Portrait of Kirill  Neklyudov

Kirill Neklyudov

Core Academic Member
Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal, Mathematics and Statistics
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Dynamical Systems
Generative Models
Molecular Modeling
Probabilistic Models

Current Students

PhD - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Independent visiting researcher - Helmholtz Zentrum München
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - University of Oxford
Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Publications

The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator
Lazar Atanackovic
Alexander Tong
The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-t… (see more)rained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of combining multiple pre-trained diffusion models at the generation stage under a novel proposed framework termed superposition. Theoretically, we derive superposition from rigorous first principles stemming from the celebrated continuity equation and design two novel algorithms tailor-made for combining diffusion models in SuperDiff. SuperDiff leverages a new scalable It\^o density estimator for the log likelihood of the diffusion SDE which incurs no additional overhead compared to the well-known Hutchinson's estimator needed for divergence calculations. We demonstrate that SuperDiff is scalable to large pre-trained diffusion models as superposition is performed solely through composition during inference, and also enjoys painless implementation as it combines different pre-trained vector fields through an automated re-weighting scheme. Notably, we show that SuperDiff is efficient during inference time, and mimics traditional composition operators such as the logical OR and the logical AND. We empirically demonstrate the utility of using SuperDiff for generating more diverse images on CIFAR-10, more faithful prompt conditioned image editing using Stable Diffusion, as well as improved conditional molecule generation and unconditional de novo structure design of proteins. https://github.com/necludov/super-diffusion
The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator
Lazar Atanackovic
Alexander Tong
The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-t… (see more)rained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of combining multiple pre-trained diffusion models at the generation stage under a novel proposed framework termed superposition. Theoretically, we derive superposition from rigorous first principles stemming from the celebrated continuity equation and design two novel algorithms tailor-made for combining diffusion models in SuperDiff. SuperDiff leverages a new scalable It\^o density estimator for the log likelihood of the diffusion SDE which incurs no additional overhead compared to the well-known Hutchinson's estimator needed for divergence calculations. We demonstrate that SuperDiff is scalable to large pre-trained diffusion models as superposition is performed solely through composition during inference, and also enjoys painless implementation as it combines different pre-trained vector fields through an automated re-weighting scheme. Notably, we show that SuperDiff is efficient during inference time, and mimics traditional composition operators such as the logical OR and the logical AND. We empirically demonstrate the utility of using SuperDiff for generating more diverse images on CIFAR-10, more faithful prompt conditioned image editing using Stable Diffusion, as well as improved conditional molecule generation and unconditional de novo structure design of proteins. https://github.com/necludov/super-diffusion
Doob's Lagrangian: A Sample-Efficient Variational Approach to Transition Path Sampling
Yuanqi Du
Michael Plainer
Rob Brekelmans
Chenru Duan
Frank No'e
Carla P. Gomes
Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Rare event sampling in dynamical systems is a fundamental problem arising in the natural sciences, which poses significant computational cha… (see more)llenges due to an exponentially large space of trajectories. For settings where the dynamical system of interest follows a Brownian motion with known drift, the question of conditioning the process to reach a given endpoint or desired rare event is definitively answered by Doob's h-transform. However, the naive estimation of this transform is infeasible, as it requires simulating sufficiently many forward trajectories to estimate rare event probabilities. In this work, we propose a variational formulation of Doob's h-transform as an optimization problem over trajectories between a given initial point and the desired ending point. To solve this optimization, we propose a simulation-free training objective with a model parameterization that imposes the desired boundary conditions by design. Our approach significantly reduces the search space over trajectories and avoids expensive trajectory simulation and inefficient importance sampling estimators which are required in existing methods. We demonstrate the ability of our method to find feasible transition paths on real-world molecular simulation and protein folding tasks.
Doob's Lagrangian: A Sample-Efficient Variational Approach to Transition Path Sampling
Yuanqi Du
Michael Plainer
Rob Brekelmans
Chenru Duan
Frank No'e
Carla P. Gomes
Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Rare event sampling in dynamical systems is a fundamental problem arising in the natural sciences, which poses significant computational cha… (see more)llenges due to an exponentially large space of trajectories. For settings where the dynamical system of interest follows a Brownian motion with known drift, the question of conditioning the process to reach a given endpoint or desired rare event is definitively answered by Doob's h-transform. However, the naive estimation of this transform is infeasible, as it requires simulating sufficiently many forward trajectories to estimate rare event probabilities. In this work, we propose a variational formulation of Doob's h-transform as an optimization problem over trajectories between a given initial point and the desired ending point. To solve this optimization, we propose a simulation-free training objective with a model parameterization that imposes the desired boundary conditions by design. Our approach significantly reduces the search space over trajectories and avoids expensive trajectory simulation and inefficient importance sampling estimators which are required in existing methods. We demonstrate the ability of our method to find feasible transition paths on real-world molecular simulation and protein folding tasks.
