Call for Papers: ICML 2024 Workshop on Accessible and Efficient Foundation Models for Biological Discovery

I am very excited to announce that we are organizing a workshop at ICML 2024 titled "Accessible and Efficient Foundation Models for Biological Discovery." Our workshop aims to bridge the growing gap between machine learning research on biology-inspired problems and the actual broad-based use of ML in the lab or the clinic, with a focus on accessibility and efficiency concerns surrounding large ML models. We want to highlight work that makes foundation models (and broader ML) more accessible to biologists, truly incorporating them into the discovery process. This could involve considerations like efficiency, lowering GPU requirements, democratization via web-accessible frameworks, lab-in-the-loop frameworks, etc.

We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

• Parameter-, memory-, and compute-efficient foundation models for biological or clinical data

• Algorithms for training efficient generative models in biology

• Efficient fine-tuning, compression, and quantization of biomedical and clinical foundation models

• Accessible cloud/web-based methods to enable biological discovery

• Knowledge distillation and transfer learning across biological contexts

• Lab in the loop: iterative approaches to refine ML models based on initial experimental results

• Hypothesis-driven machine learning in biology and uncertainty modeling in biological foundation models.

Submission Instructions

Submissions must present original research that has not been previously published or is under review elsewhere. The main body of the paper can be up to four pages long. For detailed submission instructions, template, and the OpenReview submission link, please visit the workshop webpage at https://accml.bio.

Journal Partner

We will be partnering with Cell Reports Methods for expedited consideration of accepted papers. Cell Reports Methods is an all Open Access journal from Cell Press focused on methodological advances and insights for a broad audience. Consideration at the journal will be at author's discretion and will adhere to normal editorial standards and publication agreements at the journal.

Key Dates

• Submission Portal Opens: April 5, 2024

• Submission Deadline: May 20, 2024 May 28, 2024 (EXTENDED; Anywhere on Earth)

• Notification of Acceptance: June 17, 2024 (Anywhere on Earth)

• Workshop Date: July 27, 2024