Zhangyang Gao

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53ranked-venue papers
8as first author
53since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-1026-6083ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 43 · 8 first-author · 43 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 18 · 2 first-author · 18 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 10 · 1 first-author · 10 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 dyAb: Flow Matching for Flexible Antibody Design with AlphaFold-driven Pre-binding Antigen
abstract
The development of therapeutic antibodies heavily relies on accurate predictions of how antigens will interact with antibodies. Existing computational methods in antibody design often overlook crucial conformational changes that antigens undergo during the binding process, significantly impacting the reliability of the resulting antibodies. To bridge this gap, we introduce dyAb, a flexible framework that incorporates AlphaFold2-driven predictions to model pre-binding antigen structures and specifically addresses the dynamic nature of antigen conformation changes. Our dyAb model leverages a unique combination of coarse-grained interface alignment and fine-grained flow matching techniques to simulate the interaction dynamics and structural evolution of the antigen-antibody complex, providing a realistic representation of the binding process. Extensive experiments show that dyAb significantly outperforms existing models in antibody design involving changing antigen conformations. These results highlight dyAb's potential to streamline the design process for therapeutic antibodies, promising more efficient development cycles and improved outcomes in clinical applications.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Yufei Huang 0002, Lirong Wu, Fandi Wu, Mathieu Blanchette, Stan Z. Li
AAAI3
2025 FoldToken: Learning Protein Language via Vector Quantization and Beyond
abstract
Is there a foreign language describing protein sequences and structures simultaneously? Protein structures, represented by continuous 3D points, have long posed a challenge due to the contrasting modeling paradigms of discrete sequences. We introduce FoldTokenizer to represent protein sequence-structure as discrete symbols. This approach involves projecting residue types and structures into a discrete space, guided by a reconstruction loss for information preservation. We name the learned discrete symbols as FoldToken, and the sequence of FoldTokens serves as a new protein language, transforming the protein sequence-structure into a unified modality. We apply the created protein language on general backbone inpainting task, building the first GPT-style model (FoldGPT) for sequence-structure co-generation with promising results. Key to our success is the substantial enhancement of the vector quantization module, Soft Conditional Vector Quantization (SoftCVQ).
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Jue Wang 0004, Yufei Huang 0002, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
AAAI1
2025 Relation-Aware Equivariant Graph Networks for Epitope-Unknown Antibody Design and Specificity Optimization
abstract
Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that protect the host by binding to specific antigens, and their binding is mainly determined by the Complementary Determining Regions (CDRs) in the antibody. Despite the great progress made in CDR design, existing computational methods still encounter several challenges: 1) poor capability of modeling complex CDRs with long sequences due to insufficient contextual information; 2) conditioned on pre-given antigenic epitopes and their static interaction with the target antibody; 3) neglect of specificity during antibody optimization leads to non-specific antibodies. In this paper, we take into account a variety of node features, edge features, and edge relations to include more contextual and geometric information. We propose a novel Relation-Aware Antibody Design (RAAD) framework, which dynamically models antigen-antibody interactions for co-designing the sequences and structures of antigen-specific CDRs. Furthermore, we propose a new evaluation metric to better measure antibody specificity and develop a contrasting specificity-enhancing constraint to optimize the specificity of antibodies. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior capability of RAAD in terms of antibody modeling, generation, and optimization across different CDR types, sequence lengths, pre-training strategies, and input contexts.
Lirong Wu, Yufei Huang 0002, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Yunfan Liu 0002, Tailin Wu, Stan Z. Li
AAAI4
2025 From Words to Structured Visuals: A Benchmark and Framework for Text-to-Diagram Generation and Editing
abstract
We introduce the task of text-to-diagram generation, which focuses on creating structured visual representations directly from textual descriptions. Existing approaches in text-to-image and text-to-code generation lack the logical organization and flexibility needed to produce accurate, editable diagrams, often resulting in outputs that are either unstructured or difficult to modify. To address this gap, we introduce DiagramGenBenchmark, a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing eight distinct diagram categories, including flowcharts, model architecture diagrams, and mind maps. Additionally, we present DiagramAgent, an innovative framework with four core modules—Plan Agent, Code Agent, Check Agent, and Diagram-to-Code Agent—designed to facilitate both the generation and refinement of complex diagrams. Our extensive experiments, which combine objective metrics with human evaluations, demonstrate that DiagramAgent significantly outperforms existing baseline models in terms of accuracy, structural coherence, and modifiability. This work not only establishes a foundational benchmark for the text-to-diagram generation task but also introduces a powerful toolset to advance research and applications in this emerging area.
Jingxuan Wei, Cheng Tan 0012, Siyuan Li 0002, Zhangyang Gao, Linzhuang Sun, Bihui Yu, Ruifeng Guo
CVPR6
2025 G2PDiffusion: Cross-Species Genotype-to-Phenotype Prediction Via Evolutionary Diffusion
Zhangyang Gao, Hong Chang 0001, Stan Z. Li, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen 0001
ICCV2
2025 EVA: Geometric Inverse Design for Fast Protein Motif-Scaffolding with Coupled Flow
abstract
Motif-scaffolding is a fundamental component of protein design, which aims to construct the scaffold structure that stabilizes motifs conferring desired functions. Recent advances in generative models are promising for designing scaffolds, with two main approaches: training-based and sampling-based methods. Training-based methods are resource-heavy and slow, while training-free sampling-based methods are flexible but require numerous sampling steps and costly, unstable guidance. To speed up and improve sampling-based methods, we analyzed failure cases and found that errors stem from the trade-off between generation and guidance. Thus we proposed to exploit the spatial context and adjust the generative direction to be consistent with guidance to overcome this trade-off. Motivated by this, we formulate motif-scaffolding as a Geometric Inverse Design task inspired by the image inverse problem, and present Evolution-ViA-reconstruction (EVA), a novel sampling-based coupled flow framework on geometric manifolds, which starts with a pretrained flow-based generative model. EVA uses motif-coupled priors to leverage spatial contexts, guiding the generative process along a straighter probability path, with generative directions aligned with guidance in the early sampling steps. EVA is 70× faster than SOTA model RFDiffusion with competitive and even better performance on benchmark tests. Further experiments on real-world cases including vaccine design, multi-motif scaffolding and motif optimal placement searching demonstrate EVA's superior efficiency and effectiveness.
