← Search

Mathias Niepert

47 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Width Neural Networks

ICLR 2026poster

For almost 70 years, researchers have typically selected the width of neural networks’ layers either manually or through automated hyperparameter tuning methods such as grid search and, more recently, neural architecture search. This paper challenges the status quo by introducing an easy-to-use tech…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FACET: A Fragment-Aware Conformer Ensemble Transformer

ICLR 2026poster

Accurately predicting molecular properties requires effective integration of structural information from both 2D molecular graphs and their corresponding equilibrium conformer ensembles. In this work, we propose FACET, a scalable Structure-Aware Graph Transformer that efficiently aggregates features…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FOCA: Future-Oriented Conditioning for Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Adaptation

ICML 2026poster

Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models enable general-purpose robotic control via large-scale multimodal pretraining, yet their effectiveness under few-shot imitation learning remains limited. We conduct a systematic stress test of state-of-the-art VLA models and show that performance degrades sharply …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning the Neighborhood: Contrast-Free Multimodal Self-Supervised Molecular Graph Pretraining

ICML 2026poster

High-quality molecular representations are essential for property prediction and molecular design, yet large labeled datasets remain scarce. While self-supervised pretraining on molecular graphs has shown promise, many existing approaches either depend on hand-crafted augmentations or complex genera…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Logical Guidance for the Exact Composition of Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

We propose LOGDIFF (Logical Guidance for the Exact Composition of Diffusion Models), a guidance framework for diffusion models that enables principled constrained generation with complex logical expressions at inference time. We study when exact score-based guidance for complex logical formulas can …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Protein Fold Classification at Scale: Benchmarking and Pretraining

ICML 2026oral

Classifying protein topology is essential for deciphering biological function, but progress is held back by the lack of large-scale benchmarks that avoid duplicates and by models that do not scale well. We introduce TEDBench, a large-scale, non-redundant benchmark for protein fold classification con…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SMART: Scalable Mesh‑free Aerodynamic Simulations from Raw Geometries using a Transformer‑based Surrogate Model

ICML 2026poster

Machine learning–based surrogate models have emerged as more efficient alternatives to numerical solvers for physical simulations over complex geometries, such as car bodies. Many existing models incorporate the simulation mesh as an additional input, thereby reducing prediction errors. However, gen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Active Learning for Neural PDE Solvers

ICLR 2025poster

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a fundamental problem in engineering and science. While neural PDE solvers can be more efficient than established numerical solvers, they often require large amounts of training data that is costly to obtain. Active learning (AL) could help surrogate…

2025

Adaptive Message Passing: A General Framework to Mitigate Oversmoothing, Oversquashing, and Underreaching

ICML 2025poster

Long-range interactions are essential for the correct description of complex systems in many scientific fields. The price to pay for including them in the calculations, however, is a dramatic increase in the overall computational costs. Recently, deep graph networks have been employed as efficient,…

2025

CALM-PDE: Continuous and Adaptive Convolutions for Latent Space Modeling of Time-dependent PDEs

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Solving time-dependent Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) using a densely discretized spatial domain is a fundamental problem in various scientific and engineering disciplines, including modeling climate phenomena and fluid dynamics. However, performing these computations directly in the physical…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ExGra-Med: Extended Context Graph Alignment for Medical Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

State-of-the-art medical multi-modal LLMs (med-MLLMs), such as LLaVA-Med and BioMedGPT, primarily depend on scaling model size and data volume, with training driven largely by autoregressive objectives. However, we reveal that this approach can lead to weak vision-language alignment, making these mo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How Many Tokens Do 3D Point Cloud Transformer Architectures Really Need?

