NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
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This program is designed to provide decision-makers, policymakers and professional working in policy with a foundational understanding of AI technology.
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Publications
Towards robust and replicable sex differences in the intrinsic brain function of autism
Elucidating the neural basis of social behavior is a long-standing challenge in neuroscience. Such endeavors are driven by attempts to exten… (see more)d the isolated perspective on the human brain by considering interacting persons’ brain activities, but a theoretical and computational framework for this purpose is still in its infancy. Here, we posit a comprehensive framework based on bipartite graphs for interbrain networks and address whether they provide meaningful insights into the neural underpinnings of social interactions. First, we show that the nodal density of such graphs exhibits nonrandom properties. While the current analyses mostly rely on global metrics, we encode the regions’ roles via matrix decomposition to obtain an interpretable network representation yielding both global and local insights. With Bayesian modeling, we reveal how synchrony patterns seeded in specific brain regions contribute to global effects. Beyond inferential inquiries, we demonstrate that graph representations can be used to predict individual social characteristics, outperforming functional connectivity estimators for this purpose. In the future, this may provide a means of characterizing individual variations in social behavior or identifying biomarkers for social interaction and disorders.
Accuracy