Yufei Huang 0002, Yunshu Liu, Lirong Wu, Cheng Tan 0012, Odin Zhang, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Zicheng Liu 0006, Yunfan Liu 0002, Tailin Wu, Stan Z. Li
ICLR7
2025 MeToken: Uniform Micro-environment Token Boosts Post-Translational Modification Prediction
abstract
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) profoundly expand the complexity and functionality of the proteome, regulating protein attributes and interactions that are crucial for biological processes. Accurately predicting PTM sites and their specific types is therefore essential for elucidating protein function and understanding disease mechanisms. Existing computational approaches predominantly focus on protein sequences to predict PTM sites, driven by the recognition of sequence-dependent motifs. However, these approaches often overlook protein structural contexts. In this work, we first compile a large-scale sequence-structure PTM dataset, which serves as the foundation for fair comparison. We introduce the MeToken model, which tokenizes the micro-environment of each amino acid, integrating both sequence and structural information into unified discrete tokens. This model not only captures the typical sequence motifs associated with PTMs but also leverages the spatial arrangements dictated by protein tertiary structures, thus providing a holistic view of the factors influencing PTM sites. Designed to address the long-tail distribution of PTM types, MeToken employs uniform sub-codebooks that ensure even the rarest PTMs are adequately represented and distinguished. We validate the effectiveness and generalizability of MeToken across multiple datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in accurately identifying PTM types. The results underscore the importance of incorporating structural data and highlight MeToken's potential in facilitating accurate and comprehensive PTM predictions, which could significantly impact proteomics research.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhenxiao Cao, Zhangyang Gao, Lirong Wu, Siyuan Li 0002, Yufei Huang 0002, Jun Xia 0001, Bozhen Hu, Stan Z. Li
ICLR3
2025 ReNovo: Retrieval-Based \emph{De Novo} Mass Spectrometry Peptide Sequencing
abstract
Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Tandem mass spectrometry, as the only high-throughput technique for protein sequence identification, plays a pivotal role in proteomics research. One of the long-standing challenges in this field is peptide identification, which entails determining the specific peptide (sequence of amino acids) that corresponds to each observed mass spectrum. The conventional approach involves database searching, wherein the observed mass spectrum is scored against a pre-constructed peptide database. However, the reliance on pre-existing databases limits applicability in scenarios where the peptide is absent from existing databases. Such circumstances necessitate \emph{de novo} peptide sequencing, which derives peptide sequence solely from input mass spectrum, independent of any peptide database. Despite ongoing advancements in \emph{de novo} peptide sequencing, its performance still has considerable room for improvement, which limits its application in large-scale experiments. In this study, we introduce a novel \textbf{Re}trieval-based \emph{De \textbf{Novo}} peptide sequencing methodology, termed \textbf{ReNovo}, which draws inspiration from database search methods. Specifically, by constructing a datastore from training data, ReNovo can retrieve information from the datastore during the inference stage to conduct retrieval-based inference, thereby achieving improved performance. This innovative approach enables ReNovo to effectively combine the strengths of both methods: utilizing the assistance of the datastore while also being capable of predicting novel peptides that are not present in pre-existing databases. A series of experiments have confirmed that ReNovo outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple widely-used datasets, incurring only minor storage and time consumption, representing a significant advancement in proteomics. Supplementary materials include the code.
Shaorong Chen, Jun Xia 0001, Lecheng Zhang, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan 0012, Wenjie Du 0003, Stan Z. Li
ICLR5
2025 SketchAgent: Generating Structured Diagrams from Hand-Drawn Sketches
abstract
Hand-drawn sketches are a natural and efficient medium for capturing and conveying ideas. Despite significant advancements in controllable natural image generation, translating freehand sketches into structured, machine-readable diagrams remains a labor-intensive and predominantly manual task. The primary challenge stems from the inherent ambiguity of sketches, which lack the structural constraints and semantic precision required for automated diagram generation. To address this challenge, we introduce SketchAgent, a multi-agent system designed to automate the transformation of hand-drawn sketches into structured diagrams. SketchAgent integrates sketch recognition, symbolic reasoning, and iterative validation to produce semantically coherent and structurally accurate diagrams, significantly reducing the need for manual effort. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose the Sketch2Diagram Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset and evaluation framework encompassing eight diverse diagram categories, such as flowcharts, directed graphs, and model architectures. The dataset comprises over 6,000 high-quality examples with token-level annotations, standardized preprocessing, and rigorous quality control. By streamlining the diagram generation process, SketchAgent holds great promise for applications in design, education, and engineering, while offering a significant step toward bridging the gap between intuitive sketching and machine-readable diagram generation.
Cheng Tan 0012, Jingxuan Wei, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Bihui Yu, Ruifeng Guo, Stan Z. Li
IJCAI5
2025 ProtInvTree: Deliberate Protein Inverse Folding with Reward-guided Tree Search
abstract
Designing protein sequences that fold into a target 3D structure—known as protein inverse folding—is a fundamental challenge in protein engineering. While recent deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance by recovering native sequences, they often overlook the one-to-many nature of the problem: multiple diverse sequences can fold into the same structure. This motivates the need for a generative model capable of designing diverse sequences while preserving structural consistency. To address this trade-off, we introduce ProtInvTree, the first reward-guided tree-search framework for protein inverse folding. ProtInvTree reformulates sequence generation as a deliberate, step-wise decision-making process, enabling the exploration of multiple design paths and exploitation of promising candidates through self-evaluation, lookahead, and backtracking. We propose a two-stage focus-and-grounding action mechanism that decouples position selection and residue generation. To efficiently evaluate intermediate states, we introduce a jumpy denoising strategy that avoids full rollouts. Built upon pretrained protein language models, ProtInvTree supports flexible test-time scaling by adjusting the search depth and breadth without retraining. Empirically, ProtInvTree outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple benchmarks, generating structurally consistent yet diverse sequences, including those far from the native ground truth. The code is available at https://github.com/A4Bio/ProteinInvBench/.
