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Zhangyang Gao

39 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

MindFlow: Mind Supernet Powered Thinking Flows for Research Idea Innovation

ICML 2026poster

Research idea innovation is a fundamental engine of scientific progress, yet it remains difficult to generate and evaluate in a scalable and controllable way. This challenge lies in its inherently open-ended and multi-objective nature, where ideas should balance novelty, plausibility and feasibility…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AlphaFold Database Debiasing for Robust Inverse Folding

NeurIPS 2025poster

The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database (AFDB) offers unparalleled structural coverage at near-experimental accuracy, positioning it as a valuable resource for data-driven protein design. However, its direct use in training deep models that are sensitive to fine-grained atomic geometry—such as inve…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

EVA: Geometric Inverse Design for Fast Protein Motif-Scaffolding with Coupled Flow

ICLR 2025poster

Motif-scaffolding is a fundamental component of protein design, which aims to construct the scaffold structure that stabilizes motifs conferring desired functions. Recent advances in generative models are promising for designing scaffolds, with two main approaches: training-based and sampling-based…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FoldToken: Learning Protein Language via Vector Quantization and Beyond

AAAI 2025technical

Is there a foreign language describing protein sequences and structures simultaneously? Protein structures, represented by continuous 3D points, have long posed a challenge due to the contrasting modeling paradigms of discrete sequences. We introduce FoldTokenizer to represent protein sequence-struc…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Words to Structured Visuals: A Benchmark and Framework for Text-to-Diagram Generation and Editing

CVPR 2025highlight

We introduce the task of text-to-diagram generation, which focuses on creating structured visual representations directly from textual descriptions. Existing approaches in text-to-image and text-to-code generation lack the logical organization and flexibility needed to produce accurate, editable dia…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

G2PDiffusion: Cross-Species Genotype-to-Phenotype Prediction via Evolutionary Diffusion

ICCV 2025poster

Understanding how genes influence phenotype across species is a fundamental challenge in genetic engineering, which will facilitate advances in various fields such as crop breeding, conservation biology, and personalized medicine. However, current phenotype prediction models are limited to individua…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MeToken: Uniform Micro-environment Token Boosts Post-Translational Modification Prediction

ICLR 2025poster

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) profoundly expand the complexity and functionality of the proteome, regulating protein attributes and interactions that are crucial for biological processes. Accurately predicting PTM sites and their specific types is therefore essential for elucidating protei…

2025

ProtInvTree: Deliberate Protein Inverse Folding with Reward-guided Tree Search

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Designing protein sequences that fold into a target 3D structure—known as protein inverse folding—is a fundamental challenge in protein engineering. While recent deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance by recovering native sequences, they often overlook the one-to-many nature of t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ReNovo: Retrieval-Based \emph{De Novo} Mass Spectrometry Peptide Sequencing

ICLR 2025poster

Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Tandem mass spectrometry, as the only high-throughput technique for protein sequence identification, plays a pivotal role in proteomics research. One of the long-standing challenges in this field is peptide identification, which entails determining th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Relation-Aware Equivariant Graph Networks for Epitope-Unknown Antibody Design and Specificity Optimization

AAAI 2025technical

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that protect the host by binding to specific antigens, and their binding is mainly determined by the Complementary Determining Regions (CDRs) in the antibody. Despite the great progress made in CDR design, existing computational methods still encounter several challe…

2025

SketchAgent: Generating Structured Diagrams from Hand-Drawn Sketches

IJCAI 2025

Hand-drawn sketches are a natural and efficient medium for capturing and conveying ideas. Despite significant advancements in controllable natural image generation, translating freehand sketches into structured, machine-readable diagrams remains a labor-intensive and predominantly manual task. The p

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

dyAb: Flow Matching for Flexible Antibody Design with AlphaFold-driven Pre-binding Antigen

AAAI 2025technical

The development of therapeutic antibodies heavily relies on accurate predictions of how antigens will interact with antibodies. Existing computational methods in antibody design often overlook crucial conformational changes that antigens undergo during the binding process, significantly impacting th…

2024

A Graph is Worth $K$ Words: Euclideanizing Graph using Pure Transformer

ICML 2024poster

Can we model Non-Euclidean graphs as pure language or even Euclidean vectors while retaining their inherent information? The Non-Euclidean property have posed a long term challenge in graph modeling. Despite recent graph neural networks and graph transformers efforts encoding graphs as Euclidean vec…

2024

AdaNovo: Towards Robust \emph{De Novo} Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics against Data Biases

NeurIPS 2024poster

Tandem mass spectrometry has played a pivotal role in advancing proteomics, enabling the high-throughput analysis of protein composition in biological tissues. Despite the development of several deep learning methods for predicting amino acid sequences (peptides) responsible for generating the obser…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Boosting the Power of Small Multimodal Reasoning Models to Match Larger Models with Self-Consistency Training

ECCV 2024poster

"Multimodal reasoning is a challenging task that requires models to reason across multiple modalities to answer questions. Existing approaches have made progress by incorporating language and visual modalities into a two-stage reasoning framework, separating rationale generation from answer inferenc…

2024

Cross-Gate MLP with Protein Complex Invariant Embedding Is a One-Shot Antibody Designer

