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Sungsoo Ahn

54 accepted papers

2026

DNACHUNKER: Learnable Tokenization for DNA Language Models

ICML 2026poster

DNA language models are increasingly used to represent genomic sequence, yet their effectiveness depends critically on how raw nucleotides are converted into model inputs. Unlike natural language, DNA offers no canonical “word” boundaries, making fixed tokenizations a brittle design choice under shi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Latent Veracity Inference for Identifying Errors in Stepwise Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has advanced the capabilities and transparency of language models (LMs); however, reasoning chains can contain inaccurate statements that reduce performance and trustworthiness. To address this, we propose to augment each reasoning step in a CoT with a latent veracit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning Adaptive Perturbation-Conditioned Contexts for Robust Transcriptional Response Prediction

ICML 2026poster

Predicting high-dimensional transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is challenging due to severe experimental noise and sparse gene-level effects. Existing methods often suffer from mean collapse, where high correlation is achieved by predicting global average expression rather than pertu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning Collective Variables from BioEmu with Time-Lagged Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Molecular dynamics is crucial for understanding molecular systems but its applicability is often limited by the vast timescales of rare events like protein folding. Enhanced sampling techniques overcome this by accelerating the simulation along key reaction pathways, which are defined by collective…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Machine Learning Hamiltonians are Accurate Energy-Force Predictors

ICML 2026poster

Recently, machine learning Hamiltonian (MLH) models have gained traction as fast approximations of electronic structures such as orbitals and electron densities, while also enabling direct evaluation of energies and forces from their predictions. However, despite their physical grounding, existing H…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Multimodal Crystal Flow: Any-to-Any Modality Generation for Unified Crystal Modeling

ICML 2026poster

Crystal modeling spans a family of conditional and unconditional generation tasks across different modalities, including crystal structure prediction (CSP) and *de novo* generation (DNG). While recent deep generative models have shown promising performance, they remain largely task-specific, lacking…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adaptive teachers for amortized samplers

ICLR 2025poster

Amortized inference is the task of training a parametric model, such as a neural network, to approximate a distribution with a given unnormalized density where exact sampling is intractable. When sampling is modeled as a sequential decision-making process, reinforcement learning (RL) methods, such a…

2025

Energy-based generator matching: A neural sampler for general state space

NeurIPS 2025poster

We propose Energy-based generator matching (EGM), a modality-agnostic approach to train generative models from energy functions in the absence of data. Extending the recently proposed generator matching, EGM enables training of arbitrary continuous-time Markov processes, e.g., diffusion, flow, and j…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Enhancing LLM Agent Safety via Causal Influence Prompting

ACL 2025finding

As autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate potential across various assistive tasks, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial for preventing unintended consequences. In this work, we introduce CIP, a novel technique that leverages causal influenc…

2025

Generative Flows on Synthetic Pathway for Drug Design

ICLR 2025poster

Generative models in drug discovery have recently gained attention as efficient alternatives to brute-force virtual screening. However, most existing models do not account for synthesizability, limiting their practical use in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose RxnFlow, which sequentiall…

2025

High-order Equivariant Flow Matching for Density Functional Theory Hamiltonian Prediction

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Density functional theory (DFT) is a fundamental method for simulating quantum chemical properties, but it remains expensive due to the iterative self-consistent field (SCF) process required to solve the Kohn–Sham equations. Recently, deep learning methods are gaining attention as a way to bypass t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MOFFlow: Flow Matching for Structure Prediction of Metal-Organic Frameworks

ICLR 2025poster

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of crystalline materials with promising applications in many areas such as carbon capture and drug delivery. In this work, we introduce MOFFlow, the first deep generative model tailored for MOF structure prediction. Existing approaches, including ab initio…

2025

On scalable and efficient training of diffusion samplers

NeurIPS 2025poster

We address the challenge of training diffusion models to sample from unnormalized energy distributions in the absence of data, the so-called diffusion samplers. Although these approaches have shown promise, they struggle to scale in more demanding scenarios where energy evaluations are expensive and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

