Ziyao Cao

dblp:364/2544 · DBLP profile ↗
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4ranked-venue papers
0as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 4 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
4 papers
Generative modeling · 95% 3D vision · 2% Deep learning architectures and training · 2%
Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
3 papers
Bioinformatics and computational biology · 64% Computational science and engineering · 36%

Topics — the 15 heaviest of 16, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Generative modeling › generative model › continuous-time generative model
bayesian flow network
2.632025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation · ICLR 2025
Steering Protein Family Design through Profile Bayesian Flow · ICLR 2025
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model
2.432025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation · ICLR 2025
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023
Machine learning › Generative modeling › diffusion model
crystal structure generation
0.912025
A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation · ICLR 2025
Computational science and engineering › materials science
crystal structure prediction
0.912025
A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation · ICLR 2025
Computational science and engineering
materials science
0.912025
A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation · ICLR 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery
molecular optimization
0.912025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology
protein design
0.912025
Steering Protein Family Design through Profile Bayesian Flow · ICLR 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery › drug design
structure-based drug design
0.912025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Generative modeling › molecular generation
3d molecule generation
0.712023
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023
Machine learning › Generative modeling › flow matching
equivariant flow matching
0.712023
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023
Machine learning › Generative modeling
flow matching
0.712023
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics › molecular modeling
molecular docking
0.312025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › structural bioinformatics
protein-ligand binding
0.312025
Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training
equivariant models
0.212023
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023
Computer vision › 3D vision
geometric deep learning
0.212023
Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation · NeurIPS 2023

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

bayesian flow network · 3.5profile modeling · 1.7gradient guidance · 1.7entropy conditioning · 1.7diffusion · 1.7bayesian flow · 1.7backward correction · 1.7SE(3)-equivariance · 0.9SE(3) equivariance · 0.9optimal transport · 0.7hybrid probability path · 0.7
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Steering Protein Family Design through Profile Bayesian Flow
abstract
Protein family design emerges as a promising alternative by combining the advantages of de novo protein design and mutation-based directed evolution.In this paper, we propose ProfileBFN, the Profile Bayesian Flow Networks, for specifically generative modeling of protein families. ProfileBFN extends the discrete Bayesian Flow Network from an MSA profile perspective, which can be trained on single protein sequences by regarding it as a degenerate profile, thereby achieving efficient protein family design by avoiding large-scale MSA data construction and training. Empirical results show that ProfileBFN has a profound understanding of proteins. When generating diverse and novel family proteins, it can accurately capture the structural characteristics of the family. The enzyme produced by this method is more likely than the previous approach to have the corresponding function, offering better odds of generating diverse proteins with the desired functionality.
Jingjing Gong, Siyu Long, Yuxuan Song 0002, Wenhao Huang 0001, Ziyao Cao, Hao Zhou 0012, Wei-Ying Ma
ICLR7
2025 A Periodic Bayesian Flow for Material Generation
abstract
Generative modeling of crystal data distribution is an important yet challenging task due to the unique periodic physical symmetry of crystals. Diffusion-based methods have shown early promise in modeling crystal distribution. More recently, Bayesian Flow Networks were introduced to aggregate noisy latent variables, resulting in a variance-reduced parameter space that has been shown to be advantageous for modeling Euclidean data distributions with structural constraints (Song, et al.,2023). Inspired by this, we seek to unlock its potential for modeling variables located in non-Euclidean manifolds e.g. those within crystal structures, by overcoming challenging theoretical issues. We introduce CrysBFN, a novel crystal generation method by proposing a periodic Bayesian flow, which essentially differs from the original Gaussian-based BFN by exhibiting non-monotonic entropy dynamics. To successfully realize the concept of periodic Bayesian flow, CrysBFN integrates a new entropy conditioning mechanism and empirically demonstrates its significance compared to time-conditioning. Extensive experiments over both crystal ab initio generation and crystal structure prediction tasks demonstrate the superiority of CrysBFN, which consistently achieves new state-of-the-art on all benchmarks. Surprisingly, we found that CrysBFN enjoys a significant improvement in sampling efficiency, e.g., 200x speedup (10 v.s. 2000 steps network forwards) compared with previous Diffusion-based methods on MP-20 dataset.
Yuxuan Song 0002, Jingjing Gong, Ziyao Cao, Yawen Ouyang, Hao Zhou 0012, Wei-Ying Ma
ICLR4
2025 Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks
abstract
Structure-based molecule optimization (SBMO) aims to optimize molecules with both continuous coordinates and discrete types against protein targets. A promising direction is to exert gradient guidance on generative models given its remarkable success in images, but it is challenging to guide discrete data and risks inconsistencies between modalities. To this end, we leverage a continuous and differentiable space derived through Bayesian inference, presenting Molecule Joint Optimization (MolJO), the gradient-based SBMO framework that facilitates joint guidance signals across different modalities while preserving SE(3)-equivariance. We introduce a novel backward correction strategy that optimizes within a sliding window of the past histories, allowing for a seamless trade-off between explore-and-exploit during optimization. MolJO achieves state-of-the-art performance on CrossDocked2020 benchmark (Success Rate 51.3\%, Vina Dock -9.05 and SA 0.78), more than 4x improvement in Success Rate compared to the gradient-based counterpart, and 2x ``Me-Better'' Ratio as much as 3D baselines. Furthermore, we extend MolJO to a wide range of optimization settings, including multi-objective optimization and challenging tasks in drug design such as R-group optimization and scaffold hopping, further underscoring its versatility. Code is available at https://github.com/AlgoMole/MolCRAFT.
Keyue Qiu, Yuxuan Song 0002, Hongbo Ma, Ziyao Cao, Yushuai Wu, Mingyue Zheng, Hao Zhou 0012, Wei-Ying Ma
ICML5
2023 Equivariant Flow Matching with Hybrid Probability Transport for 3D Molecule Generation
abstract
The generation of 3D molecules requires simultaneously deciding the categorical features (atom types) and continuous features (atom coordinates). Deep generative models, especially Diffusion Models (DMs), have demonstrated effectiveness in generating feature-rich geometries. However, existing DMs typically suffer from unstable probability dynamics with inefficient sampling speed. In this paper, we introduce geometric flow matching, which enjoys the advantages of both equivariant modeling and stabilized probability dynamics. More specifically, we propose a hybrid probability path where the coordinates probability path is regularized by an equivariant optimal transport, and the information between different modalities is aligned. Experimentally, the proposed method could consistently achieve better performance on multiple molecule generation benchmarks with 4.75$\times$ speed up of sampling on average.
Yuxuan Song 0002, Jingjing Gong, Minkai Xu, Ziyao Cao, Yanyan Lan, Stefano Ermon, Hao Zhou 0012, Wei-Ying Ma
NeurIPS4