh Chawla (University of Notre Dame) · Olaf Wiest (University of Notre Dame)
chemical intelligencechemorch frameworkcontrollable diversitydistillationfine-tuninghierarchical structureinstruction-response datasetsresponse precisionrule-governed structureself-repair mechanismssynthetic data generationtask-controlled instruction generationtool planningtool-aware response construction

Empowering large language models (LLMs) with chemical intelligence remains a challenge due to the scarcity of high-quality, domain-specific instruction-response datasets and the misalignment of existing synthetic data generation pipelines with the inherently hierarchical and rule-governed structure of chemical information. To address this, we propose ChemOrch, a framework that synthesizes chemically grounded instruction–response pairs through a two-stage process: task-controlled instruction generation and tool-aware response construction. ChemOrch enables controllable diversity and levels of difficulty for the generated tasks and ensures response precision through tool planning \& distillation, and tool-based self-repair mechanisms. The effectiveness of ChemOrch is evaluated based on: 1) the \textbf{high quality} of generated instruction data, demonstrating superior diversity and strong alignment with chemical constraints; 2) the \textbf{dynamic generation of evaluation tasks} that more effectively reveal LLM weaknesses in chemistry; and 3) the significant \textbf{improvement of LLM chemistry capabilities} when the generated instruction data are used for fine-tuning. Our work thus represents a critical step toward scalable and verifiable chemical intelligence in LLMs. The code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ChemOrch-854A}.