Yifan Deng


2024

pdf bib
ChatMol Copilot: An Agent for Molecular Modeling and Computation Powered by LLMs
Jinyuan Sun | Auston Li | Yifan Deng | Jiabo Li
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Language + Molecules (L+M 2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT excel at diverse tasks when given explicit instructions, yet they often struggle with specialized domains such as molecular science, lacking in-depth reasoning and sophisticated planning capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce ChatMol Copilot, a chatbot-like agent specifically engineered for protein design and small molecule computations. ChatMol Copilot employs a multi-level abstraction framework to expand the LLM‘s capability. At the basic level, it integrates external computational tools through function calls, thus offloading complex tasks and enabling a focus on strategic decision-making. The second level is data abstraction. Large data sets (such as a large number of molecules created by a generative model) are stored in Redis cache, and the redis keys are referenced by LLMs for data sources involved in computation. The third level of abstraction allows the LLM to orchestrate these tools, either directly or via dynamically generated Python executables. Our evaluations demonstrate that ChatMol Copilot can adeptly manage molecular modeling tasks, effectively utilizing a variety of tools as directed. By simplifying access to sophisticated molecular modeling resources, ChatMol Copilot stands to significantly accelerate drug discovery and biotechnological innovation, empowering biochemists with advanced, user-friendly AI capabilities. The open-sourced code is available at https://github.com/ChatMol/ChatMol

2023

pdf bib
Towards Faithful Dialogues via Focus Learning
Yifan Deng | Xingsheng Zhang | Heyan Huang | Yue Hu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Maintaining faithfulness between responses and knowledge is an important research topic for building reliable knowledge-grounded dialogue systems. Existing models heavily rely on elaborate data engineering or increasing the model’s parameters ignoring to track the tokens that significantly influence losses, which is decisive for the optimization direction of the model in each iteration. To address this issue, we propose Focus Learning (FocusL), a novel learning approach that adjusts the contribution of each token to the optimization direction by directly scaling the corresponding objective loss. Specifically, we first introduce a positioning method by utilizing similarity distributions between knowledge and each response token to locate knowledge-aware tokens. Then, we further design a similarity-to-weight transformation to provide dynamic token-level weights for the cross-entropy loss. Finally, we use the weighted loss to encourage the model to pay special attention to the knowledge utilization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art results and generates more reliable responses while maintaining training stability.