Portrait of Dominique Beaini is unavailable

Dominique Beaini

Associate Industry Member
Adjunct Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research
Head of Graph Research, Valence Discovery
Research Topics
Graph Neural Networks
Learning on Graphs
Molecular Modeling
Multimodal Learning

Biography

I am currently a research unit team lead at Valence Discovery, one of the leading companies in machine learning applied to drug discovery. I am also an adjunct professor at Université de Montréal, in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO). My goal is to push the state of machine learning toward a better understanding of molecules and their interactions with human biology. I completed my PhD at Polytechnique Montréal in the area of robotics and computer vision.

My research interests are graph neural networks, self-supervised learning, quantum mechanics, drug discovery, computer vision and robotics.

Current Students

Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Publications

Molphenix: A Multimodal Foundation Model for PhenoMolecular Retrieval
Philip Fradkin
Puria Azadi Moghadam
Karush Suri
Frederik Wenkel
Maciej Sypetkowski
Predicting molecular impact on cellular function is a core challenge in therapeutic design. Phenomic experiments, designed to capture cellu… (see more)lar morphology, utilize microscopy based techniques and demonstrate a high throughput solution for uncovering molecular impact on the cell. In this work, we learn a joint latent space between molecular structures and microscopy phenomic experiments, aligning paired samples with contrastive learning. Specifically, we study the problem of Contrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval, which consists of zero-shot molecular structure identification conditioned on phenomic experiments. We assess challenges in multi-modal learning of phenomics and molecular modalities such as experimental batch effect, inactive molecule perturbations, and encoding perturbation concentration. We demonstrate improved multi-modal learner retrieval through (1) a uni-modal pre-trained phenomics model, (2) a novel inter sample similarity aware loss, and (3) models conditioned on a representation of molecular concentration. Following this recipe, we propose MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model. MolPhenix leverages a pre-trained phenomics model to demonstrate significant performance gains across perturbation concentrations, molecular scaffolds, and activity thresholds. In particular, we demonstrate an 8.1
Molphenix: A Multimodal Foundation Model for PhenoMolecular Retrieval
Philip Fradkin
Puria Azadi Moghadam
Karush Suri
Frederik Wenkel
Maciej Sypetkowski
Predicting molecular impact on cellular function is a core challenge in therapeutic design. Phenomic experiments, designed to capture cellu… (see more)lar morphology, utilize microscopy based techniques and demonstrate a high throughput solution for uncovering molecular impact on the cell. In this work, we learn a joint latent space between molecular structures and microscopy phenomic experiments, aligning paired samples with contrastive learning. Specifically, we study the problem of Contrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval, which consists of zero-shot molecular structure identification conditioned on phenomic experiments. We assess challenges in multi-modal learning of phenomics and molecular modalities such as experimental batch effect, inactive molecule perturbations, and encoding perturbation concentration. We demonstrate improved multi-modal learner retrieval through (1) a uni-modal pre-trained phenomics model, (2) a novel inter sample similarity aware loss, and (3) models conditioned on a representation of molecular concentration. Following this recipe, we propose MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model. MolPhenix leverages a pre-trained phenomics model to demonstrate significant performance gains across perturbation concentrations, molecular scaffolds, and activity thresholds. In particular, we demonstrate an 8.1
ET-Flow: Equivariant Flow-Matching for Molecular Conformer Generation
Majdi Hassan
Nikhil Shenoy
Jungyoon Lee
Hannes Stärk
Stephan Thaler
Predicting low-energy molecular conformations given a molecular graph is an important but challenging task in computational drug discovery.… (see more) Existing state- of-the-art approaches either resort to large scale transformer-based models that diffuse over conformer fields, or use computationally expensive methods to gen- erate initial structures and diffuse over torsion angles. In this work, we introduce Equivariant Transformer Flow (ET-Flow). We showcase that a well-designed flow matching approach with equivariance and harmonic prior alleviates the need for complex internal geometry calculations and large architectures, contrary to the prevailing methods in the field. Our approach results in a straightforward and scalable method that directly operates on all-atom coordinates with minimal assumptions. With the advantages of equivariance and flow matching, ET-Flow significantly increases the precision and physical validity of the generated con- formers, while being a lighter model and faster at inference. Code is available https://github.com/shenoynikhil/ETFlow.
How Molecules Impact Cells: Unlocking Contrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval
Philip Fradkin
Puria Azadi Moghadam
Karush Suri
Frederik Wenkel
Ali Bashashati
Maciej Sypetkowski
