Portrait de Jian Tang

Jian Tang

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, HEC Montréal, Département de sciences de la décision
Professeur associé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO)
Fondateur, BioGeometry
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond
Biologie computationnelle
Modèles génératifs
Modélisation moléculaire
Réseaux de neurones en graphes

Biographie

Jian Tang est professeur agrégé au département de sciences de la décision de HEC. Il est aussi professeur associé au département informatique et recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal et un membre académique principal à Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Il est titulaire d'une chaire de recherche en IA Canada-CIFAR et le fondateur de BioGeometry, une entreprise en démarrage spécialisée dans l'IA générative pour la découverte d'anticorps. Ses principaux domaines de recherche sont les modèles génératifs profonds, l'apprentissage automatique des graphes et leurs applications à la découverte de médicaments. Il est un leader international dans le domaine de l'apprentissage automatique des graphes, et son travail représentatif sur l'apprentissage de la représentation des nœuds, LINE, a été largement reconnu et cité plus de 5 000 fois. Il a également réalisé de nombreux travaux pionniers sur l'IA pour la découverte de médicaments, notamment le premier cadre d'apprentissage automatique à source ouverte pour la découverte de médicaments, TorchDrug et TorchProtein.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM

Publications

Reaction-conditioned De Novo Enzyme Design with GENzyme
Chenqing Hua
Jiarui Lu
Yong Liu
Odin Zhang
Rex Ying
Wengong Jin
Shuangjia Zheng
The introduction of models like RFDiffusionAA, AlphaFold3, AlphaProteo, and Chai1 has revolutionized protein structure modeling and interact… (voir plus)ion prediction, primarily from a binding perspective, focusing on creating ideal lock-and-key models. However, these methods can fall short for enzyme-substrate interactions, where perfect binding models are rare, and induced fit states are more common. To address this, we shift to a functional perspective for enzyme design, where the enzyme function is defined by the reaction it catalyzes. Here, we introduce \textsc{GENzyme}, a \textit{de novo} enzyme design model that takes a catalytic reaction as input and generates the catalytic pocket, full enzyme structure, and enzyme-substrate binding complex. \textsc{GENzyme} is an end-to-end, three-staged model that integrates (1) a catalytic pocket generation and sequence co-design module, (2) a pocket inpainting and enzyme inverse folding module, and (3) a binding and screening module to optimize and predict enzyme-substrate complexes. The entire design process is driven by the catalytic reaction being targeted. This reaction-first approach allows for more accurate and biologically relevant enzyme design, potentially surpassing structure-based and binding-focused models in creating enzymes capable of catalyzing specific reactions. We provide \textsc{GENzyme} code at https://github.com/WillHua127/GENzyme.
Structure Language Models for Protein Conformation Generation
Jiarui Lu
Xiaoyin Chen
Stephen Zhewen Lu
Chence Shi
Hongyu Guo
Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model
Xinyu Yuan
Zhihao Zhan
Zuobai Zhang
Manqi Zhou
Jianan Zhao
Boyu Han
Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by… (voir plus) self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. To this end, we present **s**ingle **c**ell, **Cell-o**ntology guided TFM (scCello). We introduce cell-type coherence loss and ontology alignment loss, which are minimized along with the masked gene expression prediction loss during the pre-training. The novel loss component guide scCello to learn the cell-type-specific representation and the structural relation between cell types from the cell ontology graph, respectively. We pre-trained scCello on 22 million cells from CellxGene database leveraging their cell-type labels mapped to the cell ontology graph from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry. Our TFM demonstrates competitive generalization and transferability performance over the existing TFMs on biologically important tasks including identifying novel cell types of unseen cells, prediction of cell-type-specific marker genes, and cancer drug responses.
Fully-inductive Node Classification on Arbitrary Graphs
Jianan Zhao
Mikhail Galkin
Hesham Mostafa
Michael M. Bronstein
Zhaocheng Zhu
GraphText: Graph Reasoning in Text Space
Jianan Zhao
Le Zhuo
Yikang Shen
Meng Qu
Kai Liu
Michael M. Bronstein
Zhaocheng Zhu
Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model
Xinyu Yuan
Zhihao Zhan
Zuobai Zhang
Manqi Zhou
Jianan Zhao
Boyu Han
Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by… (voir plus) self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. To this end, we present **s**ingle **c**ell, **Cell**-**o**ntology guided TFM (scCello). We introduce cell-type coherence loss and ontology alignment loss, which are minimized along with the masked gene expression prediction loss during the pre-training. The novel loss component guide scCello to learn the cell-type-specific representation and the structural relation between cell types from the cell ontology graph, respectively. We pre-trained scCello on 22 million cells from CellxGene database leveraging their cell-type labels mapped to the cell ontology graph from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry. Our TFM demonstrates competitive generalization and transferability performance over the existing TFMs on biologically important tasks including identifying novel cell types of unseen cells, prediction of cell-type-specific marker genes, and cancer drug responses. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/scCello.
A Foundation Model for Zero-shot Logical Query Reasoning
Mikhail Galkin
Jincheng Zhou
Bruno Ribeiro
Zhaocheng Zhu
Complex logical query answering (CLQA) in knowledge graphs (KGs) goes beyond simple KG completion and aims at answering compositional querie… (voir plus)s comprised of multiple projections and logical operations. Existing CLQA methods that learn parameters bound to certain entity or relation vocabularies can only be applied to the graph they are trained on which requires substantial training time before being deployed on a new graph. Here we present UltraQuery, the first foundation model for inductive reasoning that can zero-shot answer logical queries on any KG. The core idea of UltraQuery is to derive both projections and logical operations as vocabulary-independent functions which generalize to new entities and relations in any KG. With the projection operation initialized from a pre-trained inductive KG completion model, UltraQuery can solve CLQA on any KG after finetuning on a single dataset. Experimenting on 23 datasets, UltraQuery in the zero-shot inference mode shows competitive or better query answering performance than best available baselines and sets a new state of the art on 15 of them.
Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Protein Fitness Prediction
Zuobai Zhang
Pascal Notin
Yining Huang
Aurelie Lozano
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Debora Susan Marks
Payel Das
Designing novel functional proteins crucially depends on accurately modeling their fitness landscape. Given the limited availability of func… (voir plus)tional annotations from wet-lab experiments, previous methods have primarily relied on self-supervised models trained on vast, unlabeled protein sequence or structure datasets. While initial protein representation learning studies solely focused on either sequence or structural features, recent hybrid architectures have sought to merge these modalities to harness their respective strengths. However, these sequence-structure models have so far achieved only incremental improvements when compared to the leading sequence-only approaches, highlighting unresolved challenges effectively leveraging these modalities together. Moreover, the function of certain proteins is highly dependent on the granular aspects of their surface topology, which have been overlooked by prior models. To address these limitations, we introduce the Sequence-Structure-Surface Fitness (**S3F**) model — a novel multimodal representation learning framework that integrates protein features across several scales. Our approach combines sequence representations from a protein language model with Geometric Vector Perceptron networks encoding protein backbone and detailed surface topology. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art fitness prediction on the ProteinGym benchmark encompassing 217 substitution deep mutational scanning assays, and provides insights into the determinants of protein function. Our code is at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/S3F.
Are Heterophily-Specific GNNs and Homophily Metrics Really Effective? Evaluation Pitfalls and New Benchmarks
Sitao Luan
Qincheng Lu
Chenqing Hua
Xinyu Wang
Jiaqi Zhu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Over the past decade, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success on machine learning tasks with relational data. However, rece… (voir plus)nt studies have found that heterophily can cause significant performance degradation of GNNs, especially on node-level tasks. Numerous heterophilic benchmark datasets have been put forward to validate the efficacy of heterophily-specific GNNs and various homophily metrics have been designed to help people recognize these malignant datasets. Nevertheless, there still exist multiple pitfalls that severely hinder the proper evaluation of new models and metrics. In this paper, we point out three most serious pitfalls: 1) a lack of hyperparameter tuning; 2) insufficient model evaluation on the real challenging heterophilic datasets; 3) missing quantitative evaluation benchmark for homophily metrics on synthetic graphs. To overcome these challenges, we first train and fine-tune baseline models on
The Heterophilic Graph Learning Handbook: Benchmarks, Models, Theoretical Analysis, Applications and Challenges
Sitao Luan
Chenqing Hua
Qincheng Lu
Liheng Ma
Lirong Wu
Xinyu Wang
Minkai Xu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Rex Ying
Stan Z. Li
Stefanie Jegelka
Homophily principle, \ie{} nodes with the same labels or similar attributes are more likely to be connected, has been commonly believed to b… (voir plus)e the main reason for the superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over traditional Neural Networks (NNs) on graph-structured data, especially on node-level tasks. However, recent work has identified a non-trivial set of datasets where GNN's performance compared to the NN's is not satisfactory. Heterophily, i.e. low homophily, has been considered the main cause of this empirical observation. People have begun to revisit and re-evaluate most existing graph models, including graph transformer and its variants, in the heterophily scenario across various kinds of graphs, e.g. heterogeneous graphs, temporal graphs and hypergraphs. Moreover, numerous graph-related applications are found to be closely related to the heterophily problem. In the past few years, considerable effort has been devoted to studying and addressing the heterophily issue. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the latest progress on heterophilic graph learning, including an extensive summary of benchmark datasets and evaluation of homophily metrics on synthetic graphs, meticulous classification of the most updated supervised and unsupervised learning methods, thorough digestion of the theoretical analysis on homophily/heterophily, and broad exploration of the heterophily-related applications. Notably, through detailed experiments, we are the first to categorize benchmark heterophilic datasets into three sub-categories: malignant, benign and ambiguous heterophily. Malignant and ambiguous datasets are identified as the real challenging datasets to test the effectiveness of new models on the heterophily challenge. Finally, we propose several challenges and future directions for heterophilic graph representation learning.
In-Context Learning, Can It Break Safety?
Sophie Xhonneux
David Dobre
Michael Noukhovitch
Augmenting Evolutionary Models with Structure-based Retrieval
Yining Huang
Zuobai Zhang
Debora Susan Marks
Pascal Notin