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Pietro Lio

41 accepted papers

2026

Fast and Interpretable Protein Substructure Alignment via Optimal Transport

ICLR 2026poster

Proteins are essential biological macromolecules that execute life functions. Local motifs within protein structures, such as active sites, are the most critical components for linking structure to function and are key to understanding protein evolution and enabling protein engineering. Existing com…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

High-Pass Matters: Theoretical Insights and Sheaflet-Based Design for Hypergraph Neural Networks

AAAI 2026technical

Hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) have shown great potential in modeling higher-order relationships among multiple entities. However, most existing HGNNs primarily emphasize low-pass filtering while neglecting the role of high-frequency information. In this work, we present a theoretical investigat

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Pairwise is Not Enough: Hypergraph Neural Networks for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

ICLR 2026poster

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a representative multi-agent coordination problem, where multiple agents are required to navigate to their respective goals without collisions. Solving MAPF optimally is known to be NP-hard, leading to the adoption of learning-based approaches to alleviate the onli…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks

AAAI 2026technical

Hypergraphs provide a natural and expressive framework for modeling high-order relationships, enabling the representation of group-wise interactions beyond pairwise connections. While hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have shown promise for learning on such structures, existing models often rely on

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Sheaves Reloaded: A Direction Awakening

ICLR 2026poster

Sheaf Neural Networks (SNNs) are a powerful algebraic-topology generalization of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and have been shown to significantly improve our ability to model complex relational data. While the GNN literature proved that incorporating directionality can substantially boost performa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SynCoGen: Synthesizable 3D Molecule Generation via Joint Reaction and Coordinate Modeling

ICLR 2026poster

Ensuring synthesizability in generative small molecule design remains a major challenge. While recent developments in synthesizable molecule generation have demonstrated promising results, these efforts have been largely confined to 2D molecular graph representations, limiting the ability to perform…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

EduLLM: Leveraging Large Language Models and Framelet-Based Signed Hypergraph Neural Networks for Student Performance Prediction

ICML 2025poster

The growing demand for personalized learning underscores the importance of accurately predicting students' future performance to support tailored education and optimize instructional strategies. Traditional approaches predominantly focus on temporal modeling using historical response records and lea…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

G-Adaptivity: optimised graph-based mesh relocation for finite element methods

ICML 2025spotlight

We present a novel, and effective, approach to achieve optimal mesh relocation in finite element methods (FEMs). The cost and accuracy of FEMs is critically dependent on the choice of mesh points. Mesh relocation (r-adaptivity) seeks to optimise the mesh geometry to obtain the best solution accuracy…

2025

Hierarchical Planning for Complex Tasks with Knowledge Graph-RAG and Symbolic Verification

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as robotic planners but often struggle with long-horizon and complex tasks, especially in specialized environments requiring external knowledge. While hierarchical planning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) address some of these challenges, they…

2025

How Particle System Theory Enhances Hypergraph Message Passing

NeurIPS 2025poster

Hypergraphs effectively model higher-order relationships in natural phenomena, capturing complex interactions beyond pairwise connections. We introduce a novel hypergraph message passing framework inspired by interacting particle systems, where hyperedges act as fields inducing shared node dynamics.…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

NMA-tune: Generating Highly Designable and Dynamics Aware Protein Backbones

ICML 2025poster

Protein's backbone flexibility is a crucial property that heavily influences its functionality. Recent work in the field of protein diffusion probabilistic modelling has leveraged Normal Mode Analysis (NMA) and, for the first time, introduced information about large scale protein motion into the gen…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Stochastic Encodings for Active Feature Acquisition

ICML 2025poster

Active Feature Acquisition is an instance-wise, sequential decision making problem. The aim is to dynamically select which feature to measure based on current observations, independently for each test instance. Common approaches either use Reinforcement Learning, which experiences training difficult…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SynFlowNet: Design of Diverse and Novel Molecules with Synthesis Constraints

ICLR 2025spotlight

Generative models see increasing use in computer-aided drug design. However, while performing well at capturing distributions of molecular motifs, they often produce synthetically inaccessible molecules. To address this, we introduce SynFlowNet, a GFlowNet model whose action space uses chemical reac…

2025

Uncertainty Modeling in Graph Neural Networks via Stochastic Differential Equations

ICLR 2025spotlight

We propose a novel Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) framework to address the problem of learning uncertainty-aware representations for graph-structured data. While Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (GNODEs) have shown promise in learning node representations, they lack the ability t…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

gRNAde: Geometric Deep Learning for 3D RNA inverse design

ICLR 2025spotlight

Computational RNA design tasks are often posed as inverse problems, where sequences are designed based on adopting a single desired secondary structure without considering 3D conformational diversity. We introduce gRNAde, a geometric RNA design pipeline operating on 3D RNA backbones to design sequen…

2024

DEFT: Efficient Fine-tuning of Diffusion Models by Learning the Generalised $h$-transform

NeurIPS 2024poster

Generative modelling paradigms based on denoising diffusion processes have emerged as a leading candidate for conditional sampling in inverse problems. In many real-world applications, we often have access to large, expensively trained unconditional diffusion models, which we aim to exploit for imp…

2024

Deep Equilibrium Algorithmic Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neural Algorithmic Reasoning (NAR) research has demonstrated that graph neural networks (GNNs) could learn to execute classical algorithms. However, most previous approaches have always used a recurrent architecture, where each iteration of the GNN matches an iteration of the algorithm. In this pape…

2024

Dynamics-Informed Protein Design with Structure Conditioning

ICLR 2024poster

Current protein generative models are able to design novel backbones with desired shapes or functional motifs. However, despite the importance of a protein’s dynamical properties for its function, conditioning on dynamical properties remains elusive. We present a new approach to protein generative m…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Evaluating Representation Learning on the Protein Structure Universe

ICLR 2024poster

We introduce ProteinWorkshop, a comprehensive benchmark suite for representation learning on protein structures with Geometric Graph Neural Networks. We consider large-scale pre-training and downstream tasks on both experimental and predicted structures to enable the systematic evaluation of the qua…

2024

How Universal Polynomial Bases Enhance Spectral Graph Neural Networks: Heterophily, Over-smoothing, and Over-squashing

ICML 2024poster

Spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), alternatively known as *graph filters*, have gained increasing prevalence for heterophily graphs. Optimal graph filters rely on Laplacian eigendecomposition for Fourier transform. In an attempt to avert prohibitive computations, numerous polynomial filters have…

2024

HyperBERT: Mixing Hypergraph-Aware Layers with Language Models for Node Classification on Text-Attributed Hypergraphs

EMNLP 2024finding

Hypergraphs are characterized by complex topological structure, representing higher-order interactions among multiple entities through hyperedges. Lately, hypergraph-based deep learning methods to learn informative data representations for the problem of node classification on text-attributed hyperg…

2024

Position: Topological Deep Learning is the New Frontier for Relational Learning

ICML 2024poster

Topological deep learning (TDL) is a rapidly evolving field that uses topological features to understand and design deep learning models. This paper posits that TDL is the new frontier for relational learning. TDL may complement graph representation learning and geometric deep learning by incorporat…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2024

Unsupervised Pretraining for Fact Verification by Language Model Distillation

ICLR 2024poster

Fact verification aims to verify a claim using evidence from a trustworthy knowledge base. To address this challenge, algorithms must produce features for every claim that are both semantically meaningful, and compact enough to find a semantic alignment with the source information. In contrast to pr…

2023

Global Explainability of GNNs via Logic Combination of Learned Concepts

ICLR 2023poster

While instance-level explanation of GNN is a well-studied problem with plenty of approaches being developed, providing a global explanation for the behaviour of a GNN is much less explored, despite its potential in interpretability and debugging. Existing solutions either simply list local explanati…

