Portrait de Emmanuel Bengio

Emmanuel Bengio

Membre industriel associé
Scientifique en apprentissage automatique, Recursion
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
GFlowNets
Modèles génératifs
Modélisation moléculaire

Biographie

Emmanuel Bengio est chercheur en ML à Valence Labs/Recursion, où il travaille sur l'intersection des GFlowNets et de la découverte de médicaments. Il a fait son doctorat sous la direction de Joelle Pineau et Doina Precup à McGill/Mila - Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle, en se concentrant sur la compréhension de la généralisation dans la RL profonde.

Publications

QGFN: Controllable Greediness with Action Values
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets; GFNs) are a family of energy-based generative methods for combinatorial objects, capable of generating … (voir plus)diverse and high-utility samples. However, consistently biasing GFNs towards producing high-utility samples is non-trivial. In this work, we leverage connections between GFNs and reinforcement learning (RL) and propose to combine the GFN policy with an action-value estimate,
GFlowNet Pretraining with Inexpensive Rewards
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a class of generative models have recently emerged as a suitable framework for generating diverse and … (voir plus)high-quality molecular structures by learning from unnormalized reward distributions. Previous works in this direction often restrict exploration by using predefined molecular fragments as building blocks, limiting the chemical space that can be accessed. In this work, we introduce Atomic GFlowNets (A-GFNs), a foundational generative model leveraging individual atoms as building blocks to explore drug-like chemical space more comprehensively. We propose an unsupervised pre-training approach using offline drug-like molecule datasets, which conditions A-GFNs on inexpensive yet informative molecular descriptors such as drug-likeliness, topological polar surface area, and synthetic accessibility scores. These properties serve as proxy rewards, guiding A-GFNs towards regions of chemical space that exhibit desirable pharmacological properties. We further our method by implementing a goal-conditioned fine-tuning process, which adapts A-GFNs to optimize for specific target properties. In this work, we pretrain A-GFN on the ZINC15 offline dataset and employ robust evaluation metrics to show the effectiveness of our approach when compared to other relevant baseline methods in drug design.
Learning to Scale Logits for Temperature-Conditional GFlowNets
GFlowNets are probabilistic models that sequentially generate compositional structures through a stochastic policy. Among GFlowNets, tempera… (voir plus)ture-conditional GFlowNets can introduce temperature-based controllability for exploration and exploitation. We propose \textit{Logit-scaling GFlowNets} (Logit-GFN), a novel architectural design that greatly accelerates the training of temperature-conditional GFlowNets. It is based on the idea that previously proposed approaches introduced numerical challenges in the deep network training, since different temperatures may give rise to very different gradient profiles as well as magnitudes of the policy's logits. We find that the challenge is greatly reduced if a learned function of the temperature is used to scale the policy's logits directly. Also, using Logit-GFN, GFlowNets can be improved by having better generalization capabilities in offline learning and mode discovery capabilities in online learning, which is empirically verified in various biological and chemical tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/dbsxodud-11/logit-gfn
Generative Active Learning for the Search of Small-Molecule Protein Binders
Cheng-Hao Liu
Éric Jolicoeur
Edward Ruediger
Andrei Nica
Daniel St-Cyr
Doris Alexandra Schuetz
Victor Ion Butoi
Saikrishna Gottipati
Prateek Gupta
Sasikanth Avancha
William Hamilton
Brooks Paige
Sanchit Misra
Bharat Kaul
José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Marwin Segler
Michael Bronstein
Anne Marinier
Mike Tyers
Despite substantial progress in machine learning for scientific discovery in recent years, truly de novo design of small molecules which exh… (voir plus)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.
Local Search GFlowNets
