Jianpeng Chen

About Me

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech since Aug. 2023, where I am advised by Prof. Dawei Zhou in VLOG Lab. During my M.S. degree at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), I was fortunately advised by Prof. Yazhou Ren and Prof. Lifang He on the topic of multi-view/graph self-supervised learning.

Generally, my research lies in data mining and machine learning, with a particular focus on self-/un-supervised multi-modal/view/graph learning. and Agentic LLMs. I also seek to apply my research to scientific domains, such as 3D graph modeling of metamaterials and molecules, contributing to the broader community of AI for science. To date, my work has led to multiple publications in top-tier venues, including KDD, AAAI, TNNLS, ICML, NAACL, etc., spanning machine learning, language models, and scientific discovery. Some major results are as follows:

Agentic LLMs (Preprints’25: LinguaMate, ChemBOMAS) paves the way for collaboration between knowledge-driven agents and data-driven agents by exploring symbolic-driven latent optimization and finetuned LLM with Bayesian optimization.
Multi-view/modal learning (ICML’25, AAAI’23, AAAI’24, ICONIP’22) studies unsupervised multi-view/modal alignment and collaboration mechanisms for clustering and generative tasks.
Graph learning/generation (INS’24, TNNLS’25) develops methods for graph semantic extraction and specification-aware variational inference for graph generation.
Applications on Molecular and Material Science (KDD’25, ICML’25, IJCAI’24) investigates how the advanced LLMs and generative models can be integrated with domain-specific knowledge for molecule and material modeling.

News

[Nov. 2025] Glad to be recognized by IEEE ICDM Organizing Committee as a Student Volunteer to contribute to the inspiring community.
[Nov. 2025] Congrats to Alex for our work, Generalizable Physics-Aware Refinement Framework for Metamaterial Design, receiving the IEEE ICDM UGHS Rising Star Award.
[Nov. 2025] Congrats to our paper, The End of Trial-and-Error: A Vision for Generative Intelligence in Metamaterial Design, accepted by IEEE ICDM Bluesky.
[Aug. 2025] My research topic on Metamaterial Discovery is accepted by ICDM PhD Forum. See you in DC.
[June 2025] I am pleased to receive the Virginia Tech Travel Award.
[May 2025] Our benchmark, MetamatBench, on Metamaterial Discovery, is accepted by KDD 2025.
[April 2025] Our paper Unimate is accepted by ICML 2025.
[Mar. 2025] I will give a talk on Metamaterial at AAAI Spring Symposia 2025.
[Mar. 2025] Our demo MetaScientist is accepted by NAACL 2025.
[Jan. 2025] Our paper VGMGC is accepted by TNNLS.

Selected Publications

(Refer to Google Scholar for full publication list.)

KDD DB

MetamatBench: Integrating Heterogeneous Data, Computational Tools, and Visual Interface for Metamaterial Discovery

Jianpeng Chen, Wangzhi Zhan, Haohui Wang, Zian Jia, Jingru Gan, Junkai Zhang, Jingyuan Qi, Tingwei Chen, Lifu Huang, Muhao Chen, Ling Li, Wei Wang, Dawei Zhou

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining DB Track(KDD DB), 2025

PDF Code Project Page BibTex

ICML

UniMate: A Unified Model for Mechanical Metamaterial Generation, Property Prediction, and Condition Confirmation

Wangzhi Zhan, Jianpeng Chen, Dongqi Fu, Dawei Zhou

Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025

Code

NAACL Demo

MetaScientist: A Human-AI Synergistic Framework for Automated Mechanical Metamaterial Design

Jingyuan Qi, Zian Jia, Minqian Liu, Wangzhi Zhan, Junkai Zhang, Xiaofei Wen, Jingru Gan, Jianpeng Chen, Qin Liu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Bangzheng Li, Haohui Wang, Adithya Kulkarni, Muhao Chen, Dawei Zhou, Ling Li, Wei Wang, Lifu Huang

2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics -- System Demonstration Track (NAACL Demo), 2025

PDF Project Page BibTex

TNNLS

Variational Graph Generator for Multi-View Graph Clustering

Jianpeng Chen, Yawen Ling, Jie Xu, Yazhou Ren*, Shudong Huang, Xiaorong Pu, Zhifeng Hao, S Yu Philip, Lifang He

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

PDF Code BibTex

NeurIPS DB

Towards Heterogeneous Long-tailed Learning: Benchmarking, Metrics, and Toolbox

Haohui Wang, Weijie Guan, Jianpeng Chen, Zi Wang, Dawei Zhou

Thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems DB Track (NeurIPS DB), 2024

PDF

Arxiv

Similarity-Enhanced Homophily for Multi-View Heterophilous Graph Clustering

Jianpeng Chen, Yawen Ling (Equal Contribution), Yazhou Ren*, Zichen Wen, Tianyi Wu, Shufei Zhang, Lifang He (Equal Contribution)

Preprint

PDF

IJCAI Demo

3D-FuM: Benchmarking 3D Molecule Learning with Functional Groups

Tingwei Chen, Jianpeng Chen (Equal Contribution), Dawei Zhou

Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Demo Track (IJCAI Demo), 2024

PDF

AAAI

Dual Label-Guided Graph Refinement for Multi-View Graph Clustering

Yawen Ling, Jianpeng Chen (Equal Contribution), Yazhou Ren*, Xiaorong Pu, Jie Xu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Lifang He

Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023

PDF Code Oral Presentation

ICONIP

Shared-Attribute Multi-Graph Clustering with Global Self-Attention

Jianpeng Chen, Zhimeng Yang, Xiaorong Pu, Yazhou Ren*, Li Gao, Lifang He

Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP), 2022

PDF Code BibTex LNCS AC=14.6%, Oral Presentation

INS

Customizing Graph Neural Network using Path Reweighting

Jianpeng Chen, Yujing Wang (Equal Contribution), Ming Zeng (Equal Contribution), Zongyi Xiang, Bitan Hou, Yunhai Tong, Ole J Mengshoel, Yazhou Ren*

Information Sciences

PDF Code

Talks

Accepted Talk (Integrating Heterogeneous Data, Computational Tools, and Visual Interface for Metamaterial Discovery) at Towards Agentic AI for Science, AAAI Spring Symposia 2025

About Me

News

Selected Publications

Talks

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Conference PC/Reviewers

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