Vasant Gajanan Honavar, PhD - Penn State Cancer Institute
Researcher Profile
Vasant Gajanan Honavar, PhD
Professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology, College of Information Sciences and Technology
One Health Microbiome Center
Penn State Neuroscience Institute
One Health Microbiome Center
Penn State Neuroscience Institute
Scientific Program:Cancer Control
Recent Publications
2026
Rauer, E, Basu, S, Honavar, V & Tao, J 2026, Eliminating Inconsistencies among CP-Theory Qualitative Preferences. in AAMAS 2026 - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. AAMAS 2026 - Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 2169-2177, 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2026, Paphos, Cyprus, 5/25/26. https://doi.org/10.65109/WOCS8295
2025
Jacobs, R, Morgan, D, Attarian, S, Meng, J, Shen, C, Wu, Z, Xie, CY, Yang, JH, Artrith, N, Blaiszik, B, Ceder, G, Choudhary, K, Csanyi, G, Cubuk, ED, Deng, B, Drautz, R, Fu, X, Godwin, J, Honavar, V, Isayev, O, Johansson, A, Martiniani, S, Ong, SP, Poltavsky, I, Schmidt, KJ, Takamoto, S, Thompson, AP, Westermayr, J, Wood, BM & Kozinsky, B 2025, 'A practical guide to machine learning interatomic potentials – Status and future', Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science, vol. 35, 101214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cossms.2025.101214
Mahdavi, H, Honavar, V & Morgan, D 2025, 'Beyond training data: how elemental features enhance ML-based formation energy predictions', Digital Discovery, vol. 4, no. 10, pp. 2972-2982. https://doi.org/10.1039/d5dd00182j
Dalvi, A, Ashtekar, N & Honavar, VG 2025, 'C-HDNet: A Fast Hyperdimensional Computing Based Method for Causal Effect Estimation from Networked Observational Data', Social Network Analysis and Mining, vol. 15, no. 1, 97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-025-01502-2
Rauer, E, Basu, S & Honavar, V 2025, Checking Consistency of CP-Theory Preferences in Polynomial Time. in T Walsh, J Shah & Z Kolter (eds), Special Track on AI Alignment. 14 edn, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, no. 14, vol. 39, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 15126-15133, 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2025, Philadelphia, United States, 2/25/25. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i14.33659
Ashtekar, N, Zhu, J & Honavar, VG 2025, 'Class Incremental Learning from First Principles: A Review', Transactions on Machine Learning Research, vol. 2025.
Mahdavi, H, Honavar, V & Morgan, D 2025, 'Correction: Beyond training data: how elemental features enhance ML-based formation energy predictions', Digital Discovery, vol. 4, no. 12, pp. 3828. https://doi.org/10.1039/d5dd90047f
Hu, J, Liu, J, Dong, S, Liao, B, Liang, J & Honavar, V 2025, 'DGX: Uncovering General Behavior of Deep Graph Models With Model-Level Explanation', IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 2503-2514. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCBBIO.2025.3593917
Zhu, H, Xiao, T & Honavar, VG 2025, DSPO: DIRECT SCORE PREFERENCE OPTIMIZATION FOR DIFFUSION MODEL ALIGNMENT. in 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR, pp. 97212-97233, 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, Singapore, Singapore, 4/24/25.
Ren, W, Zhao, T, Wang, L, Wang, T & Honavar, V 2025, DiaLLMs: EHR Enhanced Clinical Conversational System for Clinical Test Recommendation and Diagnosis Prediction. in W Che, J Nabende, E Shutova & MT Pilehvar (eds), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 25622-25635, 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025, Vienna, Austria, 7/27/25. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1313
Dalvi, A & Honavar, V 2025, Hyperdimensional Representation Learning for Node Classification and Link Prediction. in WSDM 2025 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. WSDM 2025 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 88-97, 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2025, Hannover, Germany, 3/10/25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3701551.3703492
Zil-E-Ali, A, Petucci, J, Honavar, V, Sinoway, L & Aziz, F 2025, 'Machine learning identifies clinical and sociodemographic factors contributing to post-COVID hospitalization and cardiovascular risk in patients with peripheral artery disease', Scientific reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 43192. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-26468-1
Xiao, T, Yuan, Y, Li, M, Chen, Z & Honavar, VG 2025, ON A CONNECTION BETWEEN IMITATION LEARNING AND RLHF. in 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR, pp. 4670-4685, 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, Singapore, Singapore, 4/24/25.
Zhu, H, Xu, S, Zhang, H, Xiao, T, Guo, Z, Zhou, S, Hu, S & Honavar, VG 2025, Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models via Group Preference Reward Shaping. in C Christodoulopoulos, T Chakraborty, C Rose & V Peng (eds), EMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference. EMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 21387-21400, 30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China, 11/4/25. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1085
Xiao, T, Yuan, Y, Chen, Z, Li, M, Liang, S, Ren, Z & Honavar, VG 2025, SIMPER: A MINIMALIST APPROACH TO PREFERENCE ALIGNMENT WITHOUT HYPERPARAMETERS. in 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR, pp. 48650-48669, 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025, Singapore, Singapore, 4/24/25.
2024
Xiao, T, Yuan, Y, Zhu, H, Li, M & Honavar, VG 2024, 'Cal-DPO: Calibrated Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment', Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 37.
Lekoubou, A, Petucci, J, Femi Ajala, T, Katoch, A, Hong, J, Sen, S, Bonilha, L, Chinchilli, VM & Honavar, V 2024, 'Can machine learning predict late seizures after intracerebral hemorrhages? Evidence from real-world data', Epilepsy and Behavior, vol. 157, 109835. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2024.109835
Dalvi, A, Ashtekar, N & Honavar, V 2024, 'Causal Matching using Random Hyperplane Tessellations', Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 236, pp. 688-702.