REBIND: Enhancing Ground-state Molecular Conformation Prediction via Force-Based Graph Rewiring

ICLR 2025poster

Predicting the ground-state 3D molecular conformations from 2D molecular graphs is critical in computational chemistry due to its profound impact on molecular properties. Deep learning (DL) approaches have recently emerged as promising alternatives to computationally-heavy classical methods such as…

2025

Self-Training Large Language Models with Confident Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance by generating reasoning paths before final answers, but learning such a reasoning path requires costly human supervision. To address this issue, recent studies have explored self-training methods that improve reasoning capabilities using

2025

Transition Path Sampling with Improved Off-Policy Training of Diffusion Path Samplers

ICLR 2025poster

Understanding transition pathways between two meta-stable states of a molecular system is crucial to advance drug discovery and material design. However, unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are computationally infeasible because of the high energy barriers that separate these states. Althou…

2024

Breadth-First Exploration on Adaptive Grid for Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024poster

Graph-based planners have gained significant attention for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL), where they construct a graph consisting of confident transitions between *subgoals* as edges and run shortest path algorithms to exploit the confident edges. Meanwhile, identifying and avoiding u…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

EPIC: Graph Augmentation with Edit Path Interpolation via Learnable Cost

IJCAI 2024poster

Data augmentation plays a critical role in improving model performance across various domains, but it becomes challenging with graph data due to their complex and irregular structure. To address this issue, we propose EPIC (Edit Path Interpolation via learnable Cost), a novel interpolation-based met…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Improving Robustness to Multiple Spurious Correlations by Multi-Objective Optimization

ICML 2024poster

We study the problem of training an unbiased and accurate model given a dataset with multiple biases. This problem is challenging since the multiple biases cause multiple undesirable shortcuts during training, and even worse, mitigating one may exacerbate the other. We propose a novel training metho…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Local Search GFlowNets

ICLR 2024spotlight

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized sampling methods that learn a distribution over discrete objects proportional to their rewards. GFlowNets exhibit a remarkable ability to generate diverse samples, yet occasionally struggle to consistently produce samples with high rewards due to ov…

2024

Pessimistic Backward Policy for GFlowNets

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper studies Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), which learn to sample objects proportionally to a given reward function through the trajectory of state transitions. In this work, we observe that GFlowNets tend to under-exploit the high-reward objects due to training on insufficient number o…

2024

Symmetric Replay Training: Enhancing Sample Efficiency in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization

ICML 2024poster

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has significantly advanced the field of combinatorial optimization (CO). However, its practicality is hindered by the necessity for a large number of reward evaluations, especially in scenarios involving computationally intensive function assessments. To enhance the…

2024

Tackling Prevalent Conditions in Unsupervised Combinatorial Optimization: Cardinality, Minimum, Covering, and More

ICML 2024poster

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is naturally discrete, making machine-learning techniques based on differentiable optimization inapplicable. Karalias & Loukas (2020) adapted the probabilistic method by Erdős & Spencer (1974), to incorporate CO into differentiable optimization. Their work ignited the…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Closer Look at the Intervention Procedure of Concept Bottleneck Models

ICML 2023poster

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) are a class of interpretable neural network models that predict the target response of a given input based on its high-level concepts. Unlike the standard end-to-end models, CBMs enable domain experts to intervene on the predicted concepts and rectify any mistakes at…

2023

Bootstrapped Training of Score-Conditioned Generator for Offline Design of Biological Sequences

NeurIPS 2023poster

We study the problem of optimizing biological sequences, e.g., proteins, DNA, and RNA, to maximize a black-box score function that is only evaluated in an offline dataset. We propose a novel solution, bootstrapped training of score-conditioned generator (BootGen) algorithm. Our algorithm repeats a t…

2023

Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Structured Node Classification

