Demo Data from EDBT 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Nicholas Gao
dblp:267/5384
· DBLP profile ↗
10ranked-venue papers
6as first author
8since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 10 · 6 first-author · 8 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author
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
8 papers |
Graph learning · 46% Generative modeling · 28% Deep learning architectures and training · 7% | |
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
6 papers |
Computational science and engineering · 89% Bioinformatics and computational biology · 11% | |
| Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, and storage systems
1 paper |
Emerging computing paradigms · 100% |
Topics — the 25 heaviest of 28, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph neural network |
1.2 | 2 | 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 Ab-Initio Potential Energy Surfaces by Pairing GNNs with Neural Wave Functions · ICLR 2022 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
potential energy surface |
1.2 | 2 | 2023 | Sampling-free Inference for Ab-Initio Potential Energy Surface Networks · ICLR 2023 Ab-Initio Potential Energy Surfaces by Pairing GNNs with Neural Wave Functions · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › molecular generation
3d molecule generation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network › geometric graph neural network
equivariant graph neural network |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Learning Equivariant Non-Local Electron Density Functionals · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › molecular generation
molecular graph generation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › molecular representation learning › molecular graph learning
molecular property prediction |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Learning Equivariant Non-Local Electron Density Functionals · ICLR 2025 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry › electronic structure calculation
density functional theory |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Learning Equivariant Non-Local Electron Density Functionals · ICLR 2025 |
Computational science and engineering
computational chemistry |
0.9 | 2 | 2023 | Generalizing Neural Wave Functions · ICML 2023 Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
quantum chemistry |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Neural Pfaffians: Solving Many Many-Electron Schrödinger Equations · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
long-range interaction |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Ewald-based Long-Range Message Passing for Molecular Graphs · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
message passing |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Ewald-based Long-Range Message Passing for Molecular Graphs · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › molecular representation learning
molecular graph learning |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Ewald-based Long-Range Message Passing for Molecular Graphs · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
uncertainty estimation |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
ab initio molecular dynamics |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Generalizing Neural Wave Functions · ICML 2023 |
Bioinformatics and computational biology
molecular property prediction |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 |
Computational science and engineering › statistical computing
uncertainty estimation |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
normalizing flow |
0.4 | 1 | 2020 | Fast and Flexible Temporal Point Processes with Triangular Maps · NeurIPS 2020 |
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › stochastic processes › point process
temporal point process |
0.4 | 1 | 2020 | Fast and Flexible Temporal Point Processes with Triangular Maps · NeurIPS 2020 |
Emerging computing paradigms
quantum computing |
0.4 | 1 | 2020 | High-Dimensional Similarity Search with Quantum-Assisted Variational Autoencoder · KDD 2020 |
Emerging computing paradigms › quantum computing
quantum machine learning |
0.4 | 1 | 2020 | High-Dimensional Similarity Search with Quantum-Assisted Variational Autoencoder · KDD 2020 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
molecular force field |
0.2 | 1 | 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and Methods · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › probabilistic inference › approximate inference
variational inference |
0.1 | 1 | 2020 | Fast and Flexible Temporal Point Processes with Triangular Maps · NeurIPS 2020 |
Information retrieval › similarity search
high-dimensional similarity search |
0.1 | 1 | 2020 | High-Dimensional Similarity Search with Quantum-Assisted Variational Autoencoder · KDD 2020 |
Information retrieval
similarity search |
0.1 | 1 | 2020 | High-Dimensional Similarity Search with Quantum-Assisted Variational Autoencoder · KDD 2020 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
