Songtao Liu

Hi, this is Songtao. I'm currently a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at Penn State. I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Data Science from Fudan University.

My research focuses on efficient architectures and expressive algorithms for discrete generative modeling, with an emphasis on reducing inference cost and addressing diverse problems across domains such as language.

I am on the job market for 2025-2026!

Papers

* denotes equal contribution (first, second, or senior)

• Multi-Head Low-Rank Attention
  Songtao Liu, Hongwu Peng, Zhiwei Zhang, Zhengyu Chen, Yue Guo
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
  [pdf]
• High-Layer Attention Pruning with Rescaling
  Songtao Liu, Peng Liu
  Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026
  [arXiv] [Code]
• Evaluating Molecule Synthesizability via Retrosynthetic Planning and Reaction Prediction
  Songtao Liu, Dandan Zhang, Zhengkai Tu, Hanjun Dai, Peng Liu
  arXiv, 2024
  [arXiv]
• Preference Optimization for Molecule Synthesis with Conditional Residual Energy-based Models
  Songtao Liu, Hanjun Dai, Yue Zhao, Peng Liu
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
  Oral Presentation
  [arXiv] [Code]
• Graph Adversarial Diffusion Convolution
  Songtao Liu, Jinghui Chen, Tianfan Fu, Lu Lin, Marinka Zitnik, Dinghao Wu
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
  [arXiv] [Code]
• FusionRetro: Molecule Representation Fusion via In-Context Learning for Retrosynthetic Planning
  Songtao Liu, Zhengkai Tu*, Minkai Xu*, Zuobai Zhang*, Lu Lin, Rex Ying, Jian Tang, Peilin Zhao, Dinghao Wu
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023
  [arXiv] [Code]
• Local Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks
  Songtao Liu, Rex Ying, Hanze Dong, Lanqing Li, Tingyang Xu, Yu Rong, Peilin Zhao, Junzhou Huang, Dinghao Wu
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022
  [arXiv] [Code]

Professional Services

Conference/Journal Reviewer: ICML 2022/2024/2025, NeurIPS 2022/2023/2024/2025, ICLR 2024/2025/2026, AISTATS 2024, TMLR 2024

Teaching

• DS 330: Visual Analytics, Penn State, Spring 2025
• DS 320: Data Integration and Fusion, Penn State, Spring 2024
• DS/CMPSC 410: Programming Models for Big Data, Penn State, Fall 2023
• IST 815: Foundations of Information Security and Assurance, Penn State, Fall 2023