Lianghong Chen

Ganlin Feng, Yuxi Long, Erin Lou et al.

Children with rare genetic diseases often exhibit distinctive facial phenotypes, yet developing computer vision systems for early diagnosis remains challenging due to extreme data scarcity, privacy constraints, and limited data sharing in pediatric settings. These challenges not only hinder automated diagnosis but also restrict the availability of visual resources for clinical genetic counseling. While prior work has shown that synthetic data can augment real datasets and preserve phenotype-level semantics, it remains unclear whether synthetic data alone is sufficient for learning in ultra-low-resource pediatric settings. In this work, we study the synthetic-only regime for pediatric rare disease recognition. Under a controlled experimental setup, models are trained exclusively on phenotype-aware synthetic facial images at increasing scales. We find that synthetic-only training achieves performance comparable to real-data-only baselines at sufficient scale across multiple backbones, suggesting that high-fidelity synthetic data can approximate clinically meaningful distributions. These findings together further enable the use of synthetic pediatric facial images as privacy-preserving resources for genetic education and counseling, supporting clinician training and patient communication. Our results highlight the potential of computer vision to improve data efficiency and expand accessible visual tools in children's healthcare.

Gen Zhou, Sugitha Janarthanan, Lianghong Chen et al.

To address the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance, antimicrobial peptides (AMP) are being explored for their potent and promising ability to fight resistant pathogens. While artificial intelligence (AI) is being employed to advance AMP discovery and design, most AMP design models struggle to balance key goals like activity, toxicity, and novelty, using rigid or unclear scoring methods that make results hard to interpret and optimize. As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) advance and evolve swiftly, we turn to AI multi-agent collaboration based on such models (multi-agent LLMs), which show rapidly rising potential in complex scientific design scenarios. Based on this, we introduce MAC-AMP, a closed-loop multi-agent collaboration (MAC) system for multi-objective AMP design. The system implements a fully autonomous simulated peer review-adaptive reinforcement learning framework that requires only a task description and example dataset to design novel AMPs. The novelty of our work lies in introducing a closed-loop multi-agent system for AMP design, with cross-domain transferability, that supports multi-objective optimization while remaining explainable rather than a 'black box'. Experiments show that MAC-AMP outperforms other AMP generative models by effectively optimizing AMP generation for multiple key molecular properties, demonstrating exceptional results in antibacterial activity, AMP likeliness, toxicity compliance, and structural reliability.

Lianghong Chen, Dongkyu Eugene Kim, Mike Domaratzki et al.

Designing de novo 3D molecules with desirable properties remains a fundamental challenge in drug discovery and molecular engineering. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality 3D molecular structures, they often struggle to effectively control complex multi-objective constraints critical for real-world applications. In this study, we propose an uncertainty-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to guide the optimization of 3D molecular diffusion models toward multiple property objectives while enhancing the overall quality of the generated molecules. Our method leverages surrogate models with predictive uncertainty estimation to dynamically shape reward functions, facilitating balance across multiple optimization objectives. We comprehensively evaluate our framework across three benchmark datasets and multiple diffusion model architectures, consistently outperforming baselines for molecular quality and property optimization. Additionally, Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and ADMET profiling of top generated candidates indicate promising drug-like behavior and binding stability, comparable to known Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) inhibitors. Our results demonstrate the strong potential of RL-guided generative diffusion models for advancing automated molecular design.