Xiaoxue Cheng, Zhangyang Gao, Hong Chang 0001, Cheng Tan 0012, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen 0001
NeurIPS3
2025 AlphaFold Database Debiasing for Robust Inverse Folding
abstract
The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB) offers unparalleled structural coverage at near-experimental accuracy, positioning it as a valuable resource for data-driven protein design. However, its direct use in training deep models that are sensitive to fine-grained atomic geometry—such as inverse folding—exposes a critical limitation. Comparative analysis of structural feature distributions reveals that AFDB structures exhibit distinct statistical regularities, reflecting a systematic geometric bias that deviates from the conformational diversity found in experimentally determined structures from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). While AFDB structures are cleaner and more idealized, PDB structures capture the intrinsic variability and physical realism essential for generalization in downstream tasks. To address this discrepancy, we introduce a Debiasing Structure AutoEncoder (DeSAE) that learns to reconstruct native-like conformations from intentionally corrupted backbone geometries. By training the model to recover plausible structural states, DeSAE implicitly captures a more robust and natural structural manifold. At inference, applying DeSAE to AFDB structures produces debiased structures that significantly improve inverse folding performance across multiple benchmarks. This work highlights the critical impact of subtle systematic biases in predicted structures and presents a principled framework for debiasing, significantly boosting the performance of structure-based learning tasks like inverse folding.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhenxiao Cao, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Yufei Huang 0002, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS3
2025 R3Design: deep tertiary structure-based RNA sequence design and beyond
abstract
The rational design of Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules is crucial for advancing therapeutic applications, synthetic biology, and understanding the fundamental principles of life. Traditional RNA design methods have predominantly focused on secondary structure-based sequence design, often neglecting the intricate and essential tertiary interactions. We introduce R3Design, a tertiary structure-based RNA sequence design method that shifts the paradigm to prioritize tertiary structure in the RNA sequence design. R3Design significantly enhances sequence design on native RNA backbones, achieving high sequence recovery and Macro-F1 score, and outperforming traditional secondary structure-based approaches by substantial margins. We demonstrate that R3Design can design RNA sequences that fold into the desired tertiary structures by validating these predictions using advanced structure prediction models. This method, which is available through standalone software, provides a comprehensive toolkit for designing, folding, and evaluating RNA at the tertiary level. Our findings demonstrate R3Design's superior capability in designing RNA sequences, which achieves around $44\%$ in terms of both recovery score and Macro-F1 score in multiple datasets. This not only denotes the accuracy and fairness of the model but also underscores its potential to drive forward the development of innovative RNA-based therapeutics and to deepen our understanding of RNA biology.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Hanqun Cao, Siyuan Li 0002, Mathieu Blanchette, Stan Z. Li
Briefings Bioinform.3
2025 USTEP: Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning Under a Unified View
abstract
Spatio-temporal predictive learning plays a crucial role in self-supervised learning, with wide-ranging applications across a diverse range of fields. Previous approaches for temporal modeling fall into two categories: recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods. The former, while meticulously processing frames one by one, neglect short-term spatio-temporal information redundancies, leading to inefficiencies. The latter naively stack frames sequentially, overlooking the inherent temporal dependencies. In this paper, we re-examine the two dominant temporal modeling approaches within the realm of spatio-temporal predictive learning, offering a unified perspective. Building upon this analysis, we introduce USTEP (Unified Spatio-TEmporal Predictive learning), an innovative framework that reconciles the recurrent-based and recurrent-free methods by integrating both micro-temporal and macro-temporal scales. Extensive experiments on a wide range of spatio-temporal predictive learning demonstrate that USTEP achieves significant improvements over existing temporal modeling approaches, thereby establishing it as a robust solution for a wide range of spatio-temporal applications.
Cheng Tan 0012, Jue Wang 0004, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2025 An Extensive Survey With Empirical Studies on Deep Temporal Point Process
abstract
Temporal point process as the stochastic process on a continuous domain of time is commonly used to model the asynchronous event sequence featuring occurrence timestamps. Thanks to the strong expressivity of deep neural networks, they are emerging as a promising choice for capturing the patterns in asynchronous sequences, in the context of temporal point process. In this paper, we first review recent research emphasis and difficulties in modeling asynchronous event sequences with deep temporal point process, which can be concluded into four fields: encoding of history sequence, formulation of conditional intensity function, relational discovery of events, and learning approaches for optimization. We introduce most of the recently proposed models by dismantling them into four parts and conduct experiments by re-modularizing the first three parts with the same learning strategy for a fair empirical evaluation. Besides, we extend the history encoders and conditional intensity function family and propose a Granger causality discovery framework for exploiting the relations among multi-types of events. Because the Granger causality can be represented by the Granger causality graph, discrete graph structure learning in the framework of Variational Inference is employed to reveal latent structures of the graph. Further experiments show that the proposed framework with latent graph discovery can both capture the relations and achieve an improved fitting and predicting performance.
Cheng Tan 0012, Lirong Wu, Zicheng Liu 0006, Zhangyang Gao, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.5
2025 SimVPv2: Towards Simple Yet Powerful Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning
abstract
Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in spatiotemporal predictive learning, with methods incorporating auxiliary inputs, complex neural architectures, and sophisticated training strategies. While SimVP has introduced a simpler, CNN-based baseline for this task, it still relies on heavy Unet-like architectures for spatial and temporal modeling, which still suffers from high complexity and computational overhead. In this paper, we propose SimVPv2, a streamlined model that eliminates the need for Unet architectures and demonstrates that plain stacks of convolutional layers, enhanced with an efficient Gated Spatiotemporal Attention mechanism, can deliver state-of-the-art performance. SimVPv2 not only simplifies the model architecture but also improves both performance and computational efficiency. On the standard Moving MNIST benchmark, SimVPv2 achieves superior performance compared to SimVP, with fewer FLOPs, about half the training time, and 60% faster inference efficiency. Extensive experiments across eight diverse datasets, including real-world tasks such as traffic forecasting and climate prediction, further demonstrate that SimVPv2 offers a powerful yet straightforward solution, achieving robust generalization across various spatiotemporal learning scenarios. We believe the proposed SimVPv2 can serve as a solid baseline to benefit the spatiotemporal predictive learning community.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Multim.2
2024 Cross-Gate MLP with Protein Complex Invariant Embedding Is a One-Shot Antibody Designer
abstract
Antibodies are crucial proteins produced by the immune system in response to foreign substances or antigens. The specificity of an antibody is determined by its complementarity-determining regions (CDRs), which are located in the variable domains of the antibody chains and form the antigen-binding site. Previous studies have utilized complex techniques to generate CDRs, but they suffer from inadequate geometric modeling. Moreover, the common iterative refinement strategies lead to an inefficient inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model that can co-design 1D sequences and 3D structures of CDRs in a one-shot manner. To achieve this, we decouple the antibody CDR design problem into two stages: (i) geometric modeling of protein complex structures and (ii) sequence-structure co-learning. We develop a novel macromolecular structure invariant embedding, typically for protein complexes, that captures both intra- and inter-component interactions among the backbone atoms, including Calpha, N, C, and O atoms, to achieve comprehensive geometric modeling. Then, we introduce a simple cross-gate MLP for sequence-structure co-learning, allowing sequence and structure representations to implicitly refine each other. This enables our model to design desired sequences and structures in a one-shot manner. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our results at both the sequence and structure level, which demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art antibody CDR design methods.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Lirong Wu, Jun Xia 0001, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Xihong Yang, Yue Liu 0008, Bozhen Hu, Stan Z. Li
AAAI2
2024 Protein 3D Graph Structure Learning for Robust Structure-Based Protein Property Prediction
abstract
Protein structure-based property prediction has emerged as a promising approach for various biological tasks, such as protein function prediction and sub-cellular location estimation. The existing methods highly rely on experimental protein structure data and fail in scenarios where these data are unavailable. Predicted protein structures from AI tools (e.g., AlphaFold2) were utilized as alternatives. However, we observed that current practices, which simply employ accurately predicted structures during inference, suffer from notable degradation in prediction accuracy. While similar phenomena have been extensively studied in general fields (e.g., Computer Vision) as model robustness, their impact on protein property prediction remains unexplored. In this paper, we first investigate the reason behind the performance decrease when utilizing predicted structures, attributing it to the structure embedding bias from the perspective of structure representation learning. To study this problem, we identify a Protein 3D Graph Structure Learning Problem for Robust Protein Property Prediction (PGSL-RP3), collect benchmark datasets, and present a protein Structure embedding Alignment Optimization framework (SAO) to mitigate the problem of structure embedding bias between the predicted and experimental protein structures. Extensive experiments have shown that our framework is model-agnostic and effective in improving the property prediction of both predicted structures and experimental structures.
