Xuefeng Liu

Postdoc, School of Medicine, Stanford University
Ph.D., Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago
xfl@stanford.edu (primary), xuefeng@uchicago.edu, xuefeng.liu@anl.gov

prof_pic2.jpg

265 Campus Drive

Stanford, CA 94305

Research: My research spans two complementary directions.
(1) Machine Learning Foundations: I develop theoretically grounded methods in reinforcement learning and generative modeling, integrating active, imitation, and multi-expert learning to improve sample efficiency, policy selection, and exploration–exploitation trade-offs.
(2) AI for Life Sciences, with a focus on biomolecular design, where I integrate biophysical and biological modeling with modern AI—particularly reinforcement learning, generative models, and foundation models—to address the CURED challenges: Controllability, Unified multimodality, Robustness, Efficiency, and Dependability on biophysical and biological principles in disease diagnosis and therapy.

My research interests include, but are not limited to:

  • AI for Life Sciences
    • Biomolecular design, drug discovery, biomarker discovery, binding affinity prediction, lead discovery and optimization
  • Reinforcement Learning
    • RL in pretraining, post-training, decoding
    • Reasoning, planning, and decision-making under uncertainty
  • Generative and Foundation Models
    • Generative modeling for biomolecular design and beyond
  • Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery
    • Multimodal reasoning systems for autonomous scientific discovery
  • Scientific Machine Learning
    • Physics- and Biology-informed machine learning

About Me: I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Medicine, Stanford University. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Chicago, where I was advised by Prof. Rick L. Stevens, with co-advisors Prof. Yuxin Chen and Prof. Jinbo Xu, and mentorship from Prof. Tobin R. Sosnick. I also serve as a research associate at Argonne National Laboratory, where my work focuses on AI for Life Sciences.

news

Dec 02, 2025
  • Traveling to San Diego to attend NeurIPS 2025.
    • I am organizing the workshop AI Virtual Cells and Instruments: A New Era in Drug Discovery and Development. In light of the FDA’s recent initiative to phase out animal testing requirements, the workshop aims to foster deeper discussion on AI virtual cells and computational instruments for drug discovery. Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday, December 6.
    • Organizers: Quanquan Gu (UCLA), Michelle M. Li (Harvard), Chong Liu (UAlbany), Xuefeng Liu, Abhishek Pandey (AbbVie), Ji Won Park (Prescient Design, Genentech), Natasa Tagasovska (Prescient Design, Genentech), and Marinka Zitnik (Harvard).
    • Invited speakers: Linda Goodman (FaunaBio), Arvind Ramanathan (Argonne National Laboratory), Mengdi Wang (Princeton), Eric Xing (MBZUAI, GenBio, & CMU), Jinbo Xu (TTIC & Molecule Mind), and Alex Zhavoronkov (Insilico Medicine).
Apr 04, 2025

selected publications

  1. Thesis
    Leveraging Active Reinforcement Learning and Generative Models for Biomolecular Design
    Xuefeng Liu
    University of Chicago, 2026
  2. MLHC
    Bidirectional Hierarchical Protein Multi-Modal Representation Learning
    Xuefeng Liu, Songhao Jiang, Chih-chan Tien, and 2 more authors
    Machine Learning for Healthcare, 2025
  3. MLHC
    ScaffoldGPT: A Scaffold-based GPT Model for Drug Optimization
    Xuefeng Liu, Songhao Jiang, Ian Foster, and 2 more authors
    Machine Learning for Healthcare, 2025
  4. NeurIPS-AI4D3
    FragmentGPT: A Unified GPT Model for Fragment Growing, Linking, and Merging in Molecular Design
    Xuefeng Liu, Songhao Jiang, Qinan Huang, and 5 more authors
    NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on AI Virtual Cells and Instruments, 2025
  5. NeurIPS
    Contextual active model selection
    Xuefeng Liu, Fangfang Xia, Rick Stevens, and 1 more author
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
  6. ICML
    Entropy-reinforced planning with large language models for drug discovery
    Xuefeng Liu, Chih-chan Tien, Peng Ding, and 2 more authors
    International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024
  7. ICML
    Active policy improvement from multiple black-box oracles
    Xuefeng Liu, Takuma Yoneda, Chaoqi Wang, and 2 more authors
    In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023
  8. NeurIPS-AI4D3
    DRUGIMPROVER: Utilizing reinforcement learning for multi-objective alignment in drug optimization
    Xuefeng Liu, Songhao Jiang, Archit Vasan, and 6 more authors
    In NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on New Frontiers of AI for Drug Discovery and Development, 2023
  9. ICLR
    Blending imitation and reinforcement learning for robust policy improvement
    Xuefeng Liu, Takuma Yoneda, Rick L Stevens, and 2 more authors
    International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023