Predicting molecular impact on cellular function is a core challenge in therapeutic design. Phenomic experiments, designed to capture cellul… (see more)ar morphology, utilize microscopy based techniques and demonstrate a high throughput solution for uncovering molecular impact on the cell. In this work, we learn a joint latent space between molecular structures and microscopy phenomic experiments, aligning paired samples with contrastive learning. Specifically, we study the problem ofContrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval, which consists of zero-shot molecular structure identification conditioned on phenomic experiments. We assess challenges in multi-modal learning of phenomics and molecular modalities such as experimental batch effect, inactive molecule perturbations, and encoding perturbation concentration. We demonstrate improved multi-modal learner retrieval through (1) a uni-modal pre-trained phenomics model, (2) a novel inter sample similarity aware loss, and (3) models conditioned on a representation of molecular concentration. Following this recipe, we propose MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model. MolPhenix leverages a pre-trained phenomics model to demonstrate significant performance gains across perturbation concentrations, molecular scaffolds, and activity thresholds. In particular, we demonstrate an 8.1x improvement in zero shot molecular retrieval of active molecules over the previous state-of-the-art, reaching 77.33% in top-1% accuracy. These results open the door for machine learning to be applied in virtual phenomics screening, which can significantly benefit drug discovery applications.
On the Scalability of GNNs for Molecular Graphs
Maciej Sypetkowski
Frederik Wenkel
Farimah Poursafaei
Nia Dickson
Karush Suri
Philip Fradkin
Scaling deep learning models has been at the heart of recent revolutions in language modelling and image generation. Practitioners have obse… (see more)rved a strong relationship between model size, dataset size, and performance. However, structure-based architectures such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are yet to show the benefits of scale mainly due to the lower efficiency of sparse operations, large data requirements, and lack of clarity about the effectiveness of various architectures. We address this drawback of GNNs by studying their scaling behavior. Specifically, we analyze message-passing networks, graph Transformers, and hybrid architectures on the largest public collection of 2D molecular graphs. For the first time, we observe that GNNs benefit tremendously from the increasing scale of depth, width, number of molecules, number of labels, and the diversity in the pretraining datasets, resulting in a 30.25% improvement when scaling to 1 billion parameters and 28.98% improvement when increasing size of dataset to eightfold. We further demonstrate strong finetuning scaling behavior on 38 tasks, outclassing previous large models. We hope that our work paves the way for an era where foundational GNNs drive pharmaceutical drug discovery.
How Molecules Impact Cells: Unlocking Contrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval
Philip Fradkin
Puria Azadi Moghadam
Karush Suri
Frederik Wenkel
Ali Bashashati
Maciej Sypetkowski
Predicting molecular impact on cellular function is a core challenge in therapeutic design. Phenomic experiments, designed to capture cellul… (see more)ar morphology, utilize microscopy based techniques and demonstrate a high throughput solution for uncovering molecular impact on the cell. In this work, we learn a joint latent space between molecular structures and microscopy phenomic experiments, aligning paired samples with contrastive learning. Specifically, we study the problem ofContrastive PhenoMolecular Retrieval, which consists of zero-shot molecular structure identification conditioned on phenomic experiments. We assess challenges in multi-modal learning of phenomics and molecular modalities such as experimental batch effect, inactive molecule perturbations, and encoding perturbation concentration. We demonstrate improved multi-modal learner retrieval through (1) a uni-modal pre-trained phenomics model, (2) a novel inter sample similarity aware loss, and (3) models conditioned on a representation of molecular concentration. Following this recipe, we propose MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model. MolPhenix leverages a pre-trained phenomics model to demonstrate significant performance gains across perturbation concentrations, molecular scaffolds, and activity thresholds. In particular, we demonstrate an 8.1x improvement in zero shot molecular retrieval of active molecules over the previous state-of-the-art, reaching 77.33% in top-1% accuracy. These results open the door for machine learning to be applied in virtual phenomics screening, which can significantly benefit drug discovery applications.
Graph Positional and Structural Encoder
Renming Liu
Semih Cantürk
Olivier Lapointe-Gagné
Vincent Létourneau
Ladislav Rampášek
Positional and structural encodings (PSE) enable better identifiability of nodes within a graph, as in general graphs lack a canonical node … (see more)ordering. This renders PSEs essential tools for empowering modern GNNs, and in particular graph Transformers. However, designing PSEs that work optimally for a variety of graph prediction tasks is a challenging and unsolved problem. Here, we present the graph positional and structural encoder (GPSE), a first-ever attempt to train a graph encoder that captures rich PSE representations for augmenting any GNN. GPSE can effectively learn a common latent representation for multiple PSEs, and is highly transferable. The encoder trained on a particular graph dataset can be used effectively on datasets drawn from significantly different distributions and even modalities. We show that across a wide range of benchmarks, GPSE-enhanced models can significantly improve the performance in certain tasks, while performing on par with those that employ explicitly computed PSEs in other cases. Our results pave the way for the development of large pre-trained models for extracting graph positional and structural information and highlight their potential as a viable alternative to explicitly computed PSEs as well as to existing self-supervised pre-training approaches.
