Post #863

GraphML News (September 21st) - AITHYRA, Fragrance 2o, LOG meetups 🧬 The Austrian Academy of Sciences together with Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation launched AITHYRA - the Institute for Biomedical AI - with a generous €150M funding over the next 12 years as a part of the Vienna BioCenter with Michael Bronstein as the first scientific director! AITHYRA plans to host 10-15 research groups supporting them with compute resources and robotic lab. Chances are AITHYRA might become the European version of the Institute for Protein Design (behold, David Baker) and the hub for Geometric Deep Learning research. Big win for Vienna 👏 👃Osmo, a generative fragrance startup founded by ex-Google researchers who worked on the Principal Odor Map, uncovered a bit more details on the Fragrance 2o platform - essentially, this is a molecule search / generation for potential fragrance molecules with further conditional generation capabilities. It would certainly be exciting to discover a personalized scent like “of a sweaty researcher submitting an ICLR paper while camping in Yosemite forests”. We will keep you up to date whether GNNs conquer the perfume world and beauty industry and when Fragrantica starts to list LLM prompts as ingredients. 🍻 One of the unique ideas of the Learning on Graphs conference are local meetups about graph learning research. To date, seven meetups spanning October-December have been announced: Tel Aviv, New Jersey, Aachen, Amsterdam, Paris, Kunshan, and Siena - feel free to attend or organize one at your place! Weekend reading: Accelerating Training with Neuron Interaction and Nowcasting Networks by Boris Knyazev et al and collab between Samsung and Mila - pretty amazing work where every k-th optimization step model weights are predicted by a graph transformer conditioned on the neural net architecture (supports convnets, GPT2, BERT, Llama, and ViTs), brings up to 50% speed ups in optimization. The Empirical Impact of Neural Parameter Symmetries, or Lack Thereof by Derek Lim, Moe Putterman feat. Haggai Maron - another interesting work on neural parameter symmetries. Turns out that fixing weights in MLPs via freezing or non-linearities breaks parameter symmetries and enables better model merging (you can interpolate between pre-trained models to get even better performance). Can Graph Reordering Speed Up Graph Neural Network Training? An Experimental Study by Nikolai Merkel et al (VLDB 2025) - The answer is yes, avg speedup is 25%. The idea of partitioning the graph into several components to optimize memory reads is similar to the findings of Graph Segment Pre-training (by Google) and Sequential Aggregation and Rematerialization (Intel). Deep learning-based predictions of gene perturbation effects do not yet outperform simple linear methods by Constantin Ahlmann-Eltze et al 🫳🎤