Yuxuan Chen
Publications
UniWhisper: Efficient Continual Multi-task Training for Robust Universal Audio Representation
A universal audio representation should capture fine-grained speech cues and high-level semantics for environmental sounds and music in a single encoder. Existing encoders often excel in one domain but degrade in others. We propose UniWhisper, an efficient continual multi-task training framework that casts heterogeneous audio tasks into a unified instruction and answer format. This enables standard next-token training without task-specific heads and losses. We train it on 38k hours of public audio and assess the encoder using shallow MLP probes and k-nearest neighbors (kNN) on 20 tasks spanning speech, environmental sound, and music. UniWhisper reaches normalized weighted averages of 0.81 with MLP probes and 0.61 with kNN, compared to 0.64 and 0.46 for Whisper, while retaining strong speech performance.
DrugR: Optimizing Molecular Drugs through LLM-based Explicit Reasoning
Molecule generation and optimization is a fundamental task in chemical domain. The rapid development of intelligent tools, especially large language models (LLMs) with powerful knowledge reserves and interactive capabilities, has provided new paradigms for it. Nevertheless, the intrinsic challenge for LLMs lies in the complex implicit relationship between molecular structure and pharmacological properties and the lack of corresponding labeled data. To bridge this gap, we propose DrugR, an LLM-based method that introduces explicit, step-by-step pharmacological reasoning into the optimization process. Our approach integrates domain-specific continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning via reverse data engineering, and self-balanced multi-granular reinforcement learning. This framework enables DrugR to effectively improve key ADMET properties while preserving the original molecule's core efficacy. Experimental results demonstrate that DrugR achieves comprehensive enhancement across multiple properties without compromising structural similarity or target binding affinity. Importantly, its explicit reasoning process provides clear, interpretable rationales for each optimization step, yielding actionable design insights and advancing toward automated, knowledge-driven scientific discovery. Our code and model checkpoints are open-sourced to foster future research.