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Frank Wood

Affiliate Member
Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, Department of Computer Science
CEO, Inverted AI
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Generative Models
Probabilistic Models
Reinforcement Learning

Biography

Frank Wood is an associate professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, and an Affiliate member at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also the CEO of Inverted AI.

His research interests include probabilistic programming, as well as automatic learning and probabilistic AI. He is particularly interested in Bayesian methods and unsupervised learning.

Publications

All-in-one simulation-based inference
Manuel Gloeckler
Michael Deistler
Christian Dietrich Weilbach
Jakob H. Macke
Layerwise Proximal Replay: A Proximal Point Method for Online Continual Learning
Jinsoo Yoo
Yunpeng Liu
Geoff Pleiss
Nearest Neighbour Score Estimators for Diffusion Generative Models
Matthew Niedoba
Dylan Green
Saeid Naderiparizi
Vasileios Lioutas
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Xiaoxuan Liang
Yunpeng Liu
Ke Zhang
Setareh Dabiri
Adam Ścibior
Berend Zwartsenberg
Score function estimation is the cornerstone of both training and sampling from diffusion generative models. Despite this fact, the most com… (see more)monly used estimators are either biased neural network approximations or high variance Monte Carlo estimators based on the conditional score. We introduce a novel nearest neighbour score function estimator which utilizes multiple samples from the training set to dramatically decrease estimator variance. We leverage our low variance estimator in two compelling applications. Training consistency models with our estimator, we report a significant increase in both convergence speed and sample quality. In diffusion models, we show that our estimator can replace a learned network for probability-flow ODE integration, opening promising new avenues of future research. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Prospective Messaging: Learning in Networks with Communication Delays
Ryan Fayyazi
Christian Dietrich Weilbach
Inter-neuron communication delays are ubiquitous in physically realized neural networks such as biological neural circuits and neuromorphic … (see more)hardware. These delays have significant and often disruptive consequences on network dynamics during training and inference. It is therefore essential that communication delays be accounted for, both in computational models of biological neural networks and in large-scale neuromorphic systems. Nonetheless, communication delays have yet to be comprehensively addressed in either domain. In this paper, we first show that delays prevent state-of-the-art continuous-time neural networks called Latent Equilibrium (LE) networks from learning even simple tasks despite significant overparameterization. We then propose to compensate for communication delays by predicting future signals based on currently available ones. This conceptually straightforward approach, which we call prospective messaging (PM), uses only neuron-local information, and is flexible in terms of memory and computation requirements. We demonstrate that incorporating PM into delayed LE networks prevents reaction lags, and facilitates successful learning on Fourier synthesis and autoregressive video prediction tasks.
Online Continual Learning of Video Diffusion Models From a Single Video Stream
Jinsoo Yoo
Dylan Green
Geoff Pleiss
TorchDriveEnv: A Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Autonomous Driving with Reactive, Realistic, and Diverse Non-Playable Characters
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Ke Zhang
Vasileios Lioutas
Matthew Niedoba
Yunpeng Liu
Dylan Green
Saeid Naderiparizi
Xiaoxuan Liang
Setareh Dabiri
Adam Ścibior
Berend Zwartsenberg
Semantically Consistent Video Inpainting with Conditional Diffusion Models
Dylan Green
William Harvey
Saeid Naderiparizi
Matthew Niedoba
Yunpeng Liu
Xiaoxuan Liang
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Ke Zhang
Vasileios Lioutas
Setareh Dabiri
Adam Ścibior
Berend Zwartsenberg
Current state-of-the-art methods for video inpainting typically rely on optical flow or attention-based approaches to inpaint masked regions… (see more) by propagating visual information across frames. While such approaches have led to significant progress on standard benchmarks, they struggle with tasks that require the synthesis of novel content that is not present in other frames. In this paper we reframe video inpainting as a conditional generative modeling problem and present a framework for solving such problems with conditional video diffusion models. We highlight the advantages of using a generative approach for this task, showing that our method is capable of generating diverse, high-quality inpaintings and synthesizing new content that is spatially, temporally, and semantically consistent with the provided context.
On the Challenges and Opportunities in Generative AI
Laura Manduchi
Kushagra Pandey
Robert Bamler
Ryan Cotterell
Sina Daubener
Sophie Fellenz
Asja Fischer
Thomas Gartner
Matthias Kirchler
Marius Kloft
Yingzhen Li
Christoph Lippert
Gerard de Melo
Eric Nalisnick
Bjorn Ommer
Rajesh Ranganath
Maja Rudolph
Karen Ullrich
Guy Van den Broeck
Julia E Vogt … (see 5 more)
Yixin Wang
Florian Wenzel
Stephan Mandt
Vincent Fortuin
Nearest Neighbour Score Estimators for Diffusion Generative Models
Matthew Niedoba
Dylan Green
Saeid Naderiparizi
Vasileios Lioutas
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Xiaoxuan Liang
Yunpeng Liu
Ke Zhang
Setareh Dabiri
Adam Ścibior
Berend Zwartsenberg
A Diffusion-Model of Joint Interactive Navigation
Matthew Niedoba
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Yunpeng Liu
Vasileios Lioutas
Justice Sefas
Xiaoxuan Liang
Dylan Green
Setareh Dabiri
Berend Zwartsenberg
Adam Ścibior
Simulation of autonomous vehicle systems requires that simulated traffic participants exhibit diverse and realistic behaviors. The use of pr… (see more)erecorded real-world traffic scenarios in simulation ensures realism but the rarity of safety critical events makes large scale collection of driving scenarios expensive. In this paper, we present DJINN - a diffusion based method of generating traffic scenarios. Our approach jointly diffuses the trajectories of all agents, conditioned on a flexible set of state observations from the past, present, or future. On popular trajectory forecasting datasets, we report state of the art performance on joint trajectory metrics. In addition, we demonstrate how DJINN flexibly enables direct test-time sampling from a variety of valuable conditional distributions including goal-based sampling, behavior-class sampling, and scenario editing.
Don't be so negative! Score-based Generative Modeling with Oracle-assisted Guidance
Saeid Naderiparizi
Xiaoxuan Liang
Berend Zwartsenberg
Uncertain Evidence in Probabilistic Models and Stochastic Simulators
Andreas Munk
Alexander Mead
We consider the problem of performing Bayesian inference in probabilistic models where observations are accompanied by uncertainty, referred… (see more) to as "uncertain evidence.'' We explore how to interpret uncertain evidence, and by extension the importance of proper interpretation as it pertains to inference about latent variables. We consider a recently-proposed method "distributional evidence'' as well as revisit two older methods: Jeffrey's rule and virtual evidence. We devise guidelines on how to account for uncertain evidence and we provide new insights, particularly regarding consistency. To showcase the impact of different interpretations of the same uncertain evidence, we carry out experiments in which one interpretation is defined as "correct.'' We then compare inference results from each different interpretation illustrating the importance of careful consideration of uncertain evidence.