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Hanqun Cao

7 accepted papers

2026

Lost in Tokenization: Context as the Key to Unlocking Biomolecular Understanding in Scientific LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) have emerged as a promising frontier for accelerating biological discovery. However, these models face a fundamental challenge when processing raw biomolecular sequences: the tokenization dilemma. Whether treating sequences as a specialized language, riski…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Proteo-R1: Thinking Foundation Models for De Novo Protein Binder Design

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in generative diffusion and flow-matching models have revolutionized molecular design, enabling the creation of novel proteins, small molecules, and RNA sequences with unprecedented fidelity. Yet, these models remain intuitive rather than intelligent—they generate without reasoning. …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RiboSphere: Learning Unified and Efficient Representations of RNA Structures

ICML 2026poster

Accurate RNA structure modeling remains difficult because RNA backbones are highly flexible, non-canonical interactions are prevalent, and experimentally determined 3D structures are comparatively scarce. We introduce RiboSphere, a framework that learns discrete geometric representations of RNA by c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TD3B: Transition-Directed Discrete Diffusion for Allosteric Binder Generation

ICML 2026spotlight

Protein function is often controlled by ligands that bias the direction of state transitions, such as agonists and antagonists, rather than stabilizing a single conformation. This is especially important for clinically relevant G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), where therapeutic efficacy depends …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GLID$^2$E: A Gradient-Free Lightweight Fine-tune Approach for Discrete Biological Sequence Design

NeurIPS 2025poster

The design of biological sequences is essential for engineering functional biomolecules that contribute to advancements in human health and biotechnology. Recent advances in diffusion models, with their generative power and efficient conditional sampling, have made them a promising approach for sequ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SAGEPhos: Sage Bio-Coupled and Augmented Fusion for Phosphorylation Site Detection

ICLR 2025poster

Phosphorylation site prediction based on kinase-substrate interaction plays a vital role in understanding cellular signaling pathways and disease mechanisms. Computational methods for this task can be categorized into kinase-family-focused and individual kinase-targeted approaches. Individual kinase…

2024

Deciphering RNA Secondary Structure Prediction: A Probabilistic K-Rook Matching Perspective

ICML 2024poster

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 complexit…