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
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 |
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| Apr 04, 2025 |
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selected publications
- ThesisLeveraging Active Reinforcement Learning and Generative Models for Biomolecular DesignUniversity of Chicago, 2026
- MLHCBidirectional Hierarchical Protein Multi-Modal Representation LearningMachine Learning for Healthcare, 2025
- MLHCScaffoldGPT: A Scaffold-based GPT Model for Drug OptimizationMachine Learning for Healthcare, 2025
- NeurIPS-AI4D3FragmentGPT: A Unified GPT Model for Fragment Growing, Linking, and Merging in Molecular DesignNeurIPS 2025 Workshop on AI Virtual Cells and Instruments, 2025
- NeurIPS
- ICMLEntropy-reinforced planning with large language models for drug discoveryInternational Conference on Machine Learning, 2024
- ICMLActive policy improvement from multiple black-box oraclesIn International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023
- NeurIPS-AI4D3DRUGIMPROVER: Utilizing reinforcement learning for multi-objective alignment in drug optimizationIn NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on New Frontiers of AI for Drug Discovery and Development, 2023