A Computational Framework for Solving Wasserstein Lagrangian Flows
Rob Brekelmans
Alexander Tong
Lazar Atanackovic
Qiang Liu
Alireza Makhzani
The dynamical formulation of the optimal transport can be extended through various choices of the underlying geometry (kinetic energy), and … (see more)the regularization of density paths (potential energy). These combinations yield different variational problems (Lagrangians), encompassing many variations of the optimal transport problem such as the Schr\"odinger bridge, unbalanced optimal transport, and optimal transport with physical constraints, among others. In general, the optimal density path is unknown, and solving these variational problems can be computationally challenging. We propose a novel deep learning based framework approaching all of these problems from a unified perspective. Leveraging the dual formulation of the Lagrangians, our method does not require simulating or backpropagating through the trajectories of the learned dynamics, and does not need access to optimal couplings. We showcase the versatility of the proposed framework by outperforming previous approaches for the single-cell trajectory inference, where incorporating prior knowledge into the dynamics is crucial for correct predictions.
Efficient Evolutionary Search Over Chemical Space with Large Language Models
Haorui Wang
Cher Tian Ser
Wenhao Gao
Lingkai Kong
Felix Streith-Kalthoff
Chenru Duan
Yuchen Zhuang
Yue Yu
Yanqiao Zhu 0001
Yuanqi Du
Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Chao Zhang
Molecular discovery, when formulated as an optimization problem, presents significant computational challenges because optimization objectiv… (see more)es can be non-differentiable. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), often used to optimize black-box objectives in molecular discovery, traverse chemical space by performing random mutations and crossovers, leading to a large number of expensive objective evaluations. In this work, we ameliorate this shortcoming by incorporating chemistry-aware Large Language Models (LLMs) into EAs. Namely, we redesign crossover and mutation operations in EAs using LLMs trained on large corpora of chemical information. We perform extensive empirical studies on both commercial and open-source models on multiple tasks involving property optimization, molecular rediscovery, and structure-based drug design, demonstrating that the joint usage of LLMs with EAs yields superior performance over all baseline models across single- and multi-objective settings. We demonstrate that our algorithm improves both the quality of the final solution and convergence speed, thereby reducing the number of required objective evaluations. Our code is available at http://github.com/zoom-wang112358/MOLLEO
Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold
Lazar Atanackovic
Xi Zhang
Brandon Amos
Leo J Lee
Alexander Tong
Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting samples evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynami… (see more)cs of communicating cells or physical particles. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level --- they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We propose
Efficient Evolutionary Search Over Chemical Space with Large Language Models
Haorui Wang
Cher Tian Ser
Wenhao Gao
Lingkai Kong
Felix Streith-Kalthoff
Chenru Duan
Yuchen Zhuang
Yue Yu
Yanqiao Zhu 0001
Yuanqi Du
Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Chao Zhang
Molecular discovery, when formulated as an optimization problem, presents significant computational challenges because optimization objectiv… (see more)es can be non-differentiable. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), often used to optimize black-box objectives in molecular discovery, traverse chemical space by performing random mutations and crossovers, leading to a large number of expensive objective evaluations. In this work, we ameliorate this shortcoming by incorporating chemistry-aware Large Language Models (LLMs) into EAs. Namely, we redesign crossover and mutation operations in EAs using LLMs trained on large corpora of chemical information. We perform extensive empirical studies on both commercial and open-source models on multiple tasks involving property optimization, molecular rediscovery, and structure-based drug design, demonstrating that the joint usage of LLMs with EAs yields superior performance over all baseline models across single- and multi-objective settings. We demonstrate that our algorithm improves both the quality of the final solution and convergence speed, thereby reducing the number of required objective evaluations. Our code is available at http://github.com/zoom-wang112358/MOLLEO
Structured Inverse-Free Natural Gradient Descent: Memory-Efficient & Numerically-Stable KFAC
Wu Lin
Felix Dangel
Runa Eschenhagen
Agustinus Kristiadi
Richard E. Turner
Alireza Makhzani
Second-order methods such as KFAC can be useful for neural net training. However, they are often memory-inefficient since their precondition… (see more)ing Kronecker factors are dense, and numerically unstable in low precision as they require matrix inversion or decomposition. These limitations render such methods unpopular for modern mixed-precision training. We address them by (i) formulating an inverse-free KFAC update and (ii) imposing structures in the Kronecker factors, resulting in structured inverse-free natural gradient descent (SINGD). On modern neural networks, we show that SINGD is memory-efficient and numerically robust, in contrast to KFAC, and often outperforms AdamW even in half precision. Our work closes a gap between first- and second-order methods in modern low-precision training.