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

Publications

Physics-Inspired Protein Encoder Pre-Training via Siamese Sequence-Structure Diffusion Trajectory Prediction
Zuobai Zhang
Minghao Xu
Aurelie Lozano
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Payel Das
Pre-training methods on proteins are recently gaining interest, leveraging either protein sequences or structures, while modeling their join… (voir plus)t energy landscape is largely unexplored. In this work, inspired by the success of denoising diffusion models, we propose the DiffPreT approach to pre-train a protein encoder by sequence-structure multimodal diffusion modeling. DiffPreT guides the encoder to recover the native protein sequences and structures from the perturbed ones along the multimodal diffusion trajectory, which acquires the joint distribution of sequences and structures. Considering the essential protein conformational variations, we enhance DiffPreT by a physics-inspired method called Siamese Diffusion Trajectory Prediction ( SiamDiff ) to capture the correlation between different conformers of a protein. SiamDiff attains this goal by maximizing the mutual information between representations of diffusion trajectories of structurally-correlated conformers. We study the effectiveness of DiffPreT and SiamDiff on both atom-and residue-level structure-based protein understanding tasks. Experimental results show that the performance of DiffPreT is consistently competitive on all tasks, and SiamDiff achieves new state-of-the-art performance, considering the mean ranks on all tasks. The source code will be released upon acceptance.
GraphCG: Unsupervised Discovery of Steerable Factors in Graphs
Shengchao Liu
Chengpeng Wang
Weili Nie
Hanchen Wang
Jiarui Lu
Bolei Zhou
Deep generative models have been extensively explored recently, especially for the graph data such as molecular graphs and point clouds. Yet… (voir plus), much less investigation has been carried out on understanding the learned latent space of deep graph generative models. Such understandings can open up a unified perspective and provide guidelines for essential tasks like controllable generation. In this paper, we first examine the representation space of the recent deep generative model trained for graph data, observing that the learned representation space is not perfectly disentangled. Based on this observation, we then propose an unsupervised method called GraphCG, which is model-agnostic and task-agnostic for discovering steerable factors in graph data. Specifically, GraphCG learns the semantic-rich directions via maximizing the corresponding mutual information, where the edited graph along the same direction will possess certain steerable factors. We conduct experiments on two types of graph data, molecular graphs and point clouds. Both the quantitative and qualitative results show the effectiveness of GraphCG for discovering steerable factors. The code will be public in the near future.
Flaky Performances when Pretraining on Relational Databases
Shengchao Liu
David Vazquez
Pierre-Andre Noel
Implications of Topological Imbalance for Representation Learning on Biomedical Knowledge Graphs
Stephen Bonner
Ufuk Kirik
Ola Engkvist
Ian P Barrett
Adoption of recently developed methods from machine learning has given rise to creation of drug-discovery knowledge graphs (KGs) that utiliz… (voir plus)e the interconnected nature of the domain. Graph-based modelling of the data, combined with KG embedding (KGE) methods, are promising as they provide a more intuitive representation and are suitable for inference tasks such as predicting missing links. One common application is to produce ranked lists of genes for a given disease, where the rank is based on the perceived likelihood of association between the gene and the disease. It is thus critical that these predictions are not only pertinent but also biologically meaningful. However, KGs can be biased either directly due to the underlying data sources that are integrated or due to modelling choices in the construction of the graph, one consequence of which is that certain entities can get topologically overrepresented. We demonstrate the effect of these inherent structural imbalances, resulting in densely connected entities being highly ranked no matter the context. We provide support for this observation across different datasets, models as well as predictive tasks. Further, we present various graph perturbation experiments which yield more support to the observation that KGE models can be more influenced by the frequency of entities rather than any biological information encoded within the relations. Our results highlight the importance of data modelling choices, and emphasizes the need for practitioners to be mindful of these issues when interpreting model outputs and during KG composition.
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering
Jing Zhang
Xiaokang Zhang
Jifan Yu
Jie Tang
Cuiping Li
Hong Chen
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering
Jing Zhang
Xiaokang Zhang
Jifan Yu
Jie Tang
Cuiping Li
Hong Chen
Recent works on knowledge base question answering (KBQA) retrieve subgraphs for easier reasoning. The desired subgraph is crucial as a small… (voir plus) one may exclude the answer but a large one might introduce more noises. However, the existing retrieval is either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs, which increases the reasoning bias when the intermediate supervision is missing. This paper proposes a trainable subgraph retriever (SR) decoupled from the subsequent reasoning process, which enables a plug-and-play framework to enhance any subgraph-oriented KBQA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate SR achieves significantly better retrieval and QA performance than existing retrieval methods. Via weakly supervised pre-training as well as the end-to-end fine-tuning, SR achieves new state-of-the-art performance when combined with NSM (He et al., 2021), a subgraph-oriented reasoner, for embedding-based KBQA methods. Codes and datasets are available online (https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SubgraphRetrievalKBQA)
High-Order Pooling for Graph Neural Networks with Tensor Decomposition
Metro: Memory-Enhanced Transformer for Retrosynthetic Planning via Reaction Tree
Songtao Liu
Zhitao Ying
Rex Ying
Zuobai Zhang
Peilin Zhao
Lu Lin
Dinghao Wu
Retrosynthetic planning plays a critical role in drug discovery and organic chemistry. Starting from a target molecule as the root node, it … (voir plus)aims to find a complete reaction tree subject to the constraint that all leaf nodes belong to a set of starting materials. The multi-step reactions are crucial because they determine the flow chart in the production of the Organic Chemical Industry. However, existing datasets lack curation of tree-structured multi-step reactions, and fail to provide such reaction trees, limiting models’ understanding of organic molecule transformations. In this work, we first develop a benchmark curated for the retrosynthetic planning task, which consists of 124,869 reaction trees retrieved from the public USPTO-full dataset. On top of that, we propose Metro: Memory-Enhanced Transformer for RetrOsynthetic planning. Specifically, the dependency among molecules in the reaction tree is captured as context information for multi-step retrosynthesis predictions through transformers with a memory module. Extensive experiments show that Metro dramatically outperforms existing single-step retrosynthesis models by at least 10.7% in top-1 accuracy. The experiments demonstrate the superiority of exploiting context information in the retrosynthetic planning task. Moreover, the proposed model can be directly used for synthetic accessibility analysis, as it is trained on reaction trees with the shortest depths. Our work is the first step towards a brand new formulation for retrosynthetic planning in the aspects of data construction, model design, and evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/SongtaoLiu0823/metro.
Implications of Topological Imbalance for Representation Learning on Biomedical Knowledge Graphs
Stephen Bonner
Ufuk Kirik
Ola Engkvist
I. Barrett
Adoption of recently developed methods from machine learning has given rise to creation of drug-discovery knowledge graphs (KGs) that utiliz… (voir plus)e the interconnected nature of the domain. Graph-based modelling of the data, combined with KG embedding (KGE) methods, are promising as they provide a more intuitive representation and are suitable for inference tasks such as predicting missing links. One common application is to produce ranked lists of genes for a given disease, where the rank is based on the perceived likelihood of association between the gene and the disease. It is thus critical that these predictions are not only pertinent but also biologically meaningful. However, KGs can be biased either directly due to the underlying data sources that are integrated or due to modelling choices in the construction of the graph, one consequence of which is that certain entities can get topologically overrepresented. We demonstrate the effect of these inherent structural imbalances, resulting in densely connected entities being highly ranked no matter the context. We provide support for this observation across different datasets, models as well as predictive tasks. Further, we present various graph perturbation experiments which yield more support to the observation that KGE models can be more influenced by the frequency of entities rather than any biological information encoded within the relations. Our results highlight the importance of data modelling choices, and emphasizes the need for practitioners to be mindful of these issues when interpreting model outputs and during KG composition.
Full-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction With Reinforced Recurrent Networks
Cheng Yang
Hao Wang
Chuan Shi
Maosong Sun
Ganqu Cui
Zhiyuan Liu
Information diffusion prediction is an important task, which studies how information items spread among users. With the success of deep lear… (voir plus)ning techniques, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown their powerful capability in modeling information diffusion as sequential data. However, previous works focused on either microscopic diffusion prediction, which aims at guessing who will be the next influenced user at what time, or macroscopic diffusion prediction, which estimates the total numbers of influenced users during the diffusion process. To the best of our knowledge, few attempts have been made to suggest a unified model for both microscopic and macroscopic scales. In this article, we propose a novel full-scale diffusion prediction model based on reinforcement learning (RL). RL incorporates the macroscopic diffusion size information into the RNN-based microscopic diffusion model by addressing the nondifferentiable problem. We also employ an effective structural context extraction strategy to utilize the underlying social graph information. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models on both microscopic and macroscopic diffusion predictions on three real-world datasets.
Full-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction With Reinforced Recurrent Networks
Cheng Yang
Hao Wang
Chuan Shi
Maosong Sun
Ganqu Cui
Zhiyuan Liu
Information diffusion prediction is an important task, which studies how information items spread among users. With the success of deep lear… (voir plus)ning techniques, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown their powerful capability in modeling information diffusion as sequential data. However, previous works focused on either microscopic diffusion prediction, which aims at guessing who will be the next influenced user at what time, or macroscopic diffusion prediction, which estimates the total numbers of influenced users during the diffusion process. To the best of our knowledge, few attempts have been made to suggest a unified model for both microscopic and macroscopic scales. In this article, we propose a novel full-scale diffusion prediction model based on reinforcement learning (RL). RL incorporates the macroscopic diffusion size information into the RNN-based microscopic diffusion model by addressing the nondifferentiable problem. We also employ an effective structural context extraction strategy to utilize the underlying social graph information. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models on both microscopic and macroscopic diffusion predictions on three real-world datasets.
An End-to-End Framework for Molecular Conformation Generation via Bilevel Programming
Minkai Xu
Wujie Wang
Shitong Luo
Chence Shi
Rafael G'omez-bombarelli
Predicting molecular conformations (or 3D structures) from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in many applications. Most existing app… (voir plus)roaches are usually divided into two steps by first predicting the distances between atoms and then generating a 3D structure through optimizing a distance geometry problem. However, the distances predicted with such two-stage approaches may not be able to consistently preserve the geometry of local atomic neighborhoods, making the generated structures unsatisfying. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for molecular conformation prediction called ConfVAE based on the conditional variational autoencoder framework. Specifically, the molecular graph is first encoded in a latent space, and then the 3D structures are generated by solving a principled bilevel optimization program. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/MinkaiXu/ConfVAE-ICML21.