equivariant graph neural network · 2.6neural wave function · 2.5self-consistent field solver · 1.7slater determinant · 1.5pfaffian · 1.5neural network · 1.5graph neural network · 1.2inpainting · 0.9guidance · 0.9diffusion model · 0.9variational autoencoder · 0.9quantum-assisted variational autoencoder · 0.9orbital embedding · 0.7message passing · 0.7ewald summation · 0.7dropout · 0.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Learning Equivariant Non-Local Electron Density FunctionalsabstractThe accuracy of density functional theory hinges on the approximation of non-local contributions to the exchange-correlation (XC) functional. To date, machine-learned and human-designed approximations suffer from insufficient accuracy, limited scalability, or dependence on costly reference data. To address these issues, we introduce Equivariant Graph Exchange Correlation (EG-XC), a novel non-local XC functional based on equivariant graph neural networks (GNNs). Where previous works relied on semi-local functionals or fixed-size descriptors of the density, we compress the electron density into an SO(3)-equivariant nuclei-centered point cloud for efficient non-local atomic-range interactions. By applying an equivariant GNN on this point cloud, we capture molecular-range interactions in a scalable and accurate manner. To train EG-XC, we differentiate through a self-consistent field solver requiring only energy targets. In our empirical evaluation, we find EG-XC to accurately reconstruct `gold-standard' CCSD(T) energies on MD17. On out-of-distribution conformations of 3BPA, EG-XC reduces the relative MAE by 35% to 50%. Remarkably, EG-XC excels in data efficiency and molecular size extrapolation on QM9, matching force fields trained on 5 times more and larger molecules. On identical training sets, EG-XC yields on average 51% lower MAEs. Nicholas Gao, Eike Eberhard, Stephan Günnemann |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean SpaceabstractWe introduce a new framework for 2D molecular graph generation using 3D molecule generative models. Our Synthetic Coordinate Embedding (SyCo) framework maps 2D molecular graphs to 3D Euclidean point clouds via synthetic coordinates and learns the inverse map using an E($n$)-Equivariant Graph Neural Network (EGNN). The induced point cloud-structured latent space is well-suited to apply existing 3D molecule generative models. This approach simplifies the graph generation problem into a point cloud generation problem followed by node and edge classification tasks, without relying on molecular fragments nor autoregressive decoding. Further, we propose a novel similarity-constrained optimization scheme for 3D diffusion models based on inpainting and guidance. As a concrete implementation of our framework, we develop EDM-SyCo based on the E(3) Equivariant Diffusion Model (EDM). EDM-SyCo achieves state-of-the-art performance in distribution learning of molecular graphs, outperforming the best non-autoregressive methods by more than 26\% on ZINC250K and 16\% on the GuacaMol dataset while improving conditional generation by up to 3.9 times. Mohamed Amine Ketata, Nicholas Gao, Johanna Sommer, Tom Wollschläger, Stephan Günnemann |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2024 | Neural Pfaffians: Solving Many Many-Electron Schrödinger EquationsabstractNeural wave functions accomplished unprecedented accuracies in approximating the ground state of many-electron systems, though at a high computational cost. Recent works proposed amortizing the cost by learning generalized wave functions across different structures and compounds instead of solving each problem independently. Enforcing the permutation antisymmetry of electrons in such generalized neural wave functions remained challenging as existing methods require discrete orbital selection via non-learnable hand-crafted algorithms. This work tackles the problem by defining overparametrized, fully learnable neural wave functions suitable for generalization across molecules. We achieve this by relying on Pfaffians rather than Slater determinants. The Pfaffian allows us to enforce the antisymmetry on arbitrary electronic systems without any constraint on electronic spin configurations or molecular structure. Our empirical evaluation finds that a single neural Pfaffian calculates the ground state and ionization energies with chemical accuracy across various systems. On the TinyMol dataset, we outperform the `gold-standard' CCSD(T) CBS reference energies by 1.9m$E_h$ and reduce energy errors compared to previous generalized neural wave functions by up to an order of magnitude. Nicholas Gao, Stephan Günnemann |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2023 | Sampling-free Inference for Ab-Initio Potential Energy Surface Networks
Nicholas Gao, Stephan Günnemann |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2023 | Generalizing Neural Wave FunctionsabstractRecent neural network-based wave functions have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies in modeling ab-initio ground-state potential energy surface. However, these networks can only solve different spatial arrangements of the same set of atoms. To overcome this limitation, we present Graph-learned orbital embeddings (Globe), a neural network-based reparametrization method that can adapt neural wave functions to different molecules. Globe learns representations of local electronic structures that generalize across molecules via spatial message passing by connecting molecular orbitals to covalent bonds. Further, we propose a size-consistent wave function Ansatz, the Molecular orbital network (Moon), tailored to jointly solve Schrödinger equations of different molecules. In our experiments, we find Moon converging in 4.5 times fewer steps to similar accuracy as previous methods or to lower energies given the same time. Further, our analysis shows that Moon's energy estimate scales additively with increased system sizes, unlike previous work where we observe divergence. In both computational chemistry and machine learning, we are the first to demonstrate that a single wave function can solve the Schrödinger equation of molecules with different atoms jointly. Nicholas Gao, Stephan Günnemann |
