Locally-Deployed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Reasoning Model in Chemical Engineering: Starting from 30 Experimental Data

Abstract: In the field of chemical engineering, traditional data-processing and prediction methods face significant challenges. Machine-learning and large-LLMs also have their respective limitations. This paper explores the application of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning model in chemical engineering, starting from 30 experimental data points. By integrating traditional surrogate models like Gaussian processes and random forests with powerful LLMs such as DeepSeek-R1, a hierarchical architecture is proposed. Two CoT-building methods, LLM-Chain of Thought (LLM-CoT) and Machine Learning-LLM-Chain of Thought (ML-LLM-CoT), are studied. The LLM-CoT combines local models DeepSeek-r1:14b and Qwen2:7b with Ollama. The ML-LLM-CoT integrates a pre-trained Gaussian ML model with the LLM-based CoT framework. Our results show that during construction, ML-LLM-CoT is more efficient. It only has 2 points that require rethink and a total of 4 rethink times, while LLM-CoT has 5 points that need to be re-thought and 34 total rethink times. In predicting the solubility of 20 molecules with dissimilar structures, the number of molecules with a prediction deviation higher than 100\% for the Gaussian model, LLM-CoT, and ML-LLM-CoT is 7, 6, and 4 respectively. These results indicate that ML-LLM-CoT performs better in controlling the number of high-deviation molecules, optimizing the average deviation, and achieving a higher success rate in solubility judgment, providing a more reliable method for chemical engineering and molecular property prediction. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional methods and offers new solutions for rapid property prediction and process optimization in chemical engineering.