Publications

Revisiting Fundamentals of Experience Replay
William Fedus
Prajit Ramachandran
Rishabh Agarwal
Mark Rowland
Will Dabney
Experience replay is central to off-policy algorithms in deep reinforcement learning (RL), but there remain significant gaps in our understa… (see more)nding. We therefore present a systematic and extensive analysis of experience replay in Q-learning methods, focusing on two fundamental properties: the replay capacity and the ratio of learning updates to experience collected (replay ratio). Our additive and ablative studies upend conventional wisdom around experience replay -- greater capacity is found to substantially increase the performance of certain algorithms, while leaving others unaffected. Counterintuitively we show that theoretically ungrounded, uncorrected n-step returns are uniquely beneficial while other techniques confer limited benefit for sifting through larger memory. Separately, by directly controlling the replay ratio we contextualize previous observations in the literature and empirically measure its importance across a variety of deep RL algorithms. Finally, we conclude by testing a set of hypotheses on the nature of these performance benefits.
What can I do here? A Theory of Affordances in Reinforcement Learning
Zafarali Ahmed
Gheorghe Comanici
David Abel
An Effective Anti-Aliasing Approach for Residual Networks
Cristina Vasconcelos
Vincent Dumoulin
Ross Goroshin
Image pre-processing in the frequency domain has traditionally played a vital role in computer vision and was even part of the standard pipe… (see more)line in the early days of deep learning. However, with the advent of large datasets, many practitioners concluded that this was unnecessary due to the belief that these priors can be learned from the data itself. Frequency aliasing is a phenomenon that may occur when sub-sampling any signal, such as an image or feature map, causing distortion in the sub-sampled output. We show that we can mitigate this effect by placing non-trainable blur filters and using smooth activation functions at key locations, particularly where networks lack the capacity to learn them. These simple architectural changes lead to substantial improvements in out-of-distribution generalization on both image classification under natural corruptions on ImageNet-C [10] and few-shot learning on Meta-Dataset [17], without introducing additional trainable parameters and using the default hyper-parameters of open source codebases.
Multiscale PHATE Exploration of SARS-CoV-2 Data Reveals Multimodal Signatures of Disease
Manik Kuchroo
Jessie Huang
Patrick Wong
Jean-Christophe Grenier
Dennis Shung
Alexander Tong
Carolina Lucas
Jon Klein
Daniel B. Burkhardt
Scott Gigante
Abhinav Godavarthi
Benjamin Israelow
Tianyang Mao
Ji Eun Oh
Julio Silva
Takehiro Takahashi
Camila D. Odio
Arnau Casanovas-Massana
John Fournier
Shelli Farhadian … (see 7 more)
Charles S. Dela Cruz
Albert I. Ko
F. Perry Wilson
Akiko Iwasaki
Smita Krishnaswamy
Learning Inter-Modal Correspondence and Phenotypes From Multi-Modal Electronic Health Records
Kejing Yin
William K. Cheung
Jonathan Poon
Non-negative tensor factorization has been shown a practical solution to automatically discover phenotypes from the electronic health record… (see more)s (EHR) with minimal human supervision. Such methods generally require an input tensor describing the inter-modal interactions to be pre-established; however, the correspondence between different modalities (e.g., correspondence between medications and diagnoses) can often be missing in practice. Although heuristic methods can be applied to estimate them, they inevitably introduce errors, and leads to sub-optimal phenotype quality. This is particularly important for patients with complex health conditions (e.g., in critical care) as multiple diagnoses and medications are simultaneously present in the records. To alleviate this problem and discover phenotypes from EHR with unobserved inter-modal correspondence, we propose the collective hidden interaction tensor factorization (cHITF) to infer the correspondence between multiple modalities jointly with the phenotype discovery. We assume that the observed matrix for each modality is marginalization of the unobserved inter-modal correspondence, which are reconstructed by maximizing the likelihood of the observed matrices. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world MIMIC-III dataset demonstrate that cHITF effectively infers clinically meaningful inter-modal correspondence, discovers phenotypes that are more clinically relevant and diverse, and achieves better predictive performance compared with a number of state-of-the-art computational phenotyping models.
Using Open Source Licensing to Regulate the Assembly of LAWS: A Preliminary Analysis
Cheng Lin
Lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) are an emerging technology capable of automatically targeting and exercising lethal force. Many scholars an… (see more)d advocates have petitioned to ban the technology internationally for a myriad of reasons. However, there are practical challenges to implementing a ban. One such challenge is posed by the “intangible” nature of the software that LAWS depends on, which is incompatible with implementation mechanisms such as export control. Given the dual-use nature of software, and the fact that software is developed by teams of individuals, a number of soft governance mechanisms have been proposed to regulate this technology. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of one particular approach: leveraging open source licenses as a means to prohibit the use of certain software in LAWS. This approach is largely motivated by the fact that open source software underpins all of technology, especially AI. Through a review of the recent tech activism and open source activism, we evaluate whether open source licenses can feasibly limit the use of open source software to only non-LAWS applications. We distill the current challenges facing “ethics-driven” open source licensing efforts into three main obstacles: the need for clarity of licensing language, the lack of enforceability of licenses, and the lack of cohesiveness of the open source community. We propose that addressing these factors are also success criteria for future anti-LAWS open source initiatives. We find that open source licenses provide more theoretical than practical promise in regulating LAWS, and conclude that cohesion in the open source community is the key to their potential practical success in the future.
Global Surveillance of COVID-19 by mining news media using a multi-source dynamic embedded topic model
Pratheeksha Nair
Zhi Wen
Imane Chafi
Anya Okhmatovskaia
Guido Powell
Yannan Shen
On Posterior Collapse and Encoder Feature Dispersion in Sequence VAEs.
Teng Long
Yanshuai Cao
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) hold great potential for modelling text, as they could in theory separate high-level semantic and syntactic … (see more)properties from local regularities of natural language. Practically, however, VAEs with autoregressive decoders often suffer from posterior collapse, a phenomenon where the model learns to ignore the latent variables, causing the sequence VAE to degenerate into a language model. In this paper, we argue that posterior collapse is in part caused by the lack of dispersion in encoder features. We provide empirical evidence to verify this hypothesis, and propose a straightforward fix using pooling. This simple technique effectively prevents posterior collapse, allowing model to achieve significantly better data log-likelihood than standard sequence VAEs. Comparing to existing work, our proposed method is able to achieve comparable or superior performances while being more computationally efficient.
Approximate Planning and Learning for Partially Observed Systems
Effectiveness of quarantine and testing to prevent COVID-19 transmission from arriving travelers
Russell Wa
Explainability and Interpretability: Keys to Deep Medicine
Arash Shaban-Nejad
Martin Michalowski
Bisimulation metrics and norms for real-weighted automata
Borja Balle
Pascale Gourdeau