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in 3D point cloud transformers have led to state-of-the-art results in tasks such as semantic segmentation and reconstruction. However, these models typically rely on dense token representations, incurring high computational and memory costs during training and inference. In this wor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Learning (Approximately) Equivariant Networks via Constrained Optimization

NeurIPS 2025oral

Equivariant neural networks are designed to respect symmetries through their architecture, boosting generalization and sample efficiency when those symmetries are present in the data distribution. Real-world data, however, often departs from perfect symmetry because of noise, structural variation, m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning to Discretize Denoising Diffusion ODEs

ICLR 2025oral

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) are generative models showing competitive performance in various domains, including image synthesis and 3D point cloud generation. Sampling from pre-trained DPMs involves multiple neural function evaluations (NFEs) to transform Gaussian noise samples into images…

2025

On Zero-Initialized Attention: Optimal Prompt and Gating Factor Estimation

ICML 2025poster

LLaMA-Adapter has recently emerged as an efficient fine-tuning technique for LLaMA models, leveraging zero-initialized attention to stabilize training and enhance performance. However, despite its empirical success, the theoretical foundations of zero-initialized attention remain largely unexplored.…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Physics-Informed Weakly Supervised Learning For Interatomic Potentials

ICML 2025poster

Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in computational chemistry and materials science, complementing expensive ab initio and first-principles methods. However, machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) often struggle with generalization and robustness, leading to unphysica…

2025

Position: Graph Learning Will Lose Relevance Due To Poor Benchmarks

ICML 2025poster

While machine learning on graphs has demonstrated promise in drug design and molecular property prediction, significant benchmarking challenges hinder its further progress and relevance. Current benchmarking practices often lack focus on transformative, real-world applications, favoring narrow domai…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Rao-Blackwell Gradient Estimators for Equivariant Denoising Diffusion

NeurIPS 2025poster

In domains such as molecular and protein generation, physical systems exhibit inherent symmetries that are critical to model. Two main strategies have emerged for learning invariant distributions: designing equivariant network architectures and using data augmentation to approximate equivariance. Wh…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Tractable Transformers for Flexible Conditional Generation

ICML 2025poster

Non-autoregressive (NAR) generative models are valuable because they can handle diverse conditional generation tasks in a more principled way than their autoregressive (AR) counterparts, which are constrained by sequential dependency requirements. Recent advancements in NAR models, such as diffusion…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Accelerating Transformers with Spectrum-Preserving Token Merging

NeurIPS 2024poster

Increasing the throughput of the Transformer architecture, a foundational component used in numerous state-of-the-art models for vision and language tasks (e.g., GPT, LLaVa), is an important problem in machine learning. One recent and effective strategy is to merge token representations within Trans…

2024

Higher-Rank Irreducible Cartesian Tensors for Equivariant Message Passing

NeurIPS 2024poster

The ability to perform fast and accurate atomistic simulations is crucial for advancing the chemical sciences. By learning from high-quality data, machine-learned interatomic potentials achieve accuracy on par with ab initio and first-principles methods at a fraction of their computational cost. The…

2024

Image Inpainting via Tractable Steering of Diffusion Models

ICLR 2024poster

Diffusion models are the current state of the art for generating photorealistic images. Controlling the sampling process for constrained image generation tasks such as inpainting, however, remains challenging since exact conditioning on such constraints is intractable. While existing methods use va…

2024

Probabilistic Graph Rewiring via Virtual Nodes

NeurIPS 2024poster

Message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for graph-based machine learning. Despite their effectiveness, MPNNs face challenges such as under-reaching and over-squashing, where limited receptive fields and structural bottlenecks hinder information flow in the g…

2024

Probabilistically Rewired Message-Passing Neural Networks

ICLR 2024poster

Message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) emerged as powerful tools for processing graph-structured input. However, they operate on a fixed input graph structure, ignoring potential noise and missing information. Furthermore, their local aggregation mechanism can lead to problems such as over-sq…

2024

Structure-Aware E(3)-Invariant Molecular Conformer Aggregation Networks

ICML 2024poster

A molecule’s 2D representation consists of its atoms, their attributes, and the molecule’s covalent bonds. A 3D (geometric) representation of a molecule is called a conformer and consists of its atom types and Cartesian coordinates. Every conformer has a potential energy, and the lower this energy,…

2024

Tractable Probabilistic Graph Representation Learning with Graph-Induced Sum-Product Networks

ICLR 2024poster

We introduce Graph-Induced Sum-Product Networks (GSPNs), a new probabilistic framework for graph representation learning that can tractably answer probabilistic queries. Inspired by the computational trees induced by vertices in the context of message-passing neural networks, we build hierarchies of…

2024

Vectorized Conditional Neural Fields: A Framework for Solving Time-dependent Parametric Partial Differential Equations

