Portrait de Guy Wolf

Guy Wolf

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, Université de Montréal, Département de mathématiques et statistiques
Concordia University
CHUM - Montreal University Hospital Center
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage profond
Apprentissage spectral
Apprentissage sur graphes
Exploration des données
Modélisation moléculaire
Recherche d'information
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Systèmes dynamiques
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique

Biographie

Guy Wolf est professeur agrégé au Département de mathématiques et de statistique de l'Université de Montréal. Ses intérêts de recherche se situent au carrefour de l'apprentissage automatique, de la science des données et des mathématiques appliquées. Il s'intéresse particulièrement aux méthodes d'exploration de données qui utilisent l'apprentissage multiple et l'apprentissage géométrique profond, ainsi qu'aux applications pour l'analyse exploratoire des données biomédicales.

Ses recherches portent sur l'analyse exploratoire des données, avec des applications en bio-informatique. Ses approches sont multidisciplinaires et combinent l'apprentissage automatique, le traitement du signal et les outils mathématiques appliqués. En particulier, ses travaux récents utilisent une combinaison de géométries de diffusion et d'apprentissage profond pour trouver des modèles émergents, des dynamiques et des structures dans les mégadonnées à grande dimension (par exemple, dans la génomique et la protéomique de la cellule unique).

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Yale University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Postdoctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill (assistant professor)

Publications

Active search generation for nanophotonic design in the small data regime
Yuri Grinberg
Dan Kushnir
Yanlei Zhang
Dan-Xia Xu
MIOFlow 2.0: A unified framework for inferring cellular stochastic dynamics from single cell and spatial transcriptomics data
Xingzhi Sun
João Felipe Rocha
Brett Phelan
Dhananjay Bhaskar
Yanlei Zhang
D. S. Magruder
Ke Xu
Oluwadamilola Fasina
Mark Gerstein
Natalia Ivanova
Christine L. Chaffer
Understanding cellular trajectories via time-resolved single-cell transcriptomics is vital for studying development, regeneration, and disea… (voir plus)se. A key challenge is inferring continuous trajectories from discrete snapshots. Biological complexity stems from stochastic cell fate decisions, temporal proliferation changes, and spatial environmental influences. Current methods often use deterministic interpolations treating cells in isolation, failing to capture the probabilistic branching, population shifts, and niche-dependent signaling driving real biological processes. We introduce Manifold Interpolating Optimal-Transport Flow (MIOFlow) 2.0. This framework learns biologically informed cellular trajectories by integrating manifold learning, optimal transport, and neural differential equations. It models three core processes: (1) stochasticity and branching via Neural Stochastic Differential Equations; (2) non-conservative population changes using a learned growth-rate model initialized with unbalanced optimal transport; and (3) environmental influence through a joint latent space unifying gene expression with spatial features like local cell type composition and signaling. By operating in a PHATE-distance matching autoencoder latent space, MIOFlow 2.0 ensures trajectories respect the data's intrinsic geometry. Empirical comparisons show expressive trajectory learning via neural differential equations outperforms existing generative models, including simulation-free flow matching. Validated on synthetic datasets, embryoid body differentiation, and spatially resolved axolotl brain regeneration, MIOFlow 2.0 improves trajectory accuracy and reveals hidden drivers of cellular transitions, like specific signaling niches. MIOFlow 2.0 thus bridges single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to uncover tissue-scale trajectories.
Multimodal Manifold Learning for Clonally Constrained Trajectory Inference
A central goal of single-cell transcriptomics is to reconstruct dynamic cellular processes from static scRNA-seq snapshots, yet most traject… (voir plus)ory inference methods rely on transcriptomic similarity as a proxy for developmental linkage — an assumption that frequently fails. While lineage tracing overcomes this limitation, it requires genetic perturbations and specialized longitudinal designs. In adaptive immune cells, T and B cell receptors (AIRs) naturally encode clonal ancestry and are routinely sequenced alongside the transcriptome, providing lineage information in standard snapshot datasets, but existing trajectory methods are not adapted to exploit this signal. Here, we lay the foundation for incorporating AIR-encoded lineage information into trajectory inference by biasing RNA-based diffusion maps toward AIR-consistent paths, thereby integrating lineage constraints into learned cell-state representations. Across simulations of increasing complexity, our multimodal approach recovers more biologically plausible trajectories than RNA-only baselines. While optimized for lymphocyte differentiation, the framework generalizes to other endogenous lineage barcodes, such as mitochondrial mutations.
Can Computational Reducibility Lead to Transferable Models for Graph Combinatorial Optimization?
A key challenge in deriving unified neural solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO) is efficient generalization of models between a given… (voir plus) set of tasks to new tasks not used during the initial training process. To address it, we first establish a new model, which uses a GCON module as a form of expressive message passing together with energy-based unsupervised loss functions. This model achieves high performance (often comparable with state-of-the-art results) across multiple CO tasks when trained individually on each task. We then leverage knowledge from the computational reducibility literature to propose pretraining and fine-tuning strategies that transfer effectively (a) between MVC, MIS and MaxClique, and (b) in a multi-task learning setting that additionally incorporates MaxCut, MDS and graph coloring. Additionally, in a leave-one-out, multi-task learning setting, we observe that pretraining on all but one task almost always leads to faster convergence on the remaining task when fine-tuning while avoiding negative transfer. Our findings indicate that learning common representations across multiple graph CO problems is viable through the use of expressive message passing coupled with pretraining strategies that are informed by the polynomial reduction literature, thereby taking an important step towards enabling the development of foundational models for neural CO. We provide an open-source implementation of our work at https://github.com/semihcanturk/COPT-MT .
Position: Message-passing and spectral GNNs are two sides of the same coin
Antonis Vasileiou
Juan Cervino
Pascal Frossard
Charilaos I. Kanatsoulis
Michael T. Schaub
Pierre Vandergheynst
Zhiyang Wang
Ron Levie
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral graph neural networks, reflectin… (voir plus)g two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. This paper argues that this divide is mostly artificial, hindering progress in the field. We propose a viewpoint in which both MPNNs and spectral GNNs are understood as different parametrizations of permutation-equivariant operators acting on graph signals. From this perspective, many popular architectures are equivalent in expressive power, while genuine gaps arise only in specific regimes. We further argue that MPNNs and spectral GNNs offer complementary strengths. That is, MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis using tools from logic and graph isomorphism research, while the spectral perspective provides principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we posit that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clearly understanding the key similarities and differences between these two types of GNNs, and by working towards unifying these perspectives within a common theoretical and conceptual framework rather than treating them as competing paradigms.
Forest-Guided Semantic Transport for Label-Supervised Manifold Alignment
Kevin R. Moon
Jake S. Rhodes
GraIP: A Benchmarking Framework For Neural Graph Inverse Problems
Andrei Manolache
Arman Mielke
Chendi Qian
Antoine Siraudin
Mathias Niepert
A wide range of graph learning tasks, such as structure discovery, temporal graph analysis, and combinatorial optimization, focus on inferri… (voir plus)ng graph structures from data, rather than making predictions on given graphs. However, the respective methods to solve such problems are often developed in an isolated, task-specific manner and thus lack a unifying theoretical foundation. Here, we provide a stepping stone towards the formation of such a foundation and further development by introducing the Neural Graph Inverse Problem (GraIP) conceptual framework, which formalizes and reframes a broad class of graph learning tasks as inverse problems. Unlike discriminative approaches that directly predict target variables from given graph inputs, the GraIP paradigm addresses inverse problems, i.e., it relies on observational data and aims to recover the underlying graph structure by reversing the forward process, such as message passing or network dynamics, that produced the observed outputs. We demonstrate the versatility of GraIP across various graph learning tasks, including rewiring, causal discovery, and neural relational inference. We also propose benchmark datasets and metrics for each GraIP domain considered, and characterize and empirically evaluate existing baseline methods used to solve them. Overall, our unifying perspective bridges seemingly disparate applications and provides a principled approach to structural learning in constrained and combinatorial settings while encouraging cross-pollination of existing methods across graph inverse problems.
Scalable Tree Ensemble Proximities in Python
Kevin R. Moon
Jake S. Rhodes
Geometry-Aware Edge Pooling for Graph Neural Networks
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown significant success for graph-based tasks. Motivated by the prevalence of large datasets in real-wor… (voir plus)ld applications, pooling layers are crucial components of GNNs. By reducing the size of input graphs, pooling enables faster training and potentially better generalisation. However, existing pooling operations often optimise for the learning task at the expense of discarding fundamental graph structures, thus reducing interpretability. This leads to unreliable performance across dataset types, downstream tasks and pooling ratios. Addressing these concerns, we propose novel graph pooling layers for structure-aware pooling via edge collapses. Our methods leverage diffusion geometry and iteratively reduce a graph's size while preserving both its metric structure and its structural diversity. We guide pooling using magnitude, an isometry-invariant diversity measure, which permits us to control the fidelity of the pooling process. Further, we use the spread of a metric space as a faster and more stable alternative ensuring computational efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our methods (i) achieve top performance compared to alternative pooling layers across a range of diverse graph classification tasks, (ii) preserve key spectral properties of the input graphs, and (iii) retain high accuracy across varying pooling ratios.
Freeze, Diffuse, Decode: Geometry-Aware Adaptation of Pretrained Transformer Embeddings for Antimicrobial Peptide Design
Pankhil Gawade
Adam Izdebski
Kevin R. Moon
Jake S. Rhodes
Ewa Szczurek
Graph topological property recovery with heat and wave dynamics-based features on graphs
Dhananjay Bhaskar
Yanlei Zhang
Charles Xu
Xingzhi Sun
Oluwadamilola Fasina
Maximilian Nickel
Michael Perlmutter
Random Forest Autoencoders for Guided Representation Learning
Kevin R. Moon
Jake S. Rhodes
Extensive research has produced robust methods for unsupervised data visualization. Yet supervised visualization…