Satarifard, Vahid, Sisson, Laura, Han, Yikun, Ilídio, Pedro, Hladiš, Matej, Lalis, Maxence, Song, Xuebo, Yang, Tiffany, Yin, Wenjie, Ravia, Aharon, Zheng, CiCi Xingyu, Andreoletti, Gaia, Albrecht, Jake, Pellegrino, Robert, Wang, Zehua, Yang, Stephen, D'hondt, Robbe, Ghinis, Achilleas, de Boer, Jasper, Nakano, Felipe Kenji, Gharahighehi, Alireza, Vilar, Jose MG, Saiz, Leonor, Dream Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Consortium, Sanchez-Lengeling, Benjamin, Keller, Andreas, Vosshall, Leslie B, Fiorucci, Sébastien, Tewari, Ambuj, Topin, Jérémie, Vens, Celine, Björkman, Mårten, Kragic, Danica, Sobel, Noam, Christakis, Nicholas A, Mainland, Joel D, Meyer, Pablo (August 2026) A semantic-based community model for high-fidelity tuning of olfactory mixture distances. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 123 (32). e2611057123. ISSN 0027-8424
Abstract
A central goal in sensory science is to establish quantitative mappings between physical stimuli and perceptual experience. Although such mappings are well defined in vision and audition, they remain elusive in olfaction, particularly for complex odor mixtures. Here, we show that perceptual distances between odor mixtures can be predicted with high fidelity and are unexpectedly well captured by a compact semantic space derived from single-molecule representations. In the Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge, we assembled a unified dataset of odor-mixture pairs, benchmarked predictions on a hidden test set of 46 pairs, and integrated the top-performing models into a postchallenge ensemble. This model outperformed existing state-of-the-art approaches on the hidden test set, reducing RMSE by about 33% to 0.08 and increasing Pearson correlation by 53% to 0.57, and maintained strong performance on an independent validation set of 50 newly designed mixture pairs. An ensemble, retaining only olfactory semantic features for each model included, further improved predictions, raising the Pearson correlation by 7% to 0.61 on the test set and by 15% to 0.54 on the validation set. Given that semantic features were extracted from pure molecules, it suggests that mixture perception may not require fundamentally different representational principles from single-molecule olfaction. Together, these results establish a reproducible quantitative framework for olfactory mixture perception and advance efforts to measure, model, and engineer smell.
| Item Type: | Paper |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | organism description > animal behavior organism description > animal behavior > olfactory |
| CSHL Authors: | |
| Communities: | CSHL labs > Koulakov lab CSHL labs > Navlakha lab CSHL Post Doctoral Fellows School of Biological Sciences > Publications |
| SWORD Depositor: | CSHL Elements |
| Depositing User: | CSHL Elements |
| Date: | 11 August 2026 |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Aug 2026 12:26 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Aug 2026 12:26 |
| PMCID: | PMC13462717 |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/42297 |
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