Molecular understanding is central to advancing areas such as scientific discovery, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to understand molecular graphs effectively. Existing graph-LLM bridges often adapt the Q-Former-style connector with fixed-length static tokens, which is originally designed for vision tasks. These designs overlook stereochemistry and substructural context and typically require costly LLM-backbone fine-tuning, limiting efficiency and generalization. We introduce EDT-Former, an Entropy-guided Dynamic Token Transformer that generates tokens aligned with informative molecular patches, thereby preserving both local and global structural features for molecular graph understanding. Beyond prior approaches, EDT-Former enables alignment between frozen graph encoders and LLMs without tuning the LLM backbone (excluding the embedding layer), resulting in computationally efficient finetuning, and achieves stateof-the-art results on MoleculeQA, Molecule-oriented Mol-Instructions, and property prediction benchmarks (TDC, MoleculeNet), underscoring its effectiveness for scalable and generalizable multimodal molecular understanding
@article{arxiv.2602.02742,
title = {Entropy-Guided Dynamic Tokens for Graph-LLM Alignment in Molecular Understanding},
author = {Zihao Jing and Qiuhao Zeng and Ruiyi Fang and Yan Sun and Boyu Wang and Pingzhao Hu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02742},
year = {2026}
}