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
Biologie computationnelle
Grands modèles de langage (LLM)
IA pour la science
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

Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM

Publications

Data-Driven Approach to Encoding and De-Coding 3-D Crystal Structures
Generative models have achieved impressive results in many domains including image and text generation. In the natural sciences, generative … (voir plus)models have led to rapid progress in automated drug discovery. Many of the current methods focus on either 1-D or 2-D representations of typically small, drug-like molecules. However, many molecules require 3-D descriptors and exceed the chemical complexity of commonly used dataset. We present a method to encode and decode the position of atoms in 3-D molecules from a dataset of nearly 50,000 stable crystal unit cells that vary from containing 1 to over 100 atoms. We construct a smooth and continuous 3-D density representation of each crystal based on the positions of different atoms. Two different neural networks were trained on a dataset of over 120,000 three-dimensional samples of single and repeating crystal structures, made by rotating the single unit cells. The first, an Encoder-Decoder pair, constructs a compressed latent space representation of each molecule and then decodes this description into an accurate reconstruction of the input. The second network segments the resulting output into atoms and assigns each atom an atomic number. By generating compressed, continuous latent spaces representations of molecules we are able to decode random samples, interpolate between two molecules, and alter known molecules.
Contextualized Non-local Neural Networks for Sequence Learning
Shuaichen Chang
Xuanjing Huang
Jackie CK Cheung
Recently, a large number of neural mechanisms and models have been proposed for sequence learning, of which selfattention, as exemplified by… (voir plus) the Transformer model, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines and draws on the complementary strengths of these two methods. Specifically, we propose contextualized non-local neural networks (CN3), which can both dynamically construct a task-specific structure of a sentence and leverage rich local dependencies within a particular neighbourhood.Experimental results on ten NLP tasks in text classification, semantic matching, and sequence labelling show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines and discovers task-specific dependency structures, thus providing better interpretability to users.
Weakly-supervised Knowledge Graph Alignment with Adversarial Learning
This paper studies aligning knowledge graphs from different sources or languages. Most existing methods train supervised methods for the ali… (voir plus)gnment, which usually require a large number of aligned knowledge triplets. However, such a large number of aligned knowledge triplets may not be available or are expensive to obtain in many domains. Therefore, in this paper we propose to study aligning knowledge graphs in fully-unsupervised or weakly-supervised fashion, i.e., without or with only a few aligned triplets. We propose an unsupervised framework to align the entity and relation embddings of different knowledge graphs with an adversarial learning framework. Moreover, a regularization term which maximizes the mutual information between the embeddings of different knowledge graphs is used to mitigate the problem of mode collapse when learning the alignment functions. Such a framework can be further seamlessly integrated with existing supervised methods by utilizing a limited number of aligned triples as guidance. Experimental results on multiple datasets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both the unsupervised and the weakly-supervised settings.
Learning Powerful Policies by Using Consistent Dynamics Model
Model-based Reinforcement Learning approaches have the promise of being sample efficient. Much of the progress in learning dynamics models i… (voir plus)n RL has been made by learning models via supervised learning. But traditional model-based approaches lead to `compounding errors' when the model is unrolled step by step. Essentially, the state transitions that the learner predicts (by unrolling the model for multiple steps) and the state transitions that the learner experiences (by acting in the environment) may not be consistent. There is enough evidence that humans build a model of the environment, not only by observing the environment but also by interacting with the environment. Interaction with the environment allows humans to carry out experiments: taking actions that help uncover true causal relationships which can be used for building better dynamics models. Analogously, we would expect such interactions to be helpful for a learning agent while learning to model the environment dynamics. In this paper, we build upon this intuition by using an auxiliary cost function to ensure consistency between what the agent observes (by acting in the real world) and what it imagines (by acting in the `learned' world). We consider several tasks - Mujoco based control tasks and Atari games - and show that the proposed approach helps to train powerful policies and better dynamics models.
GMNN: Graph Markov Neural Networks
This paper studies semi-supervised object classification in relational data, which is a fundamental problem in relational data modeling. The… (voir plus) problem has been extensively studied in the literature of both statistical relational learning (e.g. relational Markov networks) and graph neural networks (e.g. graph convolutional networks). Statistical relational learning methods can effectively model the dependency of object labels through conditional random fields for collective classification, whereas graph neural networks learn effective object representations for classification through end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose the Graph Markov Neural Network (GMNN) that combines the advantages of both worlds. A GMNN models the joint distribution of object labels with a conditional random field, which can be effectively trained with the variational EM algorithm. In the E-step, one graph neural network learns effective object representations for approximating the posterior distributions of object labels. In the M-step, another graph neural network is used to model the local label dependency. Experiments on object classification, link classification, and unsupervised node representation learning show that GMNN achieves state-of-the-art results.
Session-Based Social Recommendation via Dynamic Graph Attention Networks
Zhiping Xiao
Yifan Wang
Ming Zhang
Online communities such as Facebook and Twitter are enormously popular and have become an essential part of the daily life of many of their … (voir plus)users. Through these platforms, users can discover and create information that others will then consume. In that context, recommending relevant information to users becomes critical for viability. However, recommendation in online communities is a challenging problem: 1) users' interests are dynamic, and 2) users are influenced by their friends. Moreover, the influencers may be context-dependent. That is, different friends may be relied upon for different topics. Modeling both signals is therefore essential for recommendations. We propose a recommender system for online communities based on a dynamic-graph-attention neural network. We model dynamic user behaviors with a recurrent neural network, and context-dependent social influence with a graph-attention neural network, which dynamically infers the influencers based on users' current interests. The whole model can be efficiently fit on large-scale data. Experimental results on several real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over several competitive baselines including state-of-the-art models.
Learning powerful policies and better dynamics models by encouraging consistency