About

AI-illustrated portrait of Junhao Liu based on his photograph

Hi! I’m Junhao Liu (刘俊浩). I recently earned my PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Previously, I received my master’s degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and completed my undergraduate studies at the South China University of Technology. My research interests lie in large language models (LLMs), agentic reasoning, and deep generative models, with a particular emphasis on their applications in biology.

LinkedIn | Google Scholar | GitHub | Email

News
  • Apr 2026 - Successfully passed my PhD final defense!

  • Apr 2026 - Congrats to my interns Mohan Yang and Diptanshu Sikdar on accepting CS PhD offers from UCLA and UCSD!

  • Jan 2026 - One paper accepted by ICLR 2026! Thanks to all the coauthors!

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  • Nov 2025 - Single-Cell Omics Arena is accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics!

  • May 2025 - One position paper on multimodal DNA generative models accepted by ICIP 2025!

  • May 2025 - One paper accepted by KDD 2025!

  • Dec 2024 - Our ACML paper has been selected as the Best Student Paper!!!

  • Dec 2024 - One paper accepted by AAAI 2025! Thanks to all the coauthors!

  • Sep 2024 - One paper accepted by ACML 2024!

  • July 2024 - One paper accepted by CIKM 2024!

Research Highlights

Current Research Focus:

  • LLM Agentic Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning: Building infrastructure for agentic LLMs in exploring biology world models.

  • AI for Biology: Generative and Agentic Models for Biological Data Modeling and Scientific Discovery

  • Genomics and Transcriptomics Foundation Models: DNA, single-cell, spatial transcriptomics foundation models

  • Interpretable Learning for Science Discovery: Scientific discovery via feature Explanation

Experience

  1. — Present

    Research Scientist

    Meta

  2. · Graduated

    PhD in Computer Science

    University of California, Irvine

  3. Research Scientist Intern

    GenBio AI

  4. Research Intern

    Alibaba DAMO Academy

  5. Research Intern

    Microsoft

Selected Publications

A complete list of my publications is available on Google Scholar. (* denotes equal contributions)

AI-generated conceptual illustration of cell clusters and knowledge nodes connected to a conversation

SC-Arena: A Natural Language Benchmark for Single-Cell Reasoning with Knowledge-Augmented Evaluation

ICLR, 2026

AI-generated conceptual illustration of branching cell fate trajectories

Identifying Combinatorial Regulatory Genes for Cell Fate Decision via Reparameterizable Subset Explanations

The 31st SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025

AI-generated conceptual illustration of multimodal cell context guiding DNA sequence generation

Multimodal Cell Context Instruction Tuning for Conditional DNA Regulatory Sequence Generation with Large Language Models

2025 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2025

AI-generated conceptual illustration of alternative paths in a regulatory network

Understanding Transcriptional Regulatory Redundancy by Learnable Global Subset Perturbations

Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML), 2024

AI-generated conceptual illustration of alternative paths in a regulatory network

Learnable Subset Perturbations for Understanding Transcriptional Regulatory Redundancy

NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Data-driven and Differentiable Simulations, Surrogates, and Solvers

AI-generated conceptual illustration of selected paths through a hierarchy of code context

Hierarchical Context Pruning: Optimizing Real-World Code Completion with Repository-Level Pretrained Code LLMs

The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

AI-generated conceptual illustration of translation between single-cell modalities

scACT: Accurate Cross-modality Translation via Cycle-consistent Training from Unpaired Single-cell Data

The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2024

AI-generated conceptual illustration of text and image perspectives converging into coherent reasoning

Multi-perspective Coherent Reasoning for Helpfulness Prediction of Multimodal Reviews

Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021