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper studies structured node classification on graphs, where the predictions should consider dependencies between the node labels. In particular, we focus on solving the problem for partially labeled graphs where it is essential to incorporate the information in the known label for predicting…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Imitating Graph-Based Planning with Goal-Conditioned Policies

ICLR 2023poster

Recently, graph-based planning algorithms have gained much attention to solve goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) tasks: they provide a sequence of subgoals to reach the target-goal, and the agents learn to execute subgoal-conditioned policies. However, the sample-efficiency of such RL sche…

2023

Multi-resolution Spectral Coherence for Graph Generation with Score-based Diffusion

NeurIPS 2023poster

Successful graph generation depends on the accurate estimation of the joint distribution of graph components such as nodes and edges from training data. While recent deep neural networks have demonstrated sampling of realistic graphs together with diffusion models, however, they still suffer from ov…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Disentangling Sources of Risk for Distributional Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the outcomes of agent-wise policies are highly stochastic due to the two sources of risk: (a) random actions taken by teammates and (b) random transition and rewards. Although the two sources have very distinct characteristics, existing frameworks a…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning Debiased Classifier with Biased Committee

NeurIPS 2022accept

Neural networks are prone to be biased towards spurious correlations between classes and latent attributes exhibited in a major portion of training data, which ruins their generalization capability. We propose a new method for training debiased classifiers with no spurious attribute label. The key i…

2022

What Makes Better Augmentation Strategies? Augment Difficult but Not too Different

ICLR 2022poster

The practice of data augmentation has been extensively used to boost the performance of deep neural networks for various NLP tasks. It is more effective when only a limited number of labeled samples is available, e.g., low-data or class-imbalanced regimes. Most current augmentation techniques rely o…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Layer-adaptive Sparsity for the Magnitude-based Pruning

ICLR 2021poster

Recent discoveries on neural network pruning reveal that, with a carefully chosen layerwise sparsity, a simple magnitude-based pruning achieves state-of-the-art tradeoff between sparsity and performance. However, without a clear consensus on ``how to choose,'' the layerwise sparsities are mostly sel…

2021

RetCL: A Selection-based Approach for Retrosynthesis via Contrastive Learning

IJCAI 2021poster

Retrosynthesis, of which the goal is to find a set of reactants for synthesizing a target product, is an emerging research area of deep learning. While the existing approaches have shown promising results, they currently lack the ability to consider availability (e.g., stability or purchasability) o…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2021

RoMA: Robust Model Adaptation for Offline Model-based Optimization

NeurIPS 2021poster

We consider the problem of searching an input maximizing a black-box objective function given a static dataset of input-output queries. A popular approach to solving this problem is maintaining a proxy model, e.g., a deep neural network (DNN), that approximates the true objective function. Here, the…

Cited by 46SourcePDFScholar
2020

Guiding Deep Molecular Optimization with Genetic Exploration

NeurIPS 2020poster

De novo molecular design attempts to search over the chemical space for molecules with the desired property. Recently, deep learning has gained considerable attention as a promising approach to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose genetic expert-guided learning (GEGL), a simple yet novel fra…

2020

Learning from Failure: De-biasing Classifier from Biased Classifier

NeurIPS 2020poster

Neural networks often learn to make predictions that overly rely on spurious corre- lation existing in the dataset, which causes the model to be biased. While previous work tackles this issue by using explicit labeling on the spuriously correlated attributes or presuming a particular bias type, we i…

2019

Variational Information Distillation for Knowledge Transfer

CVPR 2019poster

Transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network pretrained on the same or a similar task to a student neural network can significantly improve the performance of the student neural network. Existing knowledge transfer approaches match the activations or the corresponding hand-crafted features o…

Cited by 873PDFScholar
2018

Gauged Mini-Bucket Elimination for Approximate Inference

AISTATS 2018poster

Computing the partition function Z of a discrete graphical model is a fundamental inference challenge. Since this is computationally intractable, variational approximations are often used in practice. Recently, so-called gauge transformations were used to improve variational lower bounds on Z. In th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar