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Despite substantial progress in machine learning for scientific discovery in recent years, truly de novo design of small molecules which exh… (see more)ibit a property of interest remains a significant challenge. We introduce LambdaZero, a generative active learning approach to search for synthesizable molecules. Powered by deep reinforcement learning, LambdaZero learns to search over the vast space of molecules to discover candidates with a desired property. We apply LambdaZero with molecular docking to design novel small molecules that inhibit the enzyme soluble Epoxide Hydrolase 2 (sEH), while enforcing constraints on synthesizability and drug-likeliness. LambdaZero provides an exponential speedup in terms of the number of calls to the expensive molecular docking oracle, and LambdaZero de novo designed molecules reach docking scores that would otherwise require the virtual screening of a hundred billion molecules. Importantly, LambdaZero discovers novel scaffolds of synthesizable, drug-like inhibitors for sEH. In in vitro experimental validation, a series of ligands from a generated quinazoline-based scaffold were synthesized, and the lead inhibitor N-(4,6-di(pyrrolidin-1-yl)quinazolin-2-yl)-N-methylbenzamide (UM0152893) displayed sub-micromolar enzyme inhibition of sEH.
Conservative Q-learning for band-gap conditioned crystal design with DFT evaluations – the model is trained on trajectories constructed fr… (see more)om crystals in the Materials Project. Results indicate promising performance for lower band gap targets.
We study the problem of generating diverse candidates in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization. In many applications of machine learni… (see more)ng such as drug discovery and material design, the goal is to generate candidates which simultaneously optimize a set of potentially conflicting objectives. Moreover, these objectives are often imperfect evaluations of some underlying property of interest, making it important to generate diverse candidates to have multiple options for expensive downstream evaluations. We propose Multi-Objective GFlowNets (MOGFNs), a novel method for generating diverse Pareto optimal solutions, based on GFlowNets. We introduce two variants of MOGFNs: MOGFN-PC, which models a family of independent sub-problems defined by a scalarization function, with reward-conditional GFlowNets, and MOGFN-AL, which solves a sequence of sub-problems defined by an acquisition function in an active learning loop. Our experiments on wide variety of synthetic and benchmark tasks demonstrate advantages of the proposed methods in terms of the Pareto performance and importantly, improved candidate diversity, which is the main contribution of this work.
2023-07-02
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are amortized variational inference algorithms that treat sampling from a distribution over composition… (see more)al objects as a sequential decision-making problem with a learnable action policy. Unlike other algorithms for hierarchical sampling that optimize a variational bound, GFlowNet algorithms can stably run off-policy, which can be advantageous for discovering modes of the target distribution. Despite this flexibility in the choice of behaviour policy, the optimal way of efficiently selecting trajectories for training has not yet been systematically explored. In this paper, we view the choice of trajectories for training as an active learning problem and approach it using Bayesian techniques inspired by methods for multi-armed bandits. The proposed algorithm, Thompson sampling GFlowNets (TS-GFN), maintains an approximate posterior distribution over policies and samples trajectories from this posterior for training. We show in two domains that TS-GFN yields improved exploration and thus faster convergence to the target distribution than the off-policy exploration strategies used in past work.
Solid-state materials, which are made up of periodic 3D crystal structures, are particularly useful for a variety of real-world applications… (see more) such as batteries, fuel cells and catalytic materials. Designing solid-state materials, especially in a robust and automated fashion, remains an ongoing challenge. To further the automated design of crystalline materials, we propose a method to learn to design valid crystal structures given a crystal skeleton. By incorporating Euclidean equivariance into a policy network, we portray the problem of designing new crystals as a sequential prediction task suited for imitation learning. At each step, given an incomplete graph of a crystal skeleton, an agent assigns an element to a specific node. We adopt a behavioral cloning strategy to train the policy network on data consisting of curated trajectories generated from known crystals.
Epistemic Uncertainty is a measure of the lack of knowledge of a learner which diminishes with more evidence. While existing work focuses on… (see more) using the variance of the Bayesian posterior due to parameter uncertainty as a measure of epistemic uncertainty, we argue that this does not capture the part of lack of knowledge induced by model misspecification. We discuss how the excess risk, which is the gap between the generalization error of a predictor and the Bayes predictor, is a sound measure of epistemic uncertainty which captures the effect of model misspecification. We thus propose a principled framework for directly estimating the excess risk by learning a secondary predictor for the generalization error and subtracting an estimate of aleatoric uncertainty, i.e., intrinsic unpredictability. We discuss the merits of this novel measure of epistemic uncertainty, and highlight how it differs from variance-based measures of epistemic uncertainty and addresses its major pitfall. Our framework, Direct Epistemic Uncertainty Prediction (DEUP) is particularly interesting in interactive learning environments, where the learner is allowed to acquire novel examples in each round. Through a wide set of experiments, we illustrate how existing methods in sequential model optimization can be improved with epistemic uncertainty estimates from DEUP, and how DEUP can be used to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. We also evaluate the quality of uncertainty estimates from DEUP for probabilistic image classification and predicting synergies of drug combinations.
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized … (see more)target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD(
Design of de novo biological sequences with desired properties, like protein and DNA sequences, often involves an active loop with several r… (see more)ounds of molecule ideation and expensive wet-lab evaluations. These experiments can consist of multiple stages, with increasing levels of precision and cost of evaluation, where candidates are filtered. This makes the diversity of proposed candidates a key consideration in the ideation phase. In this work, we propose an active learning algorithm leveraging epistemic uncertainty estimation and the recently proposed GFlowNets as a generator of diverse candidate solutions, with the objective to obtain a diverse batch of useful (as defined by some utility function, for example, the predicted anti-microbial activity of a peptide) and informative candidates after each round. We also propose a scheme to incorporate existing labeled datasets of candidates, in addition to a reward function, to speed up learning in GFlowNets. We present empirical results on several biological sequence design tasks, and we find that our method generates more diverse and novel batches with high scoring candidates compared to existing approaches.
2022-06-27
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)