Michael Sun

dblp:67/1058 · DBLP profile ↗
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10ranked-venue papers
5as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · conflict

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 5 first-author · 8 since 2021Computer networks · 1Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 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.

Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
5 papers
Bioinformatics and computational biology · 69% Computational science and engineering · 20% Medical and health informatics · 10%
Artificial intelligence
4 papers
Graph learning · 57% Question answering and dialogue systems · 17% Vision and language · 17%
Theoretical computer science
2 papers
Automata and formal languages · 77% Mathematical optimization · 23%
Human-computer interaction and pervasive computing
1 paper
Ubiquitous computing and smart environments · 77% Usability and user experience research · 23%
Computer graphics and multimedia
1 paper
Visualization and visual analytics · 100%

Topics — the 23 heaviest of 27, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics
molecular design
1.622025
Procedural Synthesis of Synthesizable Molecules · ICLR 2025
Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars · ICML 2024
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph generation
directed acyclic graph generation
0.912025
Directed Graph Grammars for Sequence-based Learning · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph generation
0.912025
Directed Graph Grammars for Sequence-based Learning · ICML 2025
Computer vision › Vision and language › vision-language model
multimodal large language model
0.912025
Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning · ICLR 2025
Natural language and speech › Question answering and dialogue systems
multi-turn dialogue
0.912025
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor-Patient Communication at Discharge · EMNLP 2025
Medical and health informatics › clinical text processing
clinical dialogue
0.912025
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor-Patient Communication at Discharge · EMNLP 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery
computational drug discovery
0.912025
Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning · ICLR 2025
Computational science and engineering › materials informatics
inverse molecular design
0.912025
Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning · ICLR 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology
molecular property prediction
0.912025
Foundation Molecular Grammar: Multi-Modal Foundation Models Induce Interpretable Molecular Graph Languages · ICML 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics › cheminformatics
molecule generation
0.912025
Foundation Molecular Grammar: Multi-Modal Foundation Models Induce Interpretable Molecular Graph Languages · ICML 2025
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
retrosynthetic planning
0.912025
Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning · ICLR 2025
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics › cheminformatics › molecule generation
synthesizable molecule design
0.912025
Procedural Synthesis of Synthesizable Molecules · ICLR 2025
Automata and formal languages
graph grammars
0.912025
Directed Graph Grammars for Sequence-based Learning · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph grammar
0.812024
Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars · ICML 2024
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics › cheminformatics
molecular representation
0.812024
Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars · ICML 2024
Ubiquitous computing and smart environments
public displays
0.712023
Passenger Perceptions, Information Preferences, and Usability of Crowding Visualizations on Public Displays in Transit Stations and Vehicles · CHI 2023
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph representation learning
0.312025
Directed Graph Grammars for Sequence-based Learning · ICML 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
large language model evaluation
0.312025
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor-Patient Communication at Discharge · EMNLP 2025
Mathematical optimization › multi-objective optimization
evolutionary algorithm
0.312025
Procedural Synthesis of Synthesizable Molecules · ICLR 2025
Machine learning › Generative modeling
molecular generation
0.212024
Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars · ICML 2024
Network optimization and economics
network design
0.011983
Practical Design Tools for Large Packet-Switched Networks · INFOCOM 1983
Routing and switching › packet switching
packet-switched network design
0.011983
Practical Design Tools for Large Packet-Switched Networks · INFOCOM 1983
Routing and switching
packet switching
0.011983
Practical Design Tools for Large Packet-Switched Networks · INFOCOM 1983

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

policy learning · 1.7markov decision process · 1.7markov chain monte carlo · 1.7graph neural network · 1.7graph diffusion transformer · 1.7grammar-based encoding · 1.7evolutionary algorithm · 1.7bayesian optimization · 1.7a* search · 1.7LLM-as-judge · 1.7survey · 1.3field study · 1.3prompt learning · 0.9multimodal foundation model · 0.9random walk · 0.8graph grammar · 0.8design tools · 0.0
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor-Patient Communication at Discharge
abstract
Discharge communication is a critical yet underexplored component of patient care, where the goal shifts from diagnosis to education.While recent large language model (LLM) benchmarks emphasize in-visit diagnostic reasoning, they fail to evaluate models' ability to support patients after the visit.We introduce DischargeSim, a novel benchmark that evaluates LLMs on their ability to act as personalized discharge educators.DischargeSim simulates post-visit, multi-turn conversations between LLM-driven DoctorAgents and Pa-tientAgents with diverse psychosocial profiles (e.g., health literacy, education, emotion).Interactions are structured across six clinically grounded discharge topics and assessed along three axes: (1) dialogue quality via automatic and LLM-as-judge evaluation, (2) personalized document generation including free-text summaries and structured AHRQ checklists, and ( 3) patient comprehension through a downstream multiple-choice exam.Experiments across 18 LLMs reveal significant gaps in discharge education capability, with performance varying widely across patient profiles.Notably, model size does not always yield better education outcomes, highlighting trade-offs in strategy use and content prioritization.DischargeSim offers a first step toward benchmarking LLMs in post-visit clinical education and promoting equitable, personalized patient support. 1 .* indicates equal contribution 1 The source code is released at: https://github.com/ michaels6060/DischargeSim with CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.Discharge notes …… -Discharge Diagnoses -Discharge Medications -Discharge Condition -Discharge Instructions -Follow-up Plan : You'll be taking furosemide 40 mg by mouth every morning-it helps reduce fluid overload and also lowers your blood pressure.But because it can make you urinate more and lower potassium, you're also on potassium chloride 10 mEq daily.I took the 40 mg furosemide today and felt lightheaded.Should I be worried?: It's not uncommon.Make sure to take the 40 mg dose after breakfast, not on an empty stomach.Also, rise slowly from sitting or lying down.If the dizziness continues or worsens, call us-we may lower the dose or adjust your schedule.…
Zonghai Yao, Michael Sun, Won Seok Jang, Sunjae Kwon, Soie Kwon, Hong Yu 0001
EMNLP2
2025 Multimodal Large Language Models for Inverse Molecular Design with Retrosynthetic Planning
abstract
While large language models (LLMs) have integrated images, adapting them to graphs remains challenging, limiting their applications in materials and drug design. This difficulty stems from the need for coherent autoregressive generation across texts and graphs. To address this, we introduce Llamole, the first multimodal LLM capable of interleaved text and graph generation, enabling molecular inverse design with retrosynthetic planning. Llamole integrates a base LLM with the Graph Diffusion Transformer and Graph Neural Networks for multi-conditional molecular generation and reaction inference within texts, while the LLM, with enhanced molecular understanding, flexibly controls activation among the different graph modules. Additionally, Llamole integrates A* search with LLM-based cost functions for efficient retrosynthetic planning. We create benchmarking datasets and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate Llamole against in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Llamole significantly outperforms 14 adapted LLMs across 12 metrics for controllable molecular design and retrosynthetic planning. Code and model at https://github.com/liugangcode/Llamole.
Michael Sun, Wojciech Matusik, Jie Chen 0007
ICLR2
2025 Procedural Synthesis of Synthesizable Molecules
abstract
Designing synthetically accessible molecules and recommending analogs to unsynthesizable molecules are important problems for accelerating molecular discovery. We reconceptualize both problems using ideas from program synthesis. Drawing inspiration from syntax-guided synthesis approaches, we decouple the syntactic skeleton from the semantics of a synthetic tree to create a bilevel framework for reasoning about the combinatorial space of synthesis pathways. Given a molecule we aim to generate analogs for, we iteratively refine its skeletal characteristics via Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations over the space of syntactic skeletons. Given a black-box oracle to optimize, we formulate a joint design space over syntactic templates and molecular descriptors and introduce evolutionary algorithms that optimize both syntactic and semantic dimensions synergistically. Our key insight is that once the syntactic skeleton is set, we can amortize over the search complexity of deriving the program's semantics by training policies to fully utilize the fixed horizon Markov Decision Process imposed by the syntactic template. We demonstrate performance advantages of our bilevel framework for synthesizable analog generation and synthesizable molecule design. Notably, our approach offers the user explicit control over the resources required to perform synthesis and biases the design space towards simpler solutions, making it particularly promising for autonomous synthesis platforms. Supporting code is at https://github.com/shiningsunnyday/SynthesisNet.
Michael Sun, Alston Lo, Jie Chen 0007, Connor W. Coley, Wojciech Matusik
ICLR1
2025 Directed Graph Grammars for Sequence-based Learning
abstract
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are a class of graphs commonly used in practice, with examples that include electronic circuits, Bayesian networks, and neural architectures. While many effective encoders exist for DAGs, it remains challenging to decode them in a principled manner, because the nodes of a DAG can have many different topological orders. In this work, we propose a grammar-based approach to constructing a principled, compact and equivalent sequential representation of a DAG. Specifically, we view a graph as derivations over an unambiguous grammar, where the DAG corresponds to a unique sequence of production rules. Equivalently, the procedure to construct such a description can be viewed as a lossless compression of the data. Such a representation has many uses, including building a generative model for graph generation, learning a latent space for property prediction, and leveraging the sequence representational continuity for Bayesian Optimization over structured data.
Michael Sun, Orion Foo, Wojciech Matusik, Jie Chen 0007
ICML1
2025 Foundation Molecular Grammar: Multi-Modal Foundation Models Induce Interpretable Molecular Graph Languages
abstract
Recent data-efficient molecular generation approaches exploit graph grammars to introduce interpretability into the generative models. However, grammar learning therein relies on expert annotation or unreliable heuristics for algorithmic inference. We propose Foundation Molecular Grammar (FMG), which leverages multi-modal foundation models (MMFMs) to induce an interpretable molecular language. By exploiting the chemical knowledge of an MMFM, FMG renders molecules as images, describes them as text, and aligns information across modalities using prompt learning. FMG can be used as a drop-in replacement for the prior grammar learning approaches in molecular generation and property prediction. We show that FMG not only excels in synthesizability, diversity, and data efficiency but also offers built-in chemical interpretability for automated molecular discovery workflows. Code is available at https://github.com/shiningsunnyday/induction.
Michael Sun, Weize Yuan, Wojciech Matusik, Jie Chen 0007
ICML1
2025 Post Hoc Regression Refinement via Pairwise Rankings
abstract
Accurate prediction of continuous properties is essential to many scientific and engineering tasks. Although deep-learning regressors excel with abundant labels, their accuracy deteriorates in data-scarce regimes. We introduce RankRefine, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play post-hoc refinement technique that injects expert knowledge through pairwise rankings. Given a query item and a small reference set with known properties, RankRefine combines the base regressor’s output with a rank-based estimate via inverse-variance weighting, requiring no retraining. In molecular property prediction task, RankRefine achieves up to 10\% relative reduction in mean absolute error using only 20 pairwise comparisons obtained through a general-purpose large language model (LLM) with no finetuning. As rankings provided by human experts or general-purpose LLMs are sufficient for improving regression across diverse domains, RankRefine offers practicality and broad applicability, especially in low-data settings.
Kevin Tirta Wijaya, Michael Sun, Hans-Peter Seidel, Wojciech Matusik, Vahid Babaei
NeurIPS2
2024 Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars
abstract
Recent research in molecular discovery has primarily been devoted to small, drug-like molecules, leaving many similarly important applications in material design without adequate technology. These applications often rely on more complex molecular structures with fewer examples that are carefully designed using known substructures. We propose a data-efficient and interpretable model for representing and reasoning over such molecules in terms of graph grammars that explicitly describe the hierarchical design space featuring motifs to be the design basis. We present a novel representation in the form of random walks over the design space, which facilitates both molecule generation and property prediction. We demonstrate clear advantages over existing methods in terms of performance, efficiency, and synthesizability of predicted molecules, and we provide detailed insights into the method’s chemical interpretability.
Michael Sun, Weize Yuan, Veronika Thost, Crystal Elaine Owens, Aristotle Franklin Grosz, Sharvaa Selvan, Katelyn Zhou, Hassan Mohiuddin, Benjamin J. Pedretti, Zachary P. Smith, Jie Chen 0007, Wojciech Matusik
ICML1
2023 Passenger Perceptions, Information Preferences, and Usability of Crowding Visualizations on Public Displays in Transit Stations and Vehicles
abstract
Large crowds in public transit stations and vehicles introduce obstacles for wayfinding, hygiene, and physical distancing. Public displays that currently provide on-site transit information could also provide critical crowdedness information. Therefore, we examined people’s crowd perceptions and information preferences before and during the pandemic, and designs for visualizing crowdedness to passengers. We first report survey results with public transit users (n = 303), including the usability results of three crowdedness visualization concepts. Then, we present two animated crowd simulations on public displays that we evaluated in a field study (n = 44). We found that passengers react very positively to crowding information, especially before boarding a vehicle. Visualizing the exact physical spaces occupied on transit vehicles was most useful for avoiding crowded areas. However, visualizing the overall fullness of vehicles was the easiest to understand. We discuss design implications for communicating crowding information to support decision-making and promote a sense of safety.
Leah Zhang-Kennedy, Saira Aziz, Oluwafunminitemi (Temi) Oluwadare, Lyndon Pan, Sydney Lamorea, Soda Li, Michael Sun, Ville Mäkelä
CHI8
2023 PP-GNN: Pretraining Position-aware Graph Neural Networks with the NP-hard metric dimension problem
Michael Sun
Neurocomputing1
1983 Practical Design Tools for Large Packet-Switched Networks
Ronald Kronz, Sybil Lee, Michael Sun
INFOCOM3