  High-throughput drug screening -- using cell imaging or gene expression
measurements as readouts of drug effect -- is a critical tool in biotechnology
to assess and understand the relationship between the chemical structure and
biological activity of a drug. Since large-scale screens have to be divided
into multiple experiments, a key difficulty is dealing with batch effects,
which can introduce systematic errors and non-biological associations in the
data. We propose InfoCORE, an Information maximization approach for COnfounder
REmoval, to effectively deal with batch effects and obtain refined molecular
representations. InfoCORE establishes a variational lower bound on the
conditional mutual information of the latent representations given a batch
identifier. It adaptively reweighs samples to equalize their implied batch
distribution. Extensive experiments on drug screening data reveal InfoCORE's
superior performance in a multitude of tasks including molecular property
prediction and molecule-phenotype retrieval. Additionally, we show results for
how InfoCORE offers a versatile framework and resolves general distribution
shifts and issues of data fairness by minimizing correlation with spurious
features or removing sensitive attributes. The code is available at
https://github.com/uhlerlab/InfoCORE.