ICML 2024poster

Transformer models are increasingly used for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Several adaptations have been proposed, all of which suffer from the typical problems of Transformers, such as quadratic memory and time complexity. Furthermore, all prevalent architectures for PDE solving la…

2023

Adaptive Perturbation-Based Gradient Estimation for Discrete Latent Variable Models

AAAI 2023technical

The integration of discrete algorithmic components in deep learning architectures has numerous applications. Recently, Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation, a class of gradient estimators for discrete exponential family distributions, was proposed by combining implicit differentiation through pert…

2023

LVM-Med: Learning Large-Scale Self-Supervised Vision Models for Medical Imaging via Second-order Graph Matching

NeurIPS 2023poster

Obtaining large pre-trained models that can be fine-tuned to new tasks with limited annotated samples has remained an open challenge for medical imaging data. While pre-trained networks on ImageNet and vision-language foundation models trained on web-scale data are the prevailing approaches, their e…

2023

Learning Neural PDE Solvers with Parameter-Guided Channel Attention

ICML 2023poster

Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) is concerned with the development of learned emulators of physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDE). In application domains such as weather forecasting, molecular dynamics, and inverse design, ML-based surrogate models are increasingly used…

2023

SIMPLE: A Gradient Estimator for k-Subset Sampling

ICLR 2023poster

$k$-subset sampling is ubiquitous in machine learning, enabling regularization and interpretability through sparsity. The challenge lies in rendering $k$-subset sampling amenable to end-to-end learning. This has typically involved relaxing the reparameterized samples to allow for backpropagation, bu…

2022

BenchIE: A Framework for Multi-Faceted Fact-Based Open Information Extraction Evaluation

ACL 2022long

Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually—with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions—or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE be…

2022

Joint Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion and Alignment

EMNLP 2022finding

Knowledge graph (KG) alignment and completion are usually treated as two independent tasks. While recent work has leveraged entity and relation alignments from multiple KGs, such as alignments between multilingual KGs with common entities and relations, a deeper understanding of the ways in which mu…

2022

MILIE: Modular & Iterative Multilingual Open Information Extraction

ACL 2022long

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: fi…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2022

Ordered Subgraph Aggregation Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Numerous subgraph-enhanced graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged recently, provably boosting the expressive power of standard (message-passing) GNNs. However, there is a limited understanding of how these approaches relate to each other and to the Weisfeiler-Leman hierarchy. Moreover, current ap…

Cited by 79SourcePDFScholar
2022

PDEBench: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and repre- sentative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PD…

2021

Answering Complex Queries in Knowledge Graphs with Bidirectional Sequence Encoders

AAAI 2021technical

Representation learning for knowledge graphs (KGs) has focused on the problem of answering simple link prediction queries. In this work we address the more ambitious challenge of predicting the answers of conjunctive queries with multiple missing entities. We propose Bidirectional Query Embedding (B…

Cited by 57SourcePDFScholar
2021

Explaining Neural Matrix Factorization with Gradient Rollback

AAAI 2021technical

Explaining the predictions of neural black-box models is an important problem, especially when such models are used in applications where user trust is crucial. Estimating the influence of training examples on a learned neural model's behavior allows us to identify training examples most responsible…

2021

Implicit MLE: Backpropagating Through Discrete Exponential Family Distributions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a framework for end-to-end learning of models combining discrete expo…

2021

Uncertainty Estimation and Calibration with Finite-State Probabilistic RNNs

ICLR 2021poster

Uncertainty quantification is crucial for building reliable and trustable machine learning systems. We propose to estimate uncertainty in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) via stochastic discrete state transitions over recurrent timesteps. The uncertainty of the model can be quantified by running a p…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2019

Learning Discrete Structures for Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2019oral

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models that have been successfully applied to a range of problems. Their major advantage lies in their ability to explicitly incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only b…

Cited by 526SourcePDFScholar
2016

Discriminative Gaifman Models

NeurIPS 2016poster

We present discriminative Gaifman models, a novel family of relational machine learning models. Gaifman models learn feature representations bottom up from representations of locally connected and bounded-size regions of knowledge bases (KBs). Considering local and bounded-size neighborhoods of kno…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar