{
  "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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Human Nature Lab, Yale University",
    "Department of Computer Science, Boston University",
    "Department of Statistics, University of Michigan",
    "Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven",
    "Itec, imec Research Group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven",
    "Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford",
    "Institut de Chimie de Nice, Université Côte d’Azur",
    "Monell Chemical Senses Center",
    "School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan Royal Institute of Technology",
    "Runway Startup, Cornell Tech, Cornell University",
    "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory",
    "Sage Bionetworks",
    "Department of Animal Science, Texas A&M University",
    "Computer Science Department, State University of Londrina",
    "Biofisika Institutua, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, University of the Basque Country",
    "IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science",
    "Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California",
    "Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto",
    "Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University",
    "HHMI, The Rockefeller University",
    "Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science",
    "Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania",
    "Health Care and Life Sciences, International Business Machines Research"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 81,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Vahid Satarifard",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2087-1060"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Laura Sisson"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Yikun Han",
      "orcid": "0009-0002-9683-3092"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        3,
        4
      ],
      "name": "Pedro Ilídio",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5750-0204"
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    {
      "affs": [
        5,
        6
      ],
      "name": "Matej Hladiš",
      "orcid": "0009-0008-1652-1093"
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      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Maxence Lalis",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5458-2171"
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        7
      ],
      "name": "Xuebo Song",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-9491-3203"
    },
    {
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        7
      ],
      "name": "Tiffany Yang",
      "orcid": "0009-0003-9961-8088"
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        8
      ],
      "name": "Wenjie Yin",
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      ],
      "name": "Aharon Ravia",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2183-9254"
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        10
      ],
      "name": "Xingyu Zheng",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4704-1072"
    },
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        11
      ],
      "name": "Gaia Andreoletti",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-0452-0009"
    },
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        11
      ],
      "name": "Jacob W. Albrecht",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1813-7649"
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        7
      ],
      "name": "Robert Pellegrino",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-7436-8826"
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        2
      ],
      "name": "Wang Ze-hua"
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        2
      ],
      "name": "Stephen Yang"
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        3,
        4
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      "name": "Robbe D’hondt",
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      "name": "Achilleas Ghinis",
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        4
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      "name": "Jasper de Boer",
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        13,
        3,
        4
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      "name": "Felipe Kenji Nakano",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4884-9420"
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        3,
        4
      ],
      "name": "Alireza Gharahighehi",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1453-1155"
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        15
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      "name": "José M. G. Vilar",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4037-0746"
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      ],
      "name": "Leonor Saiz",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-6866-9400"
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      ],
      "name": "Benjamín Sánchez-Lengeling",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-1116-1745"
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        18
      ],
      "name": "Andreas Keller"
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        19,
        18
      ],
      "name": "Leslie B. Vosshall",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-6060-8099"
    },
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      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Sébastien Fiorucci",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2245-0478"
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      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Ambuj Tewari",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-6969-7844"
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        6
      ],
      "name": "Jérémie Topin",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-1470-1206"
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        3
      ],
      "name": "Celine Vens",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0983-256X"
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        8
      ],
      "name": "Mårten Björkman",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0579-3372"
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      "affs": [
        8
      ],
      "name": "Danica Kragić",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2965-2953"
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        20
      ],
      "name": "Noam Sobel",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3232-9391"
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        0
      ],
      "name": "Nicholas A. Christakis",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5547-1086"
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    {
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        21,
        7
      ],
      "name": "Joel D. Mainland",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5056-4598"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        22
      ],
      "name": "Pablo Meyer",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5281-4661"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ruhallah Amandi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Nicola Amoroso",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0211-0783"
    },
    {
      "name": "Loredana Bellantuono",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-1333-2675"
    },
    {
      "name": "Michele Dibattista",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-3955-4663"
    },
    {
      "name": "Alfonso Monaco",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5968-8642"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ester Pantaleo",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8407-9032"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sabina Tangaro",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-1372-3916"
    },
    {
      "name": "Gary Tom",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-8470-6515"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ella Miray Rajaonson",
      "orcid": "0009-0008-5015-5795"
    },
    {
      "name": "Cher Tian Ser",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0597-5758"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sean Park"
    },
    {
      "name": "Stanley Lo",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0278-5318"
    },
    {
      "name": "Brian K Lee"
    },
    {
      "name": "Gautam Ahuja"
    },
    {
      "name": "Siddhant Poudyal"
    },
    {
      "name": "Bableen Kaur",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-8168-8542"
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    {
      "name": "Douluri Pushkala Devi"
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    {
      "name": "Rintu Kutum",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8667-6199"
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    {
      "name": "Grant D. McConachie",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5214-416X"
    },
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      "name": "Soroush Arabshahi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Saeed Karimimehr"
    },
    {
      "name": "Jeremy Kotlyar"
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    {
      "name": "Faraz YazdaniBanafsheDaragh",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-6789-3542"
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    {
      "name": "Réka Böröcz"
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  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e123w3pebr3em.bib",
  "cited_by": 5,
  "doi": "10.1073/pnas.2611057123",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "e123w3pebr3em",
  "issns": [
    "0027-8424",
    "1091-6490"
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  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2611057123",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY-NC-ND",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-NC-ND",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
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      "2809|Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies"
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  "pdf_url": null,
  "pmcid": "PMC13462717",
  "pmid": "42550911",
  "published": "2026-08-04",
  "publisher": "National Academy of Sciences",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e123w3pebr3em.ris",
  "sources": [
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      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2611057123"
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  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "openalex:2809|Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies",
      "subfield": "neuroscience"
    }
  ],
  "title": "A semantic-based community model for high-fidelity tuning of olfactory mixture distances",
  "title_text": "A semantic-based community model for high-fidelity tuning of olfactory mixture distances",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-10T13:21:11Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/e123w3pebr3em",
  "venue": "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences",
  "versions": []
}