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

[May 2026] I will attend North East AI Agents Day to present our work MetaSymbO, an agentic framework for metamaterial discovery. Let’s meet in NYC!
[April 2026] Our work on Physics-Grounded Material Claim Verification has been accepted to ACL 2026. Many thanks to all collaborators. See you in San Diego!
[April 2026] I will join Google YouTube as a PhD intern this summer, focusing on efficient inference and training for large-scale recommendation models.
[April 2026] Congrats that our paper on multi-view heterophilous graph learning, SMHGC, has been published in Pattern Recognition. Thanks to all collaborators!
[Mar. 2026] Congratulations to our work, MATRIX: Stress-Testing LLM Reasoning in Materials Science, accepted by the ICLR AI4Mat.
[Nov. 2025] Glad to be recognized by the IEEE ICDM Organizing Committee as a Student Volunteer and contribute to this 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 that our paper, The End of Trial-and-Error: A Vision for Generative Intelligence in Metamaterial Design, has been accepted by IEEE ICDM Bluesky.

Archived News →

Selected Publications

(Refer to Google Scholar for full publication list.)

ACL 2026

PhyVer: Physics-Grounded Material Claim Verification with Multi-Fidelity Physical Evidence

Jianpeng Chen, Wangzhi Zhan (Equal Contribution), Haohui Wang, Brian Mayer, Dongqi Fu, Dawei Zhou

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics -- System Demonstration, 2026

Project Page

KDD 2025

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 D&B Track, 2025

PDF Code Project Page BibTex

ICML 2025

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, 2025

Code

NAACL 2025

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, 2025

PDF 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

PDF Code BibTex

Pattern Rec.

SMHGC: Homophily-Agnostic Multi-View Heterophilous Graph Clustering

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

Pattern Recognition

PDF BibTex

IJCAI 2024

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

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

PDF

AAAI 2023

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

PDF Code Oral Presentation

ICONIP 2022

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

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

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

Services

Conference PC/Reviewers

Journal Reviewers