ICML | 1 |
| 2023 | Ewald-based Long-Range Message Passing for Molecular GraphsabstractNeural architectures that learn potential energy surfaces from molecular data have undergone fast improvement in recent years. A key driver of this success is the Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) paradigm. Its favorable scaling with system size partly relies upon a spatial distance limit on messages. While this focus on locality is a useful inductive bias, it also impedes the learning of long-range interactions such as electrostatics and van der Waals forces. To address this drawback, we propose Ewald message passing: a nonlocal Fourier space scheme which limits interactions via a cutoff on frequency instead of distance, and is theoretically well-founded in the Ewald summation method. It can serve as an augmentation on top of existing MPNN architectures as it is computationally inexpensive and agnostic to architectural details. We test the approach with four baseline models and two datasets containing diverse periodic (OC20) and aperiodic structures (OE62). Across all models and datasets, we observe robust improvements in energy mean absolute errors, averaging 10% on OC20 and 16% on OE62. Our analysis shows an outsize impact of these improvements on structures with high long-range contributions to the ground-truth energy. Arthur Kosmala, Johannes Gasteiger, Nicholas Gao, Stephan Günnemann |
ICML | 3 |
| 2023 | Uncertainty Estimation for Molecules: Desiderata and MethodsabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) are promising surrogates for quantum mechanical calculations as they establish unprecedented low errors on collections of molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories. Thanks to their fast inference times they promise to accelerate computational chemistry applications. Unfortunately, despite low in-distribution (ID) errors, such GNNs might be horribly wrong for out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Uncertainty estimation (UE) may aid in such situations by communicating the model’s certainty about its prediction. Here, we take a closer look at the problem and identify six key desiderata for UE in molecular force fields, three ’physics-informed’ and three ’application-focused’ ones. To overview the field, we survey existing methods from the field of UE and analyze how they fit to the set desiderata. By our analysis, we conclude that none of the previous works satisfies all criteria. To fill this gap, we propose Localized Neural Kernel (LNK) a Gaussian Process (GP)-based extension to existing GNNs satisfying the desiderata. In our extensive experimental evaluation, we test four different UE with three different backbones across two datasets. In out-of-equilibrium detection, we find LNK yielding up to 2.5 and 2.1 times lower errors in terms of AUC-ROC score than dropout or evidential regression-based methods while maintaining high predictive performance. Tom Wollschläger, Nicholas Gao, Bertrand Charpentier, Mohamed Amine Ketata, Stephan Günnemann |
ICML | 2 |
| 2022 | Ab-Initio Potential Energy Surfaces by Pairing GNNs with Neural Wave Functions
Nicholas Gao, Stephan Günnemann |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2020 | High-Dimensional Similarity Search with Quantum-Assisted Variational AutoencoderabstractRecent progress in quantum algorithms and hardware indicates the potential importance of quantum computing in the near future. However, finding suitable application areas remains an active area of research. Quantum machine learning is touted as a potential approach to demonstrate quantum advantage within both the gate-model and the adiabatic schemes. For instance, the Quantum-assisted Variational Autoencoder (QVAE) has been proposed as a quantum enhancement to the discrete VAE. We extend on previous work and study the real-world applicability of a QVAE by presenting a proof-of-concept for similarity search in large-scale high-dimensional datasets. While exact and fast similarity search algorithms are available for low dimensional datasets, scaling to high-dimensional data is non-trivial. We show how to construct a space-efficient search index based on the latent space representation of a QVAE. Our experiments show a correlation between the Hamming distance in the embedded space and the Euclidean distance in the original space on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) dataset.Further, we find real-world speedups compared to linear search and demonstrate memory-efficient scaling to half a billion data points. Nicholas Gao, Max Wilson 0001, Thomas Vandal, Walter Vinci, Ramakrishna R. Nemani, Eleanor Gilbert Rieffel |
KDD | 1 |
| 2020 | Fast and Flexible Temporal Point Processes with Triangular MapsabstractTemporal point process (TPP) models combined with recurrent neural networks provide a powerful framework for modeling continuous-time event data. While such models are flexible, they are inherently sequential and therefore cannot benefit from the parallelism of modern hardware. By exploiting the recent developments in the field of normalizing flows, we design TriTPP - a new class of non-recurrent TPP models, where both sampling and likelihood computation can be done in parallel. TriTPP matches the flexibility of RNN-based methods but permits several orders of magnitude faster sampling. This enables us to use the new model for variational inference in continuous-time discrete-state systems. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework on synthetic and real-world datasets. Oleksandr Shchur, Nicholas Gao, Marin Bilos, Stephan Günnemann |
NeurIPS | 2 |