AAAI 2024technical

Antibodies are crucial proteins produced by the immune system in response to foreign substances or antigens. The specificity of an antibody is determined by its complementarity-determining regions (CDRs), which are located in the variable domains of the antibody chains and form the antigen-binding s…

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…

2024

Decoupling Weighing and Selecting for Integrating Multiple Graph Pre-training Tasks

ICLR 2024poster

Recent years have witnessed the great success of graph pre-training for graph representation learning. With hundreds of graph pre-training tasks proposed, integrating knowledge acquired from multiple pre-training tasks has become a popular research topic. In this paper, we identify two important col…

2024

FlexMol: A Flexible Toolkit for Benchmarking Molecular Relational Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Molecular relational learning (MRL) is crucial for understanding the interaction behaviors between molecular pairs, a critical aspect of drug discovery and development. However, the large feasible model space of MRL poses significant challenges to benchmarking, and existing MRL frameworks face limit…

2024

General Point Model Pretraining with Autoencoding and Autoregressive

CVPR 2024poster

The pre-training architectures of large language models encompass various types including autoencoding models autoregressive models and encoder-decoder models. We posit that any modality can potentially benefit from a large language model as long as it undergoes vector quantization to become discret…

2024

KW-Design: Pushing the Limit of Protein Design via Knowledge Refinement

ICLR 2024poster

Recent studies have shown competitive performance in protein inverse folding, while most of them disregard the importance of predictive confidence, fail to cover the vast protein space, and do not incorporate common protein knowledge. Given the great success of pretrained models on diverse protein-r…

2024

MLIP: Enhancing Medical Visual Representation with Divergence Encoder and Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning

CVPR 2024poster

The scarcity of annotated data has sparked significant interest in unsupervised pre-training methods that leverage medical reports as auxiliary signals for medical visual representation learning. However existing research overlooks the multi-granularity nature of medical visual representation and la…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

PSC-CPI: Multi-Scale Protein Sequence-Structure Contrasting for Efficient and Generalizable Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction

AAAI 2024technical

Compound-Protein Interaction (CPI) prediction aims to predict the pattern and strength of compound-protein interactions for rational drug discovery. Existing deep learning-based methods utilize only the single modality of protein sequences or structures and lack the co-modeling of the joint distribu…

2024

ProtGO: Function-Guided Protein Modeling for Unified Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Protein representation learning is indispensable for various downstream applications of artificial intelligence for bio-medicine research, such as drug design and function prediction. However, achieving effective representation learning for proteins poses challenges due to the diversity of data moda…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Protein 3D Graph Structure Learning for Robust Structure-Based Protein Property Prediction

AAAI 2024technical

Protein structure-based property prediction has emerged as a promising approach for various biological tasks, such as protein function prediction and sub-cellular location estimation. The existing methods highly rely on experimental protein structure data and fail in scenarios where these data are u…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

RDesign: Hierarchical Data-efficient Representation Learning for Tertiary Structure-based RNA Design

ICLR 2024poster

While artificial intelligence has made remarkable strides in revealing the relationship between biological macromolecules' primary sequence and tertiary structure, designing RNA sequences based on specified tertiary structures remains challenging. Though existing approaches in protein design have th…

2024

Re-Dock: Towards Flexible and Realistic Molecular Docking with Diffusion Bridge

ICML 2024spotlight

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding structures, a task known as molecular docking is crucial for drug design but remains challenging. While deep learning has shown promise, existing methods often depend on holo-protein structures (docked, and not accessible in realistic tasks) or neglect p…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

UniIF: Unified Molecule Inverse Folding

NeurIPS 2024poster

Molecule inverse folding has been a long-standing challenge in chemistry and biology, with the potential to revolutionize drug discovery and material science. Despite specified models have been proposed for different small- or macro-molecules, few have attempted to unify the learning process, result…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Mole-BERT: Rethinking Pre-training Graph Neural Networks for Molecules

ICLR 2023poster

Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of pre-training graph neural networks (GNNs) for molecules. Typically, atom types as node attributes are randomly masked, and GNNs are then trained to predict masked types as in AttrMask \citep{hu2020strategies}, following the Masked Language Modeling (MLM)…

2023

OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the dive…

2023

ProteinInvBench: Benchmarking Protein Inverse Folding on Diverse Tasks, Models, and Metrics

NeurIPS 2023poster

Protein inverse folding has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, we observe that current methods are usually limited to the CATH dataset and the recovery metric. The lack of a unified framework for ensembling and comparing different methods hinders the comprehensive investigation…

2023

Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Spatiotemporal predictive learning aims to generate future frames by learning from historical frames. In this paper, we investigate existing methods and present a general framework of spatiotemporal predictive learning, in which the spatial encoder and decoder capture intra-frame features and the mi…

2023

Understanding the Limitations of Deep Models for Molecular property prediction: Insights and Solutions

NeurIPS 2023poster

Molecular Property Prediction (MPP) is a crucial task in the AI-driven Drug Discovery (AIDD) pipeline, which has recently gained considerable attention thanks to advancements in deep learning. However, recent research has revealed that deep models struggle to beat traditional non-deep ones on MPP. I…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2022

Conditional Local Convolution for Spatio-Temporal Meteorological Forecasting

AAAI 2022technical

Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteor…