EMNLP2025 Keynote: Heng Ji

Motivation: drug discovery is extremely slow and expensive; mostly modulating previous iterations of work.

Principles of Drug Discovery

  • observation: acquire/fuse knowledge from multiple data modalities (sequence, stricture, etc.)
  • think: critically generating actually new hypothesis — allowing iteratively
  • allowing LMs to code-switch between moladities (i.e. fuse different modalities together in the most uniform way)

LM as a heuristic helps prune down search space quickly.