Yufei Huang 0002, Siyuan Li 0002, Lirong Wu, Jin Su, Odin Zhang, Zhangyang Gao, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Stan Z. Li
AAAI8
2024 PSC-CPI: Multi-Scale Protein Sequence-Structure Contrasting for Efficient and Generalizable Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction
abstract
Compound-Protein Interaction (CPI) prediction aims to predict the pattern and strength of compound-protein interactions for rational drug discovery. Existing deep learning-based methods utilize only the single modality of protein sequences or structures and lack the co-modeling of the joint distribution of the two modalities, which may lead to significant performance drops in complex real-world scenarios due to various factors, e.g., modality missing and domain shifting. More importantly, these methods only model protein sequences and structures at a single fixed scale, neglecting more fine-grained multi-scale information, such as those embedded in key protein fragments. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale Protein Sequence-structure Contrasting framework for CPI prediction (PSC-CPI), which captures the dependencies between protein sequences and structures through both intra-modality and cross-modality contrasting. We further apply length-variable protein augmentation to allow contrasting to be performed at different scales, from the amino acid level to the sequence level. Finally, in order to more fairly evaluate the model generalizability, we split the test data into four settings based on whether compounds and proteins have been observed during the training stage. Extensive experiments have shown that PSC-CPI generalizes well in all four settings, particularly in the more challenging ``Unseen-Both" setting, where neither compounds nor proteins have been observed during training. Furthermore, even when encountering a situation of modality missing, i.e., inference with only single-modality protein data, PSC-CPI still exhibits comparable or even better performance than previous approaches.
Lirong Wu, Yufei Huang 0002, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Zicheng Liu 0006, Stan Z. Li
AAAI4
2024 Text-To-AMP: Antimicrobial Peptide Design Guided by Natural Text
abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are vital components of the natural immune system. With their broad-spectrum antibacterial properties, low resistance, and multifunctionality, they are considered important molecules for addressing the problem of bacterial resistance. At the same time, with the rapid development of large language models, their powerful intelligence has made natural language an increasingly important bridge for human-machine interaction, bringing new perspectives to AMP design. By integrating natural language with protein language, we can significantly reduce the complexity of tasks, enhance intuitiveness and operational convenience, and deeply incorporate expert knowledge, thus providing new insights for exploring and understanding peptide design. Based on these benefits, we propose Text-to-AMP, an innovative framework that uses natural language descriptions to directly guide AMP sequence generation. Through the integration of multimodal implicit alignment, explicit alignment, and autoregressive sequence generation, Text-to-AMP establishes a semantic connection between natural language and peptide sequences, enabling precise and interpretable peptide design. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline methods on most metrics in AMP activity prediction tasks. In zero-shot text-guided sequence generation tasks, the model surpasses benchmarks, including the GPT series, by generating novel peptide sequences with enhanced antimicrobial activity and reduced toxicity. Furthermore, case studies validate the model’s capability to meet fine-grained structural and functional design criteria. In conclusion, Text-to-AMP introduces a advanced paradigm for AMP design by significantly lowering technical barriers and accelerating the discovery of antimicrobial peptides.
Alexander Teng, Yiyao Yu, Chenyi Lei, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012
BIBM8
2024 General Point Model Pretraining with Autoencoding and Autoregressive
abstract
The pre-training architectures of large language models encompass various types, including autoencoding models, autoregressive models, and encoder-decoder models. We posit that any modality can potentially benefit from a large language model, as long as it undergoes vector quantization to become discrete tokens. Inspired by the General Language Model, we propose a General Point Model (GPM) that seamlessly integrates autoencoding and autoregressive tasks in a point cloud transformer. This model is versatile, allowing fine-tuning for downstream point cloud representation tasks, as well as unconditional and conditional generation tasks. GPM enhances masked prediction in autoencoding through various forms of mask padding tasks, leading to improved performance in point cloud understanding. Additionally, GPM demonstrates highly competitive results in unconditional point cloud generation tasks, even exhibiting the potential for conditional generation tasks by modifying the input's conditional information. Compared to models like Point-BERT, MaskPoint. and PointMAE, our GPM achieves superior performance in point cloud understanding tasks. Furthermore, the integration of autoregressive and autoencoding within the same transformer underscores its versatility across different downstream tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/gentlefress/GPM
Zhe Li 0038, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Bocheng Ren, Laurence T. Yang, Stan Z. Li
CVPR2
2024 MLIP: Enhancing Medical Visual Representation with Divergence Encoder and Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning
abstract
The scarcity of annotated data has sparked signifi-cant interest in unsupervised pre-training methods that leverage medical reports as auxiliary signals for medi-cal visual representation learning. However, existing re-search overlooks the multi-granularity nature of medical visual representation and lacks suitable contrastive learning techniques to improve the models' generalizability across different granularities, leading to the underutilization of image-text information. To address this, we pro-pose MLIP, a novel framework leveraging domain-specific medical knowledge as guiding signals to integrate language information into the visual domain through image-text contrastive learning. Our model includes global contrastive learning with our designed divergence encoder, lo-cal token-knowledge-patch alignment contrastive learning, and knowledge-guided category-level contrastive learning with expert knowledge. Experimental evaluations reveal the efficacy of our model in enhancing transfer performance for tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Notably, MLIP surpasses state-of-the-art methods even with limited annotated data, highlighting the potential of multimodal pre-training in advancing medical representation learning.11Codes are available at https://github.com/gentlefress/MLIP
Zhe Li 0038, Laurence T. Yang, Bocheng Ren, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Stan Z. Li
CVPR5
2024 Boosting the Power of Small Multimodal Reasoning Models to Match Larger Models with Self-consistency Training
Cheng Tan 0012, Jingxuan Wei, Zhangyang Gao, Linzhuang Sun, Siyuan Li 0002, Ruifeng Guo, Bihui Yu, Stan Z. Li
ECCV (40)3
2024 DiscoGNN: A Sample-Efficient Framework for Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning
abstract
Self-supervised graph representation learning has received increasing research interest recently, with generative and contrastive modeling being two dominant ways. Typically, generative learning first masks parts of each graph and then recovers the masked parts based on the encoding results of the corrupted graph. However, these methods only mask fixed parts of each graph and fail to train on all the nodes and edges, which hinders them from getting the most out of each graph. As a remedy, we propose a novel self-supervised strategy, dubbed DetCor, where we first randomly replace some nodes and edges with alternative ones and then pre-train GNNs to detect and correct the replaced ones from all the nodes and edges. Additionally, for graph-level learning, the vanilla contrastive framework cannot reflect the distinction between the in-batch negatives. To alleviate this issue, we propose RankGCL, which enables the contrastive framework to capture the similarity ranking information between graphs and shows special superiority in graph similarity-based practical tasks. DetCor and RankGCL together constitute a unified self-supervised framework, DiscoGNN, which matches or outperforms state-of-the-art strategies on multiple datasets from various domains. Also, DiscoGNN is a sample-efficient framework that can achieve better performance than competitive methods with much less pre-training data. We release the codes at: https://github.com/junxia97/DiscoGNN-ICDE.
