Portrait de Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Membre académique principal
Professeur adjoint, Université de Montréal
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage actif
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage profond
Biologie computationnelle
Climat
Découverte de médicaments
GFlowNets
IA et durabilité
IA pour la science
Modèles génératifs
Modèles probabilistes
Modélisation moléculaire
Optimisation en boîte noire
Réduction d'échelle des variables climatiques

Biographie

Alex Hernandez-Garcia est professeur adjoint à l’Université de Montréal, membre académique principal de Mila, professeur IVADO et membre de l’Institut Courtois. Ses recherches en apprentissage automatique sont motivées par des applications scientifiques visant à relever la crise climatique et d’autres défis sociétaux. Un axe actuel de ses travaux porte en particulier sur l’apprentissage automatique actif et génératif afin de faciliter les découvertes scientifiques, telles que de nouveaux matériaux et antibiotiques. Il plaide également pour un examen critique des impacts de l’intelligence artificielle, est un fervent défenseur de la science ouverte et participe activement à des initiatives visant à rendre la science plus inclusive, équitable, ouverte, reproductible, transparente et respectueuse de l’environnement.

Étudiants actuels

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Polytechnique Montréal
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Concordia
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

A Comparative Study of Molecular Dynamics Approaches for Simulating Ionic Conductivity in Solid Lithium Electrolytes
Accurate prediction of ionic conductivity is critical for the design of highperformance solid-state electrolytes in next-generation batterie… (voir plus)s. We benchmark molecular dynamics (MD) approaches for computing ionic conductivity in 21 lithium solid electrolytes for which experimental ionic conductivity has been previously reported in the literature. Specifically, we compare simulations driven by density functional theory (DFT) and by universal machine-learning interatomic potentials (uMLIPs), namely a MACE foundation model. Our results suggest comparable performance between DFT and MACE, with MACE requiring only a fraction of the computational cost. The framework developed here is designed to enable systematic comparisons with additional uMLIPs and fine-tuned models in future work.
Synthesizable Molecular Generation via Soft-constrained GFlowNets with Rich Chemical Priors
D. Biton
Louis Vaillancourt
Yves V. Brun
Benchmarking the geographic generalization of deep learning models for precipitation downscaling
Luca Schmidt
Nicole Ludwig
Matthew Chantry
Christian Lessig
Earth System Models (ESM) are our main tool for projecting the impacts of climate change. However, running these models at sufficient resolu… (voir plus)tion for local-scale risk-assessments is not computationally feasible. Deep learning-based super-resolution models offer a promising solution to downscale ESM outputs to higher resolutions by learning from data. Yet, due to regional variations in climatic processes, these models typically require retraining for each geographical area–demanding high-resolution observational data, which is unevenly available across the globe. This highlights the need to assess how well these models generalize across geographic regions. To address this, we introduce RainShift, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating downscaling under geographic distribution shifts. We evaluate state-of-the-art downscaling approaches including GANs and diffusion models in generalizing across data gaps between the Global North and Global South. Our findings reveal substantial performance drops in out-of-distribution regions, depending on model and geographic area. While expanding the training domain generally improves generalization, it is insufficient to overcome shifts between geographically distinct regions. We show that addressing these shifts through, for example, domain adaptation can improve spatial generalization. Our work advances the global applicability of downscaling methods and represents a step toward reducing inequities in access to high-resolution climate information.
Adsorption energies are necessary but not sufficient to identify good catalysts
Alexander Davis
Alexandre AGM Duval
Oleksandr Voznyy
Alex Hern'andez-Garcia
Improved Off-policy Reinforcement Learning in Biological Sequence Design
Designing biological sequences with desired properties is challenging due to vast search spaces and limited evaluation budgets. Although rei… (voir plus)nforcement learning methods use proxy models for rapid reward evaluation, insufficient training data can cause proxy misspecification on out-of-distribution inputs. To address this, we propose a novel off-policy search,
Catalyst GFlowNet for electrocatalyst design: A hydrogen evolution reaction case study
Efficient and inexpensive energy storage is essential for accelerating the adoption of renewable energy and ensuring a stable supply, despit… (voir plus)e fluctuations in sources such as wind and solar. Electrocatalysts play a key role in hydrogen energy storage (HES), allowing the energy to be stored as hydrogen. However, the development of affordable and high-performance catalysts for this process remains a significant challenge. We introduce Catalyst GFlowNet, a generative model that leverages machine learning-based predictors of formation and adsorption energy to design crystal surfaces that act as efficient catalysts. We demonstrate the performance of the model through a proof-of-concept application to the hydrogen evolution reaction, a key reaction in HES, for which we successfully identified platinum as the most efficient known catalyst. In future work, we aim to extend this approach to the oxygen evolution reaction, where current optimal catalysts are expensive metal oxides, and open the search space to discover new materials. This generative modeling framework offers a promising pathway for accelerating the search for novel and efficient catalysts.
Multiscale Neural PDE Surrogates for Prediction and Downscaling: Application to Ocean Currents
Abdessamad El-Kabid
Redouane Lguensat
Accurate modeling of physical systems governed by partial differential equations is a central challenge in scientific computing. In oceanogr… (voir plus)aphy, high-resolution current data are critical for coastal management, environmental monitoring, and maritime safety. However, available satellite products, such as Copernicus data for sea water velocity at ~0.08 degrees spatial resolution and global ocean models, often lack the spatial granularity required for detailed local analyses. In this work, we (a) introduce a supervised deep learning framework based on neural operators for solving PDEs and providing arbitrary resolution solutions, and (b) propose downscaling models with an application to Copernicus ocean current data. Additionally, our method can model surrogate PDEs and predict solutions at arbitrary resolution, regardless of the input resolution. We evaluated our model on real-world Copernicus ocean current data and synthetic Navier-Stokes simulation datasets.
RainShift: A Benchmark for Precipitation Downscaling Across Geographies
Luca Schmidt
Nicole Ludwig
Matthew Chantry
Christian Lessig
Earth System Models (ESM) are our main tool for projecting the impacts of climate change. However, running these models at sufficient resolu… (voir plus)tion for local-scale risk-assessments is not computationally feasible. Deep learning-based super-resolution models offer a promising solution to downscale ESM outputs to higher resolutions by learning from data. Yet, due to regional variations in climatic processes, these models typically require retraining for each geographical area-demanding high-resolution observational data, which is unevenly available across the globe. This highlights the need to assess how well these models generalize across geographic regions. To address this, we introduce RainShift, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating downscaling under geographic distribution shifts. We evaluate state-of-the-art downscaling approaches including GANs and diffusion models in generalizing across data gaps between the Global North and Global South. Our findings reveal substantial performance drops in out-of-distribution regions, depending on model and geographic area. While expanding the training domain generally improves generalization, it is insufficient to overcome shifts between geographically distinct regions. We show that addressing these shifts through, for example, data alignment can improve spatial generalization. Our work advances the global applicability of downscaling methods and represents a step toward reducing inequities in access to high-resolution climate information.
Torsional-GFN: a conditional conformation generator for small molecules
Learning Decision Trees as Amortized Structure Inference
OBELiX: a curated dataset of crystal structures and experimentally measured ionic conductivities for lithium solid-state electrolytes
Rhiannon Hendley
Leah Wairimu Mungai
Sun Sun
Alain Tchagang
Jiang Su
Hongyu Guo
Homin Shin
OBELiX is a database of 599 synthesized solid electrolyte materials and their experimentally measured room temperature ionic conductivities … (voir plus)gathered from literature and curated by domain experts.
Multi-Fidelity Active Learning with GFlowNets
Moksh J. Jain
Cheng-Hao Liu
In the last decades, the capacity to generate large amounts of data in science and engineering applications has been growing steadily. Meanw… (voir plus)hile, the progress in machine learning has turned it into a suitable tool to process and utilise the available data. Nonetheless, many relevant scientific and engineering problems present challenges where current machine learning methods cannot yet efficiently leverage the available data and resources. For example, in scientific discovery, we are often faced with the problem of exploring very large, high-dimensional spaces, where querying a high fidelity, black-box objective function is very expensive. Progress in machine learning methods that can efficiently tackle such problems would help accelerate currently crucial areas such as drug and materials discovery. In this paper, we propose the use of GFlowNets for multi-fidelity active learning, where multiple approximations of the black-box function are available at lower fidelity and cost. GFlowNets are recently proposed methods for amortised probabilistic inference that have proven efficient for exploring large, high-dimensional spaces and can hence be practical in the multi-fidelity setting too. Here, we describe our algorithm for multi-fidelity active learning with GFlowNets and evaluate its performance in both well-studied synthetic tasks and practically relevant applications of molecular discovery. Our results show that multi-fidelity active learning with GFlowNets can efficiently leverage the availability of multiple oracles with different costs and fidelities to accelerate scientific discovery and engineering design.