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Samuel Don Stanton

8 accepted papers

2025

Concept Bottleneck Language Models For Protein Design

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce Concept Bottleneck Protein Language Models (CB-pLM), a generative masked language model with a layer where each neuron corresponds to an interpretable concept. Our architecture offers three key benefits: i) Control: We can intervene on concept values to precisely control the properties…

2025

Generalists vs. Specialists: Evaluating LLMs on Highly-Constrained Biophysical Sequence Optimization Tasks

ICML 2025poster

Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in biomolecule optimization problems, they incur heavy computational costs and struggle to satisfy precise constraints. On the other hand, specialized solvers like LaMBO-2 offer efficiency and fine-grained control but require more domain exper…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Conformal Validity Guarantees Exist for Any Data Distribution (and How to Find Them)

ICML 2024poster

As artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) gain widespread adoption, practitioners are increasingly seeking means to quantify and control the risk these systems incur. This challenge is especially salient when such systems have autonomy to collect their own data, such as in black-box op…

2023

GAUCHE: A Library for Gaussian Processes in Chemistry

NeurIPS 2023poster

We introduce GAUCHE, an open-source library for GAUssian processes in CHEmistry. Gaussian processes have long been a cornerstone of probabilistic machine learning, affording particular advantages for uncertainty quantification and Bayesian optimisation. Extending Gaussian processes to molecular repr…

2023

Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusion

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

A popular approach to protein design is to combine a generative model with a discriminative model for conditional sampling. The generative model samples plausible sequences while the discriminative model guides a search for sequences with high fitness. Given its broad success in conditional sampling…

2022

Deconstructing the Inductive Biases of Hamiltonian Neural Networks

ICLR 2022spotlight

Physics-inspired neural networks (NNs), such as Hamiltonian or Lagrangian NNs, dramatically outperform other learned dynamics models by leveraging strong inductive biases. These models, however, are challenging to apply to many real world systems, such as those that don’t conserve energy or contain…

2021

Conditioning Sparse Variational Gaussian Processes for Online Decision-making

NeurIPS 2021poster

With a principled representation of uncertainty and closed form posterior updates, Gaussian processes (GPs) are a natural choice for online decision making. However, Gaussian processes typically require at least $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ computations for $n$ training points, limiting their general applicab…

2021

Does Knowledge Distillation Really Work?

NeurIPS 2021poster

Knowledge distillation is a popular technique for training a small student network to emulate a larger teacher model, such as an ensemble of networks. We show that while knowledge distillation can improve student generalization, it does not typically work as it is commonly understood: there often re…