Jun Xia 0001, Shaorong Chen, Yue Liu 0008, Zhangyang Gao, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Xihong Yang, Stan Z. Li
ICDE4
2024 RDesign: Hierarchical Data-efficient Representation Learning for Tertiary Structure-based RNA Design
abstract
While artificial intelligence has made remarkable strides in revealing the relationship between biological macromolecules' primary sequence and tertiary structure, designing RNA sequences based on specified tertiary structures remains challenging. Though existing approaches in protein design have thoroughly explored structure-to-sequence dependencies in proteins, RNA design still confronts difficulties due to structural complexity and data scarcity. Moreover, direct transplantation of protein design methodologies into RNA design fails to achieve satisfactory outcomes although sharing similar structural components. In this study, we aim to systematically construct a data-driven RNA design pipeline. We crafted a large, well-curated benchmark dataset and designed a comprehensive structural modeling approach to represent the complex RNA tertiary structure. More importantly, we proposed a hierarchical data-efficient representation learning framework that learns structural representations through contrastive learning at both cluster-level and sample-level to fully leverage the limited data. By constraining data representations within a limited hyperspherical space, the intrinsic relationships between data points could be explicitly imposed. Moreover, we incorporated extracted secondary structures with base pairs as prior knowledge to facilitate the RNA design process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, providing a reliable baseline for future RNA design tasks. The source code and benchmark dataset are available at https://github.com/A4Bio/RDesign.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Siyuan Li 0002, Zicheng Liu 0006, Stan Z. Li
ICLR3
2024 Decoupling Weighing and Selecting for Integrating Multiple Graph Pre-training Tasks
abstract
Recent years have witnessed the great success of graph pre-training for graph representation learning. With hundreds of graph pre-training tasks proposed, integrating knowledge acquired from multiple pre-training tasks has become a popular research topic. In this paper, we identify two important collaborative processes for this topic: (1) select: how to select an optimal task combination from a given task pool based on their compatibility, and (2) weigh: how to weigh the selected tasks based on their importance. While there currently has been a lot of work focused on weighing, comparatively little effort has been devoted to selecting. This paper proposes a novel instance-level framework for integrating multiple graph pre-training tasks, Weigh And Select (WAS), where the two collaborative processes, weighing and selecting, are combined by decoupled siamese networks. Specifically, it first adaptively learns an optimal combination of tasks for each instance from a given task pool, based on which a customized instance-level task weighing strategy is learned. Extensive experiments on 16 graph datasets across node-level and graph-level downstream tasks have demonstrated that by combining a few simple but classical tasks, WAS can achieve comparable performance to other leading counterparts. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyuFan0504/WAS.
Tianyu Fan, Lirong Wu, Yufei Huang 0002, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Stan Z. Li
ICLR6
2024 KW-Design: Pushing the Limit of Protein Design via Knowledge Refinement
abstract
Recent studies have shown competitive performance in protein inverse folding, while most of them disregard the importance of predictive confidence, fail to cover the vast protein space, and do not incorporate common protein knowledge. Given the great success of pretrained models on diverse protein-related tasks and the fact that recovery is highly correlated with confidence, we wonder whether this knowledge can push the limits of protein design further. As a solution, we propose a knowledge-aware module that refines low-quality residues. We also introduce a memory-retrieval mechanism to save more than 50\% of the training time. We extensively evaluate our proposed method on the CATH, TS50, TS500, and PDB datasets and our results show that our KW-Design method outperforms the previous PiFold method by approximately 9\% on the CATH dataset. KW-Design is the first method that achieves 60+\% recovery on all these benchmarks. We also provide additional analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is publicly available via \href{https://github.com/A4Bio/ProteinInvBench}{GitHub}.
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Xingran Chen, Jun Xia 0001, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
ICLR1
2024 Re-Dock: Towards Flexible and Realistic Molecular Docking with Diffusion Bridge
abstract
Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding structures, a task known as molecular docking is crucial for drug design but remains challenging. While deep learning has shown promise, existing methods often depend on holo-protein structures (docked, and not accessible in realistic tasks) or neglect pocket sidechain conformations, leading to limited practical utility and unrealistic conformation predictions. To fill these gaps, we introduce an under-explored task, named flexible docking to predict poses of ligand and pocket sidechains simultaneously and introduce Re-Dock, a novel diffusion bridge generative model extended to geometric manifolds. Specifically, we propose energy-to-geometry mapping inspired by the Newton-Euler equation to co-model the binding energy and conformations for reflecting the energy-constrained docking generative process. Comprehensive experiments on designed benchmark datasets including apo-dock and cross-dock demonstrate our model's superior effectiveness and efficiency over current methods.