Roberts, DM, Schade, MM, Master, L, Honavar, VG, Nahmod, NG, Chang, AM, Gartenberg, D & Buxton, OM 2024, 'Corrigendum to “Performance of an open machine learning model to classify sleep/wake from actigraphy across ∼24-hour intervals without knowledge of rest timing” [Sleep Health 9 (2023) 596-610, (S2352721823001341), (10.1016/j.sleh.2023.07.001)]', Sleep health, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 255-260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2023.11.008
Xiao, T, Zhu, H, Zhang, Z, Guo, Z, Aggarwal, CC, Wang, S & Honavar, VG 2024, 'Efficient Contrastive Learning for Fast and Accurate Inference on Graphs', Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 235, pp. 54363-54381.
Ren, W & Honavar, VG 2024, EsaCL: An Efficient Continual Learning Algorithm. in S Shekhar, V Papalexakis, J Gao, Z Jiang & M Riondato (eds), Proceedings of the 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2024. Proceedings of the 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2024, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Publications, pp. 163-171, 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2024, Houston, United States, 4/18/24. https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611978032.19
Xiao, T, Cui, C, Zhu, H & Honavar, VG 2024, GeomCLIP: Contrastive Geometry-Text Pre-training for Molecules. in M Cannataro, H Zheng, L Gao, J Cheng, JL de Miranda, E Zumpano, X Hu, Y-R Cho & T Park (eds), Proceedings - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, BIBM 2024. Proceedings - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, BIBM 2024, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., pp. 1250-1256, 2024 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine, BIBM 2024, Lisbon, Portugal, 12/3/24. https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM62325.2024.10822346
Xiao, T, Li, M, Yuan, Y, Zhu, H, Cui, C & Honavar, VG 2024, How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective. in Y Al-Onaizan, M Bansal & Y-N Chen (eds), EMNLP 2024 - 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference. EMNLP 2024 - 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 13413-13426, 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2024, Hybrid, Miami, United States, 11/12/24. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.744
Liang, J, Ren, W, Sahar, H & Honavar, V 2024, 'Inducing Clusters Deep Kernel Gaussian Process for Longitudinal Data', Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 38, no. 12, pp. 13736-13743. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i12.29279
Priyadarshini, S, Petucci, J, Katoch, A, Honavar, V & Vasekar, MK 2024, 'Real world study of racial disparities associated with toxicities of sacituzumab govitecan', Journal of Clinical Oncology, vol. 42, no. 16, 1572. https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.1572
Ren, W, Li, X, Chen, H, Rakesh, V, Wang, Z, Das, M & Honavar, V 2024, 'TabLog: Test-Time Adaptation for Tabular Data Using Logic Rules', Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 235, pp. 42417-42427.
2023
Ashtekar, N & Honavar, V 2023, 'A SIMPLE, FAST ALGORITHM FOR CONTINUAL LEARNING FROM HIGH-DIMENSIONAL DATA', Paper presented at 1st Tiny Papers at 11th International Conference on Learning Representations, Tiny Papers @ ICLR 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, 5/5/23 - 5/5/23.
Adishesha, AS, Jakielaszek, L, Azhar, F, Zhang, P, Honavar, V, Ma, F, Belani, C, Mitra, P & Huang, SX 2023, 'Forecasting User Interests Through Topic Tag Predictions in Online Health Communities', IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, vol. 27, no. 7, pp. 3645-3656. https://doi.org/10.1109/JBHI.2023.3271580
Schade, MM, Roberts, DM, Honavar, VG & Buxton, OM 2023, Machine learning approaches in sleep and circadian research. in Encyclopedia of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms: Volume 1-6, Second Edition. Elsevier, pp. 53-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-822963-7.00383-2
Jung, Y, Geng, C, Bonvin, AMJJ, Xue, LC & Honavar, VG 2023, 'MetaScore: A Novel Machine-Learning-Based Approach to Improve Traditional Scoring Functions for Scoring Protein–Protein Docking Conformations', Biomolecules, vol. 13, no. 1, 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/biom13010121
Roberts, DM, Schade, MM, Master, L, Honavar, VG, Nahmod, NG, Chang, A-M, Gartenberg, D & Buxton, OM 2023, 'Performance of an open machine learning model to classify sleep/wake from actigraphy across ∼24-hour intervals without knowledge of rest timing', Sleep health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2023.07.001
Basu, S, Honavar, V, Santhanam, GR & Tao, J 2023, Representing and Reasoning with Multi-Stakeholder Qualitative Preference Queries. in K Gal, K Gal, A Nowe, GJ Nalepa, R Fairstein & R Radulescu (eds), ECAI 2023 - 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, including 12th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems, PAIS 2023 - Proceedings. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 372, IOS Press BV, pp. 206-213, 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2023, Krakow, Poland, 9/30/23. https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230272
2022
Seto, CH, Graif, C, Khademi, A, Honavar, VG & Kelling, CE 2022, 'Connected in health: Place-to-place commuting networks and COVID-19 spillovers', Health and Place, vol. 77, 102891. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102891
Kallitsis, M, Prajapati, R, Honavar, V, Wu, D & Yen, J 2022, 'Detecting and Interpreting Changes in Scanning Behavior in Large Network Telescopes', IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 17, pp. 3611-3625. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2022.3211644
Cwiek, A, Rajtmajer, SM, Wyble, B, Honavar, V, Grossner, E & Hillary, FG 2022, 'Feeding the machine: Challenges to reproducible predictive modeling in resting-state connectomics', Network Neuroscience, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 29-48. https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00212