Chaoran Cheng

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Hi! I am Chaoran Cheng, a third-year CS Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am advised by Prof. Ge Liu, before which I was working with Prof. Jian Peng. My research interests mainly span multiple aspects of generative modeling in AI4Science domains, with a special interest in manifold learning in which desirable network behaviors are mathematically inspired and guaranteed. Combining continuous and discrete modalities with a more comprehensive and versatile generative model for molecules and proteins, our work can build a more comprehensive and versatile generative model and has been successfully applied to various AI4Science tasks including protein sequence-structure co-design and structure-based drug design.

I am actively engaged in the MMLI initiative, a joint effort between UIUC CS School and Chemistry Department to develop a machine learning-based platform for molecular design. I am also engaged in the CABBI initiative, a multi-institutional project to deal with the emergent challenges of sustainable bioproducts.

I obtained my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Peking University, before which I also spent my freshman year studying chemistry.

Other personal interests Out of my pure personal interest, I am developing a machine-learning based automatic charter for Cytoid, a community-driven rhythm game inspired by Rayark's games Cytus and Cytus II. The community provides many fan-made charts that can be used to train a machine learning system.


News

Nov 6, 2024
My contributing work on AI²BMD during my internship at MSRA has been accepted to Nature. In this work, we extend AI-assisted molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to large-scale protein systems with ab initio accuracy. Check out MSR's introductory blog on why MD can be fundamental to various AI4Science domains.
Sep 27, 2024 Our latest work of Statistical Flow Matching (SFM) for discrete generation has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024! Check out our paper on arXiv and our code on GitHub. We applied SFM across image, text, and biological domains demonstrate its superior sampling quality and NLL on discrete tasks.
Sep 21, 2023 My work Equivariant Neural Operator Learning with Graphon Convolution was accepted to NeurIPS 2023 as a Spotlight paper. Check out the paper here. I am also honored to be the Workflow Chair of the New Frontiers in Graph Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2023!
Dec 7, 2022
Check out this post on the Tensor Field Network!
Nov 30, 2022
Get a glimpse of Cézanne and the revolution of modern art.

Selected Publications

  1. Ab initio characterization of protein molecular dynamics with AI2BMD
    Tong Wang, Xinheng He, Mingyu Li, Yatao Li, Ran Bi, Yusong Wang, Chaoran Cheng, Jiawei Shen, He Zhang, Haiguang Liu, Zun Wang, Shaoning Li, Bin Shao, and Tie-Yan Liu
    Nature Nov 2024
  2. Categorical Flow Matching on Statistical Manifolds
    Chaoran Cheng, Jiahan Li, Jian Peng, and Ge Liu
    In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2024, NeurIPS 2024 Nov 2024
  3. Neural P³M: A Long-Range Interaction Modeling Enhancer for Geometric GNNs
    Yusong Wang, Chaoran Cheng, Shaoning Li, Yuxuan Ren, Bin Shao, Ge Liu, Pheng-Ann Heng, and Nanning Zheng
    In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2024, NeurIPS 2024 Nov 2024
  4. Full-Atom Peptide Design based on Multi-modal Flow Matching
    Jiahan Li, Chaoran Cheng, Zuofan Wu, Ruihan Guo, Shitong Luo, Zhizhou Ren, Jian Peng, and Jianzhu Ma
    In Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2024 Nov 2024
  5. Equivariant Neural Operator Learning with Graphon Convolution
    Chaoran Cheng, and Jian Peng
    In Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2023, NeurIPS 2023 Nov 2023
  6. Equivariant Point Cloud Analysis via Learning Orientations for Message Passing
    Shitong Luo, Jiahan Li, Jiaqi Guan, Yufeng Su, Chaoran Cheng, Jian Peng, and Jianzhu Ma
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Jun 2022