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized sampling methods that learn a distribution over discrete objects proportional to their re… (voir plus)wards. GFlowNets exhibit a remarkable ability to generate diverse samples, yet occasionally struggle to consistently produce samples with high rewards due to over-exploration on wide sample space. This paper proposes to train GFlowNets with local search, which focuses on exploiting high-rewarded sample space to resolve this issue. Our main idea is to explore the local neighborhood via backtracking and reconstruction guided by backward and forward policies, respectively. This allows biasing the samples toward high-reward solutions, which is not possible for a typical GFlowNet solution generation scheme, which uses the forward policy to generate the solution from scratch. Extensive experiments demonstrate a remarkable performance improvement in several biochemical tasks. Source code is available: https://github.com/dbsxodud-11/ls_gfn.
Maximum entropy GFlowNets with soft Q-learning
Generative Flow Networks (GFNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for sampling discrete objects from unnormalized distributions, offering a sc… (voir plus)alable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. While GFNs draw inspiration from maximum entropy reinforcement learning (RL), the connection between the two has largely been unclear and seemingly applicable only in specific cases. This paper addresses the connection by constructing an appropriate reward function, thereby establishing an exact relationship between GFNs and maximum entropy RL. This construction allows us to introduce maximum entropy GFNs, which, in contrast to GFNs with uniform backward policy, achieve the maximum entropy attainable by GFNs without constraints on the state space.
SynFlowNet: Design of Diverse and Novel Molecules with Synthesis Constraints
M. Cretu
Charles Harris
Pietro Lio’
Generative models see increasing use in computer-aided drug design. However, while performing well at capturing distributions of molecular m… (voir plus)otifs, they often produce synthetically inaccessible molecules. To address this, we introduce SynFlowNet, a GFlowNet model whose action space uses chemical reactions and buyable reactants to sequentially build new molecules. By incorporating forward synthesis as an explicit constraint of the generative mechanism, we aim at bridging the gap between in silico molecular generation and real world synthesis capabilities. We evaluate our approach using synthetic accessibility scores and an independent retrosynthesis tool to assess the synthesizability of our compounds, and motivate the choice of GFlowNets through considerable improvement in sample diversity compared to baselines. Additionally, we identify challenges with reaction encodings that can complicate traversal of the MDP in the backward direction. To address this, we introduce various strategies for learning the GFlowNet backward policy and thus demonstrate how additional constraints can be integrated into the GFlowNet MDP framework. This approach enables our model to successfully identify synthesis pathways for previously unseen molecules.
A community effort in SARS-CoV-2 drug discovery.
Johannes Schimunek
Philipp Seidl
Katarina Elez
Tim Hempel
Tuan Le
Frank Noé
Simon Olsson
Lluís Raich
Robin Winter
Hatice Gokcan
Filipp Gusev
Evgeny M. Gutkin
Olexandr Isayev
Maria G. Kurnikova
Chamali H. Narangoda
Roman Zubatyuk
Ivan P. Bosko
Konstantin V. Furs
Anna D. Karpenko
Yury V. Kornoushenko … (voir 133 de plus)
Mikita Shuldau
Artsemi Yushkevich
Mohammed B. Benabderrahmane
Patrick Bousquet‐Melou
Ronan Bureau
Beatrice Charton
Bertrand C. Cirou
Gérard Gil
William J. Allen
Suman Sirimulla
Stanley Watowich
Nick Antonopoulos
Nikolaos Epitropakis
Agamemnon Krasoulis
Vassilis Pitsikalis
Stavros Theodorakis
Igor Kozlovskii
Anton Maliutin
Alexander Medvedev
Petr Popov
Mark Zaretckii
Hamid Eghbal‐Zadeh
Christina Halmich
Sepp Hochreiter
Andreas Mayr
Peter Ruch
Michael Widrich
Francois Berenger
Ashutosh Kumar
Yoshihiro Yamanishi
Kam Y. J. Zhang
Moksh J. Jain
Cheng-Hao Liu
Gilles Marcou
M. Gilles
Enrico Glaab
Kelly Barnsley
Suhasini M. Iyengar
Mary Jo Ondrechen
V. Joachim Haupt
Florian Kaiser
Michael Schroeder
Luisa Pugliese
Simone Albani
Christina Athanasiou
Andrea Beccari
Paolo Carloni
Giulia D'Arrigo
Eleonora Gianquinto
Jonas Goßen
Anton Hanke
Benjamin P. Joseph
Daria B. Kokh
Sandra Kovachka
Candida Manelfi
Goutam Mukherjee
Abraham Muñiz‐Chicharro
Francesco Musiani
Ariane Nunes‐Alves
Giulia Paiardi
Giulia Rossetti
S. Kashif Sadiq
Francesca Spyrakis
Carmine Talarico
Alexandros Tsengenes
Rebecca C. Wade
Conner Copeland
Jeremiah Gaiser
Daniel R. Olson
Amitava Roy
Vishwesh Venkatraman
Travis J. Wheeler
Haribabu Arthanari
Klara Blaschitz
Marco Cespugli
Vedat Durmaz
Konstantin Fackeldey
Patrick D. Fischer
Christoph Gorgulla
Christian Gruber
Karl Gruber
Michael Hetmann
Jamie E. Kinney
Krishna M. Padmanabha Das
Shreya Pandita
Amit Singh
Georg Steinkellner
Guilhem Tesseyre
Gerhard Wagner
Zi‐Fu Wang
Ryan J. Yust
Dmitry S. Druzhilovskiy
Dmitry A. Filimonov
Pavel V. Pogodin
Vladimir Poroikov
Anastassia V. Rudik
Leonid A. Stolbov
Alexander V. Veselovsky
Maria De Rosa
Giada De Simone
Maria R. Gulotta
Jessica Lombino
Nedra Mekni
Ugo Perricone
Arturo Casini
Amanda Embree
D. Benjamin Gordon
David Lei
Katelin Pratt
Christopher A. Voigt
Kuang‐Yu Chen
Yves Jacob
Tim Krischuns
Pierre Lafaye
Agnès Zettor
M. Luis Rodríguez
Kris M. White
Daren Fearon
Frank Von Delft
Martin A. Walsh
Dragos Horvath
Charles L. Brooks
Babak Falsafi
Bryan Ford
Adolfo García‐Sastre
Sang Yup Lee
Nadia Naffakh
Alexandre Varnek
Günter Klambauer
Thomas M. Hermans
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a substantial threat to human lives and is likely to do so for years to come. Despite the availabili… (voir plus)ty of vaccines, searching for efficient small-molecule drugs that are widely available, including in low- and middle-income countries, is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we report the results of an open science community effort, the "Billion molecules against Covid-19 challenge", to identify small-molecule inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 or relevant human receptors. Participating teams used a wide variety of computational methods to screen a minimum of 1 billion virtual molecules against 6 protein targets. Overall, 31 teams participated, and they suggested a total of 639,024 molecules, which were subsequently ranked to find 'consensus compounds'. The organizing team coordinated with various contract research organizations (CROs) and collaborating institutions to synthesize and test 878 compounds for biological activity against proteases (Nsp5, Nsp3, TMPRSS2), nucleocapsid N, RdRP (only the Nsp12 domain), and (alpha) spike protein S. Overall, 27 compounds with weak inhibition/binding were experimentally identified by binding-, cleavage-, and/or viral suppression assays and are presented here. Open science approaches such as the one presented here contribute to the knowledge base of future drug discovery efforts in finding better SARS-CoV-2 treatments.
Baking Symmetry into GFlowNets
GFlowNets have exhibited promising performance in generating diverse candidates with high rewards. These networks generate objects increment… (voir plus)ally and aim to learn a policy that assigns probability of sampling objects in proportion to rewards. However, the current training pipelines of GFlowNets do not consider the presence of isomorphic actions, which are actions resulting in symmetric or isomorphic states. This lack of symmetry increases the amount of samples required for training GFlowNets and can result in inefficient and potentially incorrect flow functions. As a consequence, the reward and diversity of the generated objects decrease. In this study, our objective is to integrate symmetries into GFlowNets by identifying equivalent actions during the generation process. Experimental results using synthetic data demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed approaches.
DGFN: Double Generative Flow Networks
Multi-Objective GFlowNets
We study the problem of generating diverse candidates in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization. In many applications of machine learni… (voir plus)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.
Goal-conditioned GFlowNets for Controllable Multi-Objective Molecular Design
In recent years, in-silico molecular design has received much attention from the machine learning community. When designing a new compound f… (voir plus)or pharmaceutical applications, there are usually multiple properties of such molecules that need to be optimised: binding energy to the target, synthesizability, toxicity, EC50, and so on. While previous approaches have employed a scalarization scheme to turn the multi-objective problem into a preference-conditioned single objective, it has been established that this kind of reduction may produce solutions that tend to slide towards the extreme points of the objective space when presented with a problem that exhibits a concave Pareto front. In this work we experiment with an alternative formulation of goal-conditioned molecular generation to obtain a more controllable conditional model that can uniformly explore solutions along the entire Pareto front.