Publications

Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning: A Review and Perspectives
Khimya Khetarpal
Matthew D Riemer
Irina Rish
Doina Precup
2022-12-22
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting
Zheng Xin Yong
Hailey Schoelkopf
Niklas Muennighoff
Alham Fikri Aji
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Khalid Almubarak
M. Saiful Bari
Lintang A. Sutawika
Jungo Kasai
Ahmed Baruwa
Genta Indra Winata
Stella Biderman
Dragomir R. Radev
Vassilina Nikoulina
The BLOOM model is a large publicly available multilingual language model, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To extend the be… (see more)nefits of BLOOM to other languages without incurring prohibitively large costs, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM to new languages not seen during pretraining. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages in a resource-constrained setting. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, we find that adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling.
2022-12-19
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
The KITMUS Test: Evaluating Knowledge Integration from Multiple Sources
Akshatha Arodi
Martin Pömsl
Kaheer Suleman
Adam Trischler
Alexandra Olteanu
Jackie Cheung
Many state-of-the-art natural language understanding (NLU) models are based on pretrained neural language models. These models often make in… (see more)ferences using information from multiple sources. An important class of such inferences are those that require both background knowledge, presumably contained in a model’s pretrained parameters, and instance-specific information that is supplied at inference time. However, the integration and reasoning abilities of NLU models in the presence of multiple knowledge sources have been largely understudied. In this work, we propose a test suite of coreference resolution subtasks that require reasoning over multiple facts. These subtasks differ in terms of which knowledge sources contain the relevant facts. We also introduce subtasks where knowledge is present only at inference time using fictional knowledge. We evaluate state-of-the-art coreference resolution models on our dataset. Our results indicate that several models struggle to reason on-the-fly over knowledge observed both at pretrain time and at inference time. However, with task-specific training, a subset of models demonstrates the ability to integrate certain knowledge types from multiple sources. Still, even the best performing models seem to have difficulties with reliably integrating knowledge presented only at inference time.
2022-12-15
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Dynamic Consolidation for Continual Learning
Hang Li
Chen Ma
Xi Chen
Xue (Steve) Liu
Abstract Training deep learning models from a stream of nonstationary data is a critical problem to be solved to achieve general artificial … (see more)intelligence. As a promising solution, the continual learning (CL) technique aims to build intelligent systems that have the plasticity to learn from new information without forgetting the previously obtained knowledge. Unfortunately, existing CL methods face two nontrivial limitations. First, when updating a model with new data, existing CL methods usually constrain the model parameters within the vicinity of the parameters optimized for old data, limiting the exploration ability of the model; second, the important strength of each parameter (used to consolidate the previously learned knowledge) is fixed and thus is suboptimal for the dynamic parameter updates. To address these limitations, we first relax the vicinity constraints with a global definition of the important strength, which allows us to explore the full parameter space. Specifically, we define the important strength as the sensitivity of the global loss function to the model parameters. Moreover, we propose adjusting the important strength adaptively to align it with the dynamic parameter updates. Through extensive experiments on popular data sets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the strong baselines by up to 24% in terms of average accuracy.
2022-12-14
Neural Computation (published)
doi.org
A Tweedie Compound Poisson Model in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space
Yi Lian
Archer Yang
Boxiang Wang
Peng Shi
Robert William Platt
Abstract Tweedie models can be used to analyze nonnegative continuous data with a probability mass at zero. There have been wide application… (see more)s in natural science, healthcare research, actuarial science, and other fields. The performance of existing Tweedie models can be limited on today’s complex data problems with challenging characteristics such as nonlinear effects, high-order interactions, high-dimensionality and sparsity. In this article, we propose a kernel Tweedie model, Ktweedie, and its sparse variant, SKtweedie, that can simultaneously address the above challenges. Specifically, nonlinear effects and high-order interactions can be flexibly represented through a wide range of kernel functions, which is fully learned from the data; In addition, while the Ktweedie can handle high-dimensional data, the SKtweedie with integrated variable selection can further improve the interpretability. We perform extensive simulation studies to justify the prediction and variable selection accuracy of our method, and demonstrate the applications in ratemaking and loss-reserving in general insurance. Overall, the Ktweedie and SKtweedie outperform existing Tweedie models when there exist nonlinear effects and high-order interactions, particularly when the dimensionality is high relative to the sample size. The model is implemented in an efficient and user-friendly R package ktweedie (https://cran.r-project.org/package=ktweedie).
2022-12-13
Technometrics (published)
doi.org
Detection and genomic analysis of BRAF fusions in Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma through the combination and integration of multi-omic data
Melissa Zwaig
Audrey Baguette
Bo Hu
Michael Johnston
Hussein Lakkis
Emily M. Nakada
Damien Faury
Nikoleta Juretic
Benjamin Ellezam
Alexandre G. Weil
Jason Karamchandani
Jacek Majewski
Mathieu Blanchette
Michael D. Taylor
Marco Gallo
Claudia Kleinman
Nada Jabado
Jiannis Ragoussis
2022-12-12
BMC Cancer (published)
doi.org
Neural Bandits for Data Mining: Searching for Dangerous Polypharmacy
Alexandre Larouche
Audrey Durand
Richard Khoury
Caroline Sirois
2022-12-10
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Energy efficiency as a normative account for predictive coding
Shahab Bakhtiari
2022-12-09
Patterns (published)
doi.org
Implicit Offline Reinforcement Learning via Supervised Learning
Alexandre Piché
Rafael Pardinas
David Vazquez
Igor Mordatch
Chris Pal
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) via Supervised Learning is a simple and effective way to learn robotic skills from a dataset of varied b… (see more)ehaviors. It is as simple as supervised learning and Behavior Cloning (BC) but takes advantage of the return information. On BC tasks, implicit models have been shown to match or outperform explicit ones. Despite the benefits of using implicit models to learn robotic skills via BC, Offline RL via Supervised Learning algorithms have been limited to explicit models. We show how implicit models leverage return information and match or outperform explicit algorithms to acquire robotic skills from fixed datasets. Furthermore, we show how closely related our implicit methods are to other popular RL via Supervised Learning algorithms.
2022-12-09
NeurIPS.cc/2022/Workshop/DeepRL (unknown)
doi.org
openreview.net
Informing the development of an outcome set and banks of items to measure mobility among individuals with acquired brain injury using natural language processing
Rehab Alhasani
Mathieu Godbout
Audrey Durand
Claudine Auger
Anouk Lamontagne
Sara Ahmed
2022-12-09
BMC Neurology (published)
doi.org
PyNM: a Lightweight Python implementation of Normative Modeling
Annabelle Harvey
Guillaume Dumas
The majority of studies in neuroimaging and psychiatry are focussed on case-control analysis (Marquand et al., 2019). However, case-control … (see more)relies on well-defined groups which is more the exception than the rule in biology. Psychiatric conditions are diagnosed based on symptoms alone, which makes for heterogeneity at the biological level (Marquand et al., 2016). Relying on mean differences obscures this heterogeneity and the resulting loss of information can produce unreliable results or misleading conclusions (Loth et al., 2021).
2022-12-08
Journal of Open Source Software (published)
doi.org
Consistency and Rate of Convergence of Switched Least Squares System Identification for Autonomous Markov Jump Linear Systems
Borna Sayedana
Mohammad Afshari
Peter E. Caines
Aditya Mahajan
In this paper, we investigate the problem of system identification for autonomous Markov jump linear systems (MJS) with complete state obser… (see more)vations. We propose switched least squares method for identification of MJS, show that this method is strongly consistent, and derive data-dependent and data-independent rates of convergence. In particular, our data-dependent rate of convergence shows that, almost surely, the system identification error is
2022-12-06
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (published)
doi.org