Equivariant Flow Matching for Molecular Conformer Generation
Majdi Hassan
Nikhil Shenoy
Jungyoon Lee
Hannes Stärk
Stephan Thaler
Masked Autoencoders for Microscopy are Scalable Learners of Cellular Biology
Oren Kraus
Kian Kenyon-Dean
Saber Saberian
Maryam Fallah
Peter McLean
Jess Leung
Vasudev Sharma
Ayla Khan
Jia Balakrishnan
Safiye Celik
Maciej Sypetkowski
Chi Vicky Cheng
Kristen Morse
Maureen Makes
Ben Mabey
Berton Earnshaw
On the Scalability of GNNs for Molecular Graphs
Maciej Sypetkowski
Frederik Wenkel
Farimah Poursafaei
Nia Dickson
Karush Suri
Philip Fradkin
Scaling deep learning models has been at the heart of recent revolutions in language modelling and image generation. Practitioners have obse… (see more)rved a strong relationship between model size, dataset size, and performance. However, structure-based architectures such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are yet to show the benefits of scale mainly due to the lower efficiency of sparse operations, large data requirements, and lack of clarity about the effectiveness of various architectures. We address this drawback of GNNs by studying their scaling behavior. Specifically, we analyze message-passing networks, graph Transformers, and hybrid architectures on the largest public collection of 2D molecular graphs. For the first time, we observe that GNNs benefit tremendously from the increasing scale of depth, width, number of molecules, number of labels, and the diversity in the pretraining datasets. We further demonstrate strong finetuning scaling behavior on 38 highly competitive downstream tasks, outclassing previous large models. This gives rise to MolGPS, a new graph foundation model that allows to navigate the chemical space, outperforming the previous state-of-the-arts on 26 out the 38 downstream tasks. We hope that our work paves the way for an era where foundational GNNs drive pharmaceutical drug discovery.
Masked Autoencoders for Microscopy are Scalable Learners of Cellular Biology
Oren Kraus
Kian Kenyon-Dean
Saber Saberian
Maryam Fallah
Peter McLean
Jess Leung
Vasudev Sharma
Ayla Khan
Jia Balakrishnan
Safiye Celik
Maciej Sypetkowski
Chi Vicky Cheng
Kristen Morse
Maureen Makes
Ben Mabey
Berton Earnshaw
Featurizing microscopy images for use in biological research remains a significant challenge, especially for large-scale experiments spannin… (see more)g millions of images. This work explores the scaling properties of weakly supervised classifiers and self-supervised masked autoencoders (MAEs) when training with increasingly larger model backbones and microscopy datasets. Our results show that ViT-based MAEs outperform weakly supervised classifiers on a variety of tasks, achieving as much as a 11.5% relative improvement when recalling known biological relationships curated from public databases. Additionally, we develop a new channel-agnostic MAE architecture (CA-MAE) that allows for inputting images of different numbers and orders of channels at inference time. We demonstrate that CA-MAEs effectively generalize by inferring and evaluating on a microscopy image dataset (JUMP-CP) generated under different experimental conditions with a different channel structure than our pretraining data (RPI-93M). Our findings motivate continued research into scaling self-supervised learning on microscopy data in order to create powerful foundation models of cellular biology that have the potential to catalyze advancements in drug discovery and beyond. Relevant code and select models released with this work can be found at: https://github.com/recursionpharma/maes_microscopy.
Masked Autoencoders for Microscopy are Scalable Learners of Cellular Biology
Oren Kraus
Kian Kenyon-Dean
Saber Saberian
Maryam Fallah
Peter McLean
Jess Leung
Vasudev Sharma
Ayla Khan
Jia Balakrishnan
Safiye Celik
Maciej Sypetkowski
Chi Vicky Cheng
Kristen Morse
Maureen Makes
Ben Mabey
Berton Earnshaw
Featurizing microscopy images for use in biological research remains a significant challenge, especially for large-scale experiments spannin… (see more)g millions of images. This work explores the scaling properties of weakly supervised classifiers and self-supervised masked autoencoders (MAEs) when training with increasingly larger model backbones and microscopy datasets. Our results show that ViT-based MAEs outperform weakly supervised classifiers on a variety of tasks, achieving as much as a 11.5% relative improvement when recalling known biological relationships curated from public databases. Additionally, we develop a new channel-agnostic MAE architecture (CA-MAE) that allows for inputting images of different numbers and orders of channels at inference time. We demonstrate that CA-MAEs effectively generalize by inferring and evaluating on a microscopy image dataset (JUMP-CP) generated under different experimental conditions with a different channel structure than our pretraining data (RPI-93M). Our findings motivate continued research into scaling self-supervised learning on microscopy data in order to create powerful foundation models of cellular biology that have the potential to catalyze advancements in drug discovery and beyond. Relevant code and select models released with this work can be found at: https://github.com/recursionpharma/maes_microscopy.