2023

Graph Denoising Diffusion for Inverse Protein Folding

NeurIPS 2023poster

Inverse protein folding is challenging due to its inherent one-to-many mapping characteristic, where numerous possible amino acid sequences can fold into a single, identical protein backbone. This task involves not only identifying viable sequences but also representing the sheer diversity of potent…

2023

Interpretable Graph Networks Formulate Universal Algebra Conjectures

NeurIPS 2023poster

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently empowered researchers to investigate hard mathematical problems which eluded traditional approaches for decades. Yet, the use of AI in Universal Algebra (UA)---one of the fields laying the foundations of modern mathematics---is still completely unexp…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Interpretable Neural-Symbolic Concept Reasoning

ICML 2023poster

Deep learning methods are highly accurate, yet their opaque decision process prevents them from earning full human trust. Concept-based models aim to address this issue by learning tasks based on a set of human-understandable concepts. However, state-of-the-art concept-based models rely on high-dime…

2023

Latent Graph Inference using Product Manifolds

ICLR 2023poster

Graph Neural Networks usually rely on the assumption that the graph topology is available to the network as well as optimal for the downstream task. Latent graph inference allows models to dynamically learn the intrinsic graph structure of problems where the connectivity patterns of data may not be…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2023

On Over-Squashing in Message Passing Neural Networks: The Impact of Width, Depth, and Topology

ICML 2023poster

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are instances of Graph Neural Networks that leverage the graph to send messages over the edges. This inductive bias leads to a phenomenon known as over-squashing, where a node feature is insensitive to information contained at distant nodes. Despite recent met…

2023

On the Expressive Power of Geometric Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2023poster

The expressive power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been studied extensively through the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) graph isomorphism test. However, standard GNNs and the WL framework are inapplicable for geometric graphs embedded in Euclidean space, such as biomolecules, materials, and other physic…

2022

Composite Feature Selection Using Deep Ensembles

NeurIPS 2022accept

In many real world problems, features do not act alone but in combination with each other. For example, in genomics, diseases might not be caused by any single mutation but require the presence of multiple mutations. Prior work on feature selection either seeks to identify individual features or can…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2022

Concept Embedding Models: Beyond the Accuracy-Explainability Trade-Off

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deploying AI-powered systems requires trustworthy models supporting effective human interactions, going beyond raw prediction accuracy. Concept bottleneck models promote trustworthiness by conditioning classification tasks on an intermediate level of human-like concepts. This enables human intervent…

2022

Do We Need Anisotropic Graph Neural Networks?

ICLR 2022poster

Common wisdom in the graph neural network (GNN) community dictates that anisotropic models---in which messages sent between nodes are a function of both the source and target node---are required to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Benchmarks to date have demonstrated that these models perform b…

2022

Extending Logic Explained Networks to Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

Recently, Logic Explained Networks (LENs) have been proposed as explainable-by-design neural models providing logic explanations for their predictions.However, these models have only been applied to vision and tabular data, and they mostly favour the generation of global explanations, while local on…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2022

Graphein - a Python Library for Geometric Deep Learning and Network Analysis on Biomolecular Structures and Interaction Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Geometric deep learning has broad applications in biology, a domain where relational structure in data is often intrinsic to modelling the underlying phenomena. Currently, efforts in both geometric deep learning and, more broadly, deep learning applied to biomolecular tasks have been hampered by a…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2022

Neural Sheaf Diffusion: A Topological Perspective on Heterophily and Oversmoothing in GNNs

NeurIPS 2022accept

Cellular sheaves equip graphs with a ``geometrical'' structure by assigning vector spaces and linear maps to nodes and edges. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) implicitly assume a graph with a trivial underlying sheaf. This choice is reflected in the structure of the graph Laplacian operator, the propert…

2022

SizeShiftReg: a Regularization Method for Improving Size-Generalization in Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

In the past few years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become the de facto model of choice for graph classification. While, from the theoretical viewpoint, most GNNs can operate on graphs of any size, it is empirically observed that their classification performance degrades when they are applied o…