Publications

Deep reinforcement learning for continuous wood drying production line control
François-Alexandre Tremblay
Audrey Durand
Michael Morin
Philippe Marier
Jonathan Gaudreault
2023-12-31
Computers in Industry (published)
doi.org
Designing and Evaluating Dialogue LLMs for Co-Creative Improvised Theatre
Boyd Branch
Piotr Mirowski
Kory Mathewson
Sophia Ppali
Alexandra Covaci
Social robotics researchers are increasingly interested in multi-party trained conversational agents. With a growing demand for real-world e… (see more)valuations, our study presents Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in a month-long live show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This case study investigates human improvisers co-creating with conversational agents in a professional theatre setting. We explore the technical capabilities and constraints of on-the-spot multi-party dialogue, providing comprehensive insights from both audience and performer experiences with AI on stage. Our human-in-the-loop methodology underlines the challenges of these LLMs in generating context-relevant responses, stressing the user interface's crucial role. Audience feedback indicates an evolving interest for AI-driven live entertainment, direct human-AI interaction, and a diverse range of expectations about AI's conversational competence and utility as a creativity support tool. Human performers express immense enthusiasm, varied satisfaction, and the evolving public opinion highlights mixed emotions about AI's role in arts.
2023-12-31
ICCC (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Development of AI-assisted microscopy frameworks through realistic simulation with pySTED
Anthony Bilodeau
Albert Michaud-Gagnon
Julia Chabbert
Benoit Turcotte
Jörn Heine
Audrey Durand
Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal
The integration of artificial intelligence into microscopy systems significantly enhances performance, optimizing both image acquisition and… (see more) analysis phases. Development of artificial intelligence-assisted super-resolution microscopy is often limited by access to large biological datasets, as well as by difficulties to benchmark and compare approaches on heterogeneous samples. We demonstrate the benefits of a realistic stimulated emission depletion microscopy simulation platform, pySTED, for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence strategies for super-resolution microscopy. pySTED integrates theoretically and empirically validated models for photobleaching and point spread function generation in stimulated emission depletion microscopy, as well as simulating realistic point-scanning dynamics and using a deep learning model to replicate the underlying structures of real images. This simulation environment can be used for data augmentation to train deep neural networks, for the development of online optimization strategies and to train reinforcement learning models. Using pySTED as a training environment allows the reinforcement learning models to bridge the gap between simulation and reality, as showcased by its successful deployment on a real microscope system without fine tuning.
2023-12-31
Nature Machine Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Discovering modular solutions that generalize compositionally
Simon Schug
Seijin Kobayashi
Yassir Akram
Maciej Wolczyk
Alexandra Proca
Johannes Von Oswald
Razvan Pascanu
João Sacramento
Angelika Steger
Many complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler, independent parts. Discovering such underlying compositional structure has the potential … (see more)to enable compositional generalization. Despite progress, our most powerful systems struggle to compose flexibly. It therefore seems natural to make models more modular to help capture the compositional nature of many tasks. However, it is unclear under which circumstances modular systems can discover hidden compositional structure. To shed light on this question, we study a teacher-student setting with a modular teacher where we have full control over the composition of ground truth modules. This allows us to relate the problem of compositional generalization to that of identification of the underlying modules. In particular we study modularity in hypernetworks representing a general class of multiplicative interactions. We show theoretically that identification up to linear transformation purely from demonstrations is possible without having to learn an exponential number of module combinations. We further demonstrate empirically that under the theoretically identified conditions, meta-learning from finite data can discover modular policies that generalize compositionally in a number of complex environments.
2023-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Disentangling the Causes of Plasticity Loss in Neural Networks
Clare Lyle
Zeyu Zheng
Khimya Khetarpal
Hado van Hasselt
Razvan Pascanu
James Martens
Will Dabney
2023-12-31
CoLLAs (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Dissecting Deep RL with High Update Ratios: Combatting Value Divergence.