Yufei Huang 0002, Odin Zhang, Lirong Wu, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
ICML6
2024 Deciphering RNA Secondary Structure Prediction: A Probabilistic K-Rook Matching Perspective
abstract
The secondary structure of ribonucleic acid (RNA) is more stable and accessible in the cell than its tertiary structure, making it essential for functional prediction. Although deep learning has shown promising results in this field, current methods suffer from poor generalization and high complexity. In this work, we reformulate the RNA secondary structure prediction as a K-Rook problem, thereby simplifying the prediction process into probabilistic matching within a finite solution space. Building on this innovative perspective, we introduce RFold, a simple yet effective method that learns to predict the most matching K-Rook solution from the given sequence. RFold employs a bi-dimensional optimization strategy that decomposes the probabilistic matching problem into row-wise and column-wise components to reduce the matching complexity, simplifying the solving process while guaranteeing the validity of the output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFold achieves competitive performance and about eight times faster inference efficiency than the state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/A4Bio/RFold.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Hanqun Cao, Xingran Chen, Lirong Wu, Jun Xia 0001, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Stan Z. Li
ICML2
2024 A Graph is Worth K Words: Euclideanizing Graph using Pure Transformer
abstract
Can we model Non-Euclidean graphs as pure language or even Euclidean vectors while retaining their inherent information? The Non-Euclidean property have posed a long term challenge in graph modeling. Despite recent graph neural networks and graph transformers efforts encoding graphs as Euclidean vectors, recovering the original graph from vectors remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce GraphsGPT, featuring an Graph2Seq encoder that transforms Non-Euclidean graphs into learnable Graph Words in the Euclidean space, along with a GraphGPT decoder that reconstructs the original graph from Graph Words to ensure information equivalence. We pretrain GraphsGPT on $100$M molecules and yield some interesting findings: (1) The pretrained Graph2Seq excels in graph representation learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on $8/9$ graph classification and regression tasks. (2) The pretrained GraphGPT serves as a strong graph generator, demonstrated by its strong ability to perform both few-shot and conditional graph generation. (3) Graph2Seq+GraphGPT enables effective graph mixup in the Euclidean space, overcoming previously known Non-Euclidean challenges. (4) The edge-centric pretraining framework GraphsGPT demonstrates its efficacy in graph domain tasks, excelling in both representation and generation. Code is available at https://github.com/A4Bio/GraphsGPT.
Zhangyang Gao, Daize Dong, Cheng Tan 0012, Jun Xia 0001, Bozhen Hu, Stan Z. Li
ICML1
2024 AdaNovo: Towards Robust \emph{De Novo} Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics against Data Biases
abstract
Tandem mass spectrometry has played a pivotal role in advancing proteomics, enabling the high-throughput analysis of protein composition in biological tissues. Despite the development of several deep learning methods for predicting amino acid sequences (peptides) responsible for generating the observed mass spectra, training data biases hinder further advancements of \emph{de novo} peptide sequencing. Firstly, prior methods struggle to identify amino acids with Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) due to their lower frequency in training data compared to canonical amino acids, further resulting in unsatisfactory peptide sequencing performance. Secondly, various noise and missing peaks in mass spectra reduce the reliability of training data (Peptide-Spectrum Matches, PSMs). To address these challenges, we propose AdaNovo, a novel and domain knowledge-inspired framework that calculates Conditional Mutual Information (CMI) between the mass spectra and amino acids or peptides, using CMI for robust training against above biases. Extensive experiments indicate that AdaNovo outperforms previous competitors on the widely-used 9-species benchmark, meanwhile yielding 3.6\% - 9.4\% improvements in PTMs identification. The supplements contain the code.
Jun Xia 0001, Shaorong Chen, Xiaojun Shan, Wenjie Du 0003, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Bozhen Hu, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS6
2024 UniIF: Unified Molecule Inverse Folding
abstract
Molecule inverse folding has been a long-standing challenge in chemistry and biology, with the potential to revolutionize drug discovery and material science. Despite specified models have been proposed for different small- or macro-molecules, few have attempted to unify the learning process, resulting in redundant efforts. Complementary to recent advancements in molecular structure prediction, such as RoseTTAFold All-Atom and AlphaFold3, we propose the unified model UniIF for the inverse folding of all molecules. We do such unification in two levels: 1) Data-Level: We propose a unified block graph data form for all molecules, including the local frame building and geometric feature initialization. 2) Model-Level: We introduce a geometric block attention network, comprising a geometric interaction, interactive attention and virtual long-term dependency modules, to capture the 3D interactions of all molecules. Through comprehensive evaluations across various tasks such as protein design, RNA design, and material design, we demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on all tasks. UniIF offers a versatile and effective solution for general molecule inverse folding.
Zhangyang Gao, Jue Wang 0004, Cheng Tan 0012, Lirong Wu, Yufei Huang 0002, Siyuan Li 0002, Zhirui Ye, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS1
2024 ProtGO: Function-Guided Protein Modeling for Unified Representation Learning
abstract
Protein representation learning is indispensable for various downstream applications of artificial intelligence for bio-medicine research, such as drug design and function prediction. However, achieving effective representation learning for proteins poses challenges due to the diversity of data modalities involved, including sequence, structure, and function annotations. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models in biomedical text modelling, there remains a pressing need for a framework that seamlessly integrates these diverse modalities, particularly focusing on the three critical aspects of protein information: sequence, structure, and function. Moreover, addressing the inherent data scale differences among these modalities is essential. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ProtGO, a unified model that harnesses a teacher network equipped with a customized graph neural network (GNN) and a Gene Ontology (GO) encoder to learn hybrid embeddings. Notably, our approach eliminates the need for additional functions as input for the student network, which shares the same GNN module. Importantly, we utilize a domain adaptation method to facilitate distribution approximation for guiding the training of the teacher-student framework. This approach leverages distributions learned from latent representations to avoid the alignment of individual samples. Benchmark experiments highlight that ProtGO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, clearly demonstrating the advantages of the proposed unified framework.
Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan 0012, Yongjie Xu 0001, Zhangyang Gao, Jun Xia 0001, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS4
2024 FlexMol: A Flexible Toolkit for Benchmarking Molecular Relational Learning
abstract
Molecular relational learning (MRL) is crucial for understanding the interaction behaviors between molecular pairs, a critical aspect of drug discovery and development. However, the large feasible model space of MRL poses significant challenges to benchmarking, and existing MRL frameworks face limitations in flexibility and scope. To address these challenges, avoid repetitive coding efforts, and ensure fair comparison of models, we introduce FlexMol, a comprehensive toolkit designed to facilitate the construction and evaluation of diverse model architectures across various datasets and performance metrics. FlexMol offers a robust suite of preset model components, including 16 drug encoders, 13 protein sequence encoders, 9 protein structure encoders, and 7 interaction layers. With its easy-to-use API and flexibility, FlexMol supports the dynamic construction of over 70, 000 distinct combinations of model architectures. Additionally, we provide detailed benchmark results and code examples to demonstrate FlexMol’s effectiveness in simplifying and standardizing MRL model development and comparison. FlexMol is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/Steven51516/FlexMol.
