Your story, your life, your learning: Autobiography Reveals Basis for Supporting Personalized, Holistic Pedagogy

Each person ongoingly experiences the world uniquely through vital processes shaping their subjectivity, personhood and sense of self. Learning, an innate characteristic or modality of each human life, of living, likewise arises subjectively or idiosyncratically. In this paper, a phenomenological lens is applied to auto/biographical excerpts concerned with various learning experiences to help reveal essential, subjective characteristics of emergent learning. The insights help establish a basis for challenging the primacy of objectivist learning evaluations. The insights also confirm the importance of personalizing learning as a pedagogical gesture nurturing and enfranchising student learning in significant ways beyond conventional educational approaches that generally ignore subjectivity. Personalized, holistic learning is also proposed here as a solution to address many challenges and issues emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper is based on the author’s recent PhD research

MoleCLUEs: Optimizing Molecular Conformers by Minimization of Differentiable Uncertainty

Structure-based models in the molecular sciences can be highly sensitive to input geometries and give predictions with large variance under subtle coordinate perturbations. We present an approach to mitigate this failure mode by generating conformations that explicitly minimize uncertainty in a predictive model. To achieve this, we compute differentiable estimates of aleatoric \textit{and} epistemic uncertainties directly from learned embeddings. We then train an optimizer that iteratively samples embeddings to reduce these uncertainties according to their gradients. As our predictive model is constructed as a variational autoencoder, the new embeddings can be decoded to their corresponding inputs, which we call \textit{MoleCLUEs}, or (molecular) counterfactual latent uncertainty explanations \citep{antoran2020getting}. We provide results of our algorithm for the task of predicting drug properties with maximum confidence as well as analysis of the differentiable structure simulations.Comment: Submitted to the Differentiable Almost Everything Workshop, ICML 202

SeO₂-Mediated Oxidative Transposition of Pauson–Khand Products

Oxidative transpositions of bicyclic cyclopentenones mediated by selenium dioxide (SeO₂) are disclosed. Treatment of Pauson–Khand reaction (PKR) products with SeO₂ in the presence or absence of water furnishes di- and trioxidized cyclopentenones, respectively. Mechanistic investigations reveal multiple competing oxidation pathways that depend on substrate identity and water concentration. Functionalization of the oxidized products via cross-coupling methods demonstrates their synthetic utility. These transformations allow rapid access to oxidatively transposed cyclopentenones from simple PKR products

BOtied: Multi-objective Bayesian optimization with tied multivariate ranks

Many scientific and industrial applications require joint optimization of multiple, potentially competing objectives. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) is a sample-efficient framework for identifying Pareto-optimal solutions. We show a natural connection between non-dominated solutions and the highest multivariate rank, which coincides with the outermost level line of the joint cumulative distribution function (CDF). We propose the CDF indicator, a Pareto-compliant metric for evaluating the quality of approximate Pareto sets that complements the popular hypervolume indicator. At the heart of MOBO is the acquisition function, which determines the next candidate to evaluate by navigating the best compromises among the objectives. Multi-objective acquisition functions that rely on box decomposition of the objective space, such as the expected hypervolume improvement (EHVI) and entropy search, scale poorly to a large number of objectives. We propose an acquisition function, called BOtied, based on the CDF indicator. BOtied can be implemented efficiently with copulas, a statistical tool for modeling complex, high-dimensional distributions. We benchmark BOtied against common acquisition functions, including EHVI and random scalarization (ParEGO), in a series of synthetic and real-data experiments. BOtied performs on par with the baselines across datasets and metrics while being computationally efficient.Comment: 10 pages (+5 appendix), 9 figures. Submitted to NeurIP

3D Computer Vision Models Predict DFT-Level HOMO-LUMO Gap Energies from Force-Field-Optimized Geometries

We investigate 3D deep learning methods for predicting quantum mechanical energies at high-theory-level accuracy from inexpensive, rapidly computed molecular geometries. Using space-filled volumetric representations (voxels), we explore the effects of radial decay from atom centers and rotational data augmentation on learnability. We test several published computer vision models for 3D shape learning, and construct our own architecture based on 3D inception networks with physically meaningful kernels. We provide a framework for further studies and propose a modeling challenge for the computer vision and molecular machine learning communities

Multilabel Classification Models for the Prediction of Cross-Coupling Reaction Conditions

Machine-learned ranking models have been developed for the prediction of substrate-specific cross-coupling reaction conditions. Data sets of published reactions were curated for Suzuki, Negishi, and C–N couplings, as well as Pauson–Khand reactions. String, descriptor, and graph encodings were tested as input representations, and models were trained to predict the set of conditions used in a reaction as a binary vector. Unique reagent dictionaries categorized by expert-crafted reaction roles were constructed for each data set, leading to context-aware predictions. We find that relational graph convolutional networks and gradient-boosting machines are very effective for this learning task, and we disclose a novel reaction-level graph attention operation in the top-performing model

Graph Neural Networks for the Prediction of Substrate-Specific Organic Reaction Conditions

We present a systematic investigation using graph neural networks (GNNs) to model organic chemical reactions. To do so, we prepared a dataset collection of four ubiquitous reactions from the organic chemistry literature. We evaluate seven different GNN architectures for classification tasks pertaining to the identification of experimental reagents and conditions. We find that models are able to identify specific graph features that affect reaction conditions and lead to accurate predictions. The results herein show great promise in advancing molecular machine learning

Graph Neural Networks for the Prediction of Substrate-Specific Organic Reaction Conditions

We present a systematic investigation using graph neural networks (GNNs) to model organic chemical reactions. To do so, we prepared a dataset collection of four ubiquitous reactions from the organic chemistry literature. We evaluate seven different GNN architectures for classification tasks pertaining to the identification of experimental reagents and conditions. We find that models are able to identify specific graph features that affect reaction conditions and lead to accurate predictions. The results herein show great promise in advancing molecular machine learning.Comment: 23 pages, 10 tables, 13 figures, to appear in the ICML 2020 Workshop on Graph Representation Learning and Beyond (GRLB

Multilabel Classification Models for the Prediction of Cross-Coupling Reaction Conditions

Machine-learned ranking models have been developed for the prediction of substrate-specific cross-coupling reaction conditions. Data sets of published reactions were curated for Suzuki, Negishi, and C–N couplings, as well as Pauson–Khand reactions. String, descriptor, and graph encodings were tested as input representations, and models were trained to predict the set of conditions used in a reaction as a binary vector. Unique reagent dictionaries categorized by expert-crafted reaction roles were constructed for each data set, leading to context-aware predictions. We find that relational graph convolutional networks and gradient-boosting machines are very effective for this learning task, and we disclose a novel reaction-level graph attention operation in the top-performing model

SupSiam: Non-contrastive Auxiliary Loss for Learning from Molecular Conformers

We investigate Siamese networks for learning related embeddings for augmented samples of molecular conformers. We find that a non-contrastive (positive-pair only) auxiliary task aids in supervised training of Euclidean neural networks (E3NNs) and increases manifold smoothness (MS) around point-cloud geometries. We demonstrate this property for multiple drug-activity prediction tasks while maintaining relevant performance metrics, and propose an extension of MS to probabilistic and regression settings. We provide an analysis of representation collapse, finding substantial effects of task-weighting, latent dimension, and regularization. We expect the presented protocol to aid in the development of reliable E3NNs from molecular conformers, even for small-data drug discovery programs.Comment: Submitted to the MLDD workshop, ICLR 202