Marcel Hussing
Claas Voelcker
Igor Gilitschenski
Amir-massoud Farahmand
Eric R. Eaton
2023-12-31
RLJ (published)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Doob's Lagrangian: A Sample-Efficient Variational Approach to Transition Path Sampling
Yuanqi Du
Michael Plainer
Rob Brekelmans
Chenru Duan
Frank Noé
Carla P. Gomes
Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Kirill Neklyudov
Rare event sampling in dynamical systems is a fundamental problem arising in the natural sciences, which poses significant computational cha… (see more)llenges due to an exponentially large space of trajectories. For settings where the dynamical system of interest follows a Brownian motion with known drift, the question of conditioning the process to reach a given endpoint or desired rare event is definitively answered by Doob's h-transform. However, the naive estimation of this transform is infeasible, as it requires simulating sufficiently many forward trajectories to estimate rare event probabilities. In this work, we propose a variational formulation of Doob's h-transform as an optimization problem over trajectories between a given initial point and the desired ending point. To solve this optimization, we propose a simulation-free training objective with a model parameterization that imposes the desired boundary conditions by design. Our approach significantly reduces the search space over trajectories and avoids expensive trajectory simulation and inefficient importance sampling estimators which are required in existing methods. We demonstrate the ability of our method to find feasible transition paths on real-world molecular simulation and protein folding tasks.
2023-12-31
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
openreview.net
Dynamic Neural Control Flow Execution: An Agent-Based Deep Equilibrium Approach for Binary Vulnerability Detection
Litao Li
Steven H. H. Ding
Andrew Walenstein
Philippe Charland
Benjamin C. M. Fung
2023-12-31
CIKM (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Dynamic Routing and Wavelength Assignment with Reinforcement Learning.
Peyman Kafaei
Quentin Cappart
Nicolas Chapados
Hamed Pouya
Louis-Martin Rousseau
With the rapid developments in communication systems, and considering their dynamic nature, all-optical networks are becoming increasingly c… (see more)omplex. This study proposes a novel method based on deep reinforcement learning for the routing and wavelength assignment problem in all-optical wavelength-decision-multiplexing networks. We consider dynamic incoming requests, in which their arrival and holding times are not known in advance. The objective is to devise a strategy that minimizes the number of rejected packages due to the lack of resources in the long term. We use graph neural networks to capture crucial latent information from the graph-structured input to develop the optimal strategy. The proposed deep reinforcement learning algorithm selects a route and a wavelength simultaneously for each incoming traffic connection as they arrive. The results demonstrate that the learned agent outperforms the methods used in practice and can be generalized on network topologies that did not participate in training.
2023-12-31
INFORMS Journal on Optimization (published)
doi.org
E(3)-Equivariant Mesh Neural Networks
Thuan Trang
Nhat Khang Ngo
Daniel Levy
Thieu N. Vo
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Truong Son Hy
Triangular meshes are widely used to represent three-dimensional objects. As a result, many recent works have address the need for geometric… (see more) deep learning on 3D mesh. However, we observe that the complexities in many of these architectures does not translate to practical performance, and simple deep models for geometric graphs are competitive in practice. Motivated by this observation, we minimally extend the update equations of E(n)-Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNNs) (Satorras et al., 2021) to incorporate mesh face information, and further improve it to account for long-range interactions through hierarchy. The resulting architecture, Equivariant Mesh Neural Network (EMNN), outperforms other, more complicated equivariant methods on mesh tasks, with a fast run-time and no expensive pre-processing. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/HySonLab/EquiMesh
2023-12-31
AISTATS (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
ECBD: Evidence-Centered Benchmark Design for NLP
Yu Lu Liu
Su Lin Blodgett
Jackie Chi
Jackie CK Cheung
Kit Cheung
Q. Vera Liao
A.R. Olteanu
Ziang Xiao
Benchmarking is seen as critical to assessing progress in NLP. However, creating a benchmark involves many design decisions (e.g., which dat… (see more)asets to include, which metrics to use) that often rely on tacit, untested assumptions about what the benchmark is intended to measure or is actually measuring. There is currently no principled way of analyzing these decisions and how they impact the validity of the benchmark's measurements. To address this gap, we draw on evidence-centered design in educational assessments and propose Evidence-Centered Benchmark Design (ECBD), a framework which formalizes the benchmark design process into five modules. ECBD specifies the role each module plays in helping practitioners collect evidence about capabilities of interest. Specifically, each module requires benchmark designers to describe, justify, and support benchmark design choices -- e.g., clearly specifying the capabilities the benchmark aims to measure or how evidence about those capabilities is collected from model responses. To demonstrate the use of ECBD, we conduct case studies with three benchmarks: BoolQ, SuperGLUE, and HELM. Our analysis reveals common trends in benchmark design and documentation that could threaten the validity of benchmarks' measurements.
2023-12-31
ACL (1) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Discovering Neural Pathways
Samin Yeasar Arnob
Riyasat Ohib
Sergey Plis
Amy Zhang
Alessandro Sordoni
Doina Precup
2023-12-31
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (published)
doi.org
openreview.net