Sizhe Liu, Jun Xia 0001, Lecheng Zhang, Yue Liu 0008, Wenjie Du 0003, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan 0012, Hongxin Xiang, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS7
2024 Interpretable and Generalizable Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning with Disentangled Consistency
Jingxuan Wei, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Linzhuang Sun, Bihui Yu, Ruifeng Guo, Stan Z. Li
ECML/PKDD (3)3
2024 AQND: An asymmetric quorum-based neighbor discovery protocol for reducing delay in sensor based systems
Ziqing Xia, Zhangyang Gao, Anfeng Liu, Naixue Xiong
Inf. Sci.2
2024 Enhancing human-like multimodal reasoning: a new challenging dataset and comprehensive framework
Jingxuan Wei, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Linzhuang Sun, Siyuan Li 0002, Bihui Yu, Ruifeng Guo, Stan Z. Li
Neural Comput. Appl.3
2024 A Survey on Generative Diffusion Models
abstract
Deep generative models have unlocked another profound realm of human creativity. By capturing and generalizing patterns within data, we have entered the epoch of all-encompassing Artificial Intelligence for General Creativity (AIGC). Notably, diffusion models, recognized as one of the paramount generative models, materialize human ideation into tangible instances across diverse domains, encompassing imagery, text, speech, biology, and healthcare. To provide advanced and comprehensive insights into diffusion, this survey comprehensively elucidates its developmental trajectory and future directions from three distinct angles: the fundamental formulation of diffusion, algorithmic enhancements, and the manifold applications of diffusion. Each layer is meticulously explored to offer a profound comprehension of its evolution. Structured and summarized approaches are presented here.
Hanqun Cao, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Guangyong Chen, Pheng-Ann Heng, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2024 A Teacher-Free Graph Knowledge Distillation Framework With Dual Self-Distillation
abstract
Recent years have witnessed great success in handling graph-related tasks with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their greatacademicsuccess, Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) remain the primary workhorse for practicalindustrialapplications. One reason for such an academic-industry gap is the neighborhood-fetching latency incurred by data dependency in GNNs. To reduce their gaps, Graph Knowledge Distillation (GKD) is proposed, usually based on a standard teacher-student architecture, to distill knowledge from a large teacher GNN into a lightweight student GNN or MLP. However, we found in this paper that neither teachers nor GNNs are necessary for graph knowledge distillation. We propose aTeacher-FreeGraphSelf-Distillation(TGS) framework that does not require any teacher model or GNNs during both training and inference. More importantly, the proposed TGS framework is purely based on MLPs, where structural information is only implicitly used to guidedual knowledge self-distillationbetween the target node and its neighborhood. As a result, TGS enjoys the benefits of graph topology awareness in training but is free from data dependency in inference. Extensive experiments have shown that the performance of vanilla MLPs can be greatly improved with dual self-distillation, e.g., TGS improves over vanilla MLPs by 15.54% on average and outperforms state-of-the-art GKD algorithms on six real-world datasets. In terms of inference speed, TGS infers 75×-89× faster than existing GNNs and 16×-25× faster than classical inference acceleration methods.
Lirong Wu, Zhangyang Gao, Guojiang Zhao, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2024 Beyond Homophily and Homogeneity Assumption: Relation-Based Frequency Adaptive Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been playing important roles in various graph-related tasks. However, most existing GNNs are based on the assumption of homophily, so they cannot be directly generalized to heterophily settings where connected nodes may have different features and class labels. Moreover, real-world graphs often arise from highly entangled latent factors, but the existing GNNs tend to ignore this and simply denote the heterogeneous relations between nodes as binary-valued homogeneous edges. In this article, we propose a novel relation-based frequency adaptive GNN (RFA-GNN) to handle both heterophily and heterogeneity in a unified framework. RFA-GNN first decomposes an input graph into multiple relation graphs, each representing a latent relation. More importantly, we provide detailed theoretical analysis from the perspective of spectral signal processing. Based on this, we propose a relation-based frequency adaptive mechanism that adaptively picks up signals of different frequencies in each corresponding relation space in the message-passing process. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show qualitatively and quantitatively that RFA-GNN yields truly encouraging results for both the heterophily and heterogeneity settings. Codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/LirongWu/RFA-GNN.
Lirong Wu, Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Zicheng Liu 0006, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.5
2023 Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning
abstract
Spatiotemporal predictive learning aims to generate future frames by learning from historical frames. In this paper, we investigate existing methods and present a general framework of spatiotemporal predictive learning, in which the spatial encoder and decoder capture intra-frame features and the middle temporal module catches inter-frame correlations. While the mainstream methods employ recurrent units to capture long-term temporal dependencies, they suffer from low computational efficiency due to their unparallelizable architectures. To parallelize the temporal module, we propose the Temporal Attention Unit (TAU), which decomposes temporal attention into intra-frame statical attention and inter-frame dynamical attention. Moreover, while the mean squared error loss focuses on intra-frame errors, we introduce a novel differential divergence regularization to take inter-frame variations into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method enables the derived model to achieve competitive performance on various spatiotemporal prediction benchmarks.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Lirong Wu, Yongjie Xu 0001, Jun Xia 0001, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
CVPR2
2023 Global-Context Aware Generative Protein Design
abstract
The linear sequence of amino acids determines protein structure and function. Protein design, known as the inverse of protein structure prediction, aims to obtain a novel protein sequence that will fold into the defined structure. Recent works on computational protein design have studied designing sequences for the desired backbone structure with local positional information and achieved competitive performance. However, similar local environments in different backbone structures may result in different amino acids, which indicates the global context of protein structure matters. Thus, we propose the Global-Context Aware generative de novo protein design method (GCA), consisting of local modules and global modules. While local modules focus on relationships between neighbor amino acids, global modules explicitly capture non-local contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCA method achieves state-of-the-art performance on structure-based protein design. Our code and pretrained model have been released on Github1.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Jun Xia 0001, Bozhen Hu, Stan Z. Li
ICASSP2
2023 PiFold: Toward effective and efficient protein inverse folding
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Stan Z. Li
ICLR1
2023 Mole-BERT: Rethinking Pre-training Graph Neural Networks for Molecules
Jun Xia 0001, Chengshuai Zhao, Bozhen Hu, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Yue Liu 0008, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
ICLR4
2023 OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning
abstract
Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow, and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.
Cheng Tan 0012, Siyuan Li 0002, Zhangyang Gao, Wenfei Guan, Zedong Wang, Zicheng Liu 0006, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS3
2023 ProteinInvBench: Benchmarking Protein Inverse Folding on Diverse Tasks, Models, and Metrics
abstract
Protein inverse folding has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, we observe that current methods are usually limited to the CATH dataset and the recovery metric. The lack of a unified framework for ensembling and comparing different methods hinders the comprehensive investigation. In this paper, we propose ProteinBench, a new benchmark for protein design, which comprises extended protein design tasks, integrated models, and diverse evaluation metrics. We broaden the application of methods originally designed for single-chain protein design to new scenarios of multi-chain and \textit{de novo} protein design. Recent impressive methods, including GraphTrans, StructGNN, GVP, GCA, AlphaDesign, ProteinMPNN, PiFold and KWDesign are integrated into our framework. In addition to the recovery, we also evaluate the confidence, diversity, sc-TM, efficiency, and robustness to thoroughly revisit current protein design approaches and inspire future work. As a result, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark for protein design, which is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/A4Bio/OpenCPD}.
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Xingran Chen, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS1
2023 Understanding the Limitations of Deep Models for Molecular property prediction: Insights and Solutions
abstract
Molecular Property Prediction (MPP) is a crucial task in the AI-driven Drug Discovery (AIDD) pipeline, which has recently gained considerable attention thanks to advancements in deep learning. However, recent research has revealed that deep models struggle to beat traditional non-deep ones on MPP. In this study, we benchmark 12 representative models (3 non-deep models and 9 deep models) on 15 molecule datasets. Through the most comprehensive study to date, we make the following key observations: \textbf{(\romannumeral 1)} Deep models are generally unable to outperform non-deep ones; \textbf{(\romannumeral 2)} The failure of deep models on MPP cannot be solely attributed to the small size of molecular datasets; \textbf{(\romannumeral 3)} In particular, some traditional models including XGB and RF that use molecular fingerprints as inputs tend to perform better than other competitors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive empirical investigations into the unique patterns of molecule data and inductive biases of various models underlying these phenomena. These findings stimulate us to develop a simple-yet-effective feature mapping method for molecule data prior to feeding them into deep models. Empirically, deep models equipped with this mapping method can beat non-deep ones in most MoleculeNet datasets. Notably, the effectiveness is further corroborated by extensive experiments on cutting-edge dataset related to COVID-19 and activity cliff datasets.
Jun Xia 0001, Lecheng Zhang, Yue Liu 0008, Zhangyang Gao, Bozhen Hu, Cheng Tan 0012, Jiangbin Zheng 0002, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
NeurIPS5
2023 Co-supervised Pre-training of Pocket and Ligand
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Jun Xia 0001, Stan Z. Li
ECML/PKDD (1)1
2023 Learning to Augment Graph Structure for both Homophily and Heterophily Graphs
Lirong Wu, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Stan Z. Li
ECML/PKDD (3)4
2023 Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs: Contrastive, Generative, or Predictive
abstract
Deep learning on graphs has recently achieved remarkable success on a variety of tasks, while such success relies heavily on the massive and carefully labeled data. However, precise annotations are generally very expensive and time-consuming. To address this problem, self-supervised learning (SSL) is emerging as a new paradigm for extracting informative knowledge through well-designed pretext tasks without relying on manual labels. In this survey, we extend the concept of SSL, which first emerged in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, to present a timely and comprehensive review of existing SSL techniques for graph data. Specifically, we divide existing graph SSL methods into three categories: contrastive, generative, and predictive. More importantly, unlike other surveys that only provide a high-level description of published research, we present an additional mathematical summary of existing works in a unified framework. Furthermore, to facilitate methodological development and empirical comparisons, we also summarize the commonly used datasets, evaluation metrics, downstream tasks, open-source implementations, and experimental study of various algorithms. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges and potential future directions for improving graph self-supervised learning. Latest advances in graph SSL are summarized in a GitHub repositoryhttps://github.com/LirongWu/awesome-graph-self-supervised-learning.
Lirong Wu, Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Stan Z. Li
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.4
2022 Conditional Local Convolution for Spatio-Temporal Meteorological Forecasting
abstract
Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteorology to handle the irregular distribution of sensors' spatial location. In this work, a novel graph-based convolution for imitating the meteorological flows is proposed to capture the local spatial patterns. Based on the assumption of smoothness of location-characterized patterns, we propose conditional local convolution whose shared kernel on nodes' local space is approximated by feedforward networks, with local representations of coordinate obtained by horizon maps into cylindrical-tangent space as its input. The established united standard of local coordinate system preserves the orientation on geography. We further propose the distance and orientation scaling terms to reduce the impacts of irregular spatial distribution. The convolution is embedded in a Recurrent Neural Network architecture to model the temporal dynamics, leading to the Conditional Local Convolution Recurrent Network (CLCRN). Our model is evaluated on real-world weather benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with obvious improvements. We conduct further analysis on local pattern visualization, model's framework choice, advantages of horizon maps and etc. The source code is available at https://github.com/BIRD-TAO/CLCRN.
Zhangyang Gao, Yongjie Xu 0001, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
AAAI2
2022 Hyperspherical Consistency Regularization
abstract
Recent advances in contrastive learning have enlightened diverse applications across various semi-supervised fields. Jointly training supervised learning and unsupervised learning with a shared feature encoder becomes a common scheme. Though it benefits from taking advantage of both feature-dependent information from self-supervised learning and label-dependent information from supervised learning, this scheme remains suffering from bias of the classifier. In this work, we systematically explore the relationship between self-supervised learning and supervised learning, and study how self-supervised learning helps robust data-efficient deep learning. We propose hyperspherical consistency regularization (HCR), a simple yet effective plug-and-play method, to regularize the classifier using feature-dependent information and thus avoid bias from labels. Specifically, HCR first project logits from the classifier and feature projections from the projection head on the respective hypersphere, then it enforces data points on hyperspheres to have similar structures by minimizing binary cross entropy of pairwise distances' similarity metrics. Extensive experiments on semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, by showing superior performance with HCR.
Cheng Tan 0012, Zhangyang Gao, Lirong Wu, Siyuan Li 0002, Stan Z. Li
CVPR2
2022 SimVP: Simpler yet Better Video Prediction
abstract
From CNN, RNN, to ViT, we have witnessed remarkable advancements in video prediction, incorporating auxiliary inputs, elaborate neural architectures, and sophisticated training strategies. We admire these progresses but are confused about the necessity: is there a simple method that can perform comparably well? This paper proposes SimVp, a simple video prediction model that is completely built upon CNN and trained by MSE loss in an end-to-end fashion. Without introducing any additional tricks and complicated strategies, we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets. Through extended experiments, we demonstrate that SimVP has strong generalization and extensibility on real-world datasets. The significant reduction of training cost makes it easier to scale to complex scenarios. We believe SimVP can serve as a solid baseline to stimulate the further development of video prediction.
Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
CVPR1
2022 GraphMixup: Improving Class-Imbalanced Node Classification by Reinforcement Mixup and Self-supervised Context Prediction
Lirong Wu, Jun Xia 0001, Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan 0012, Stan Z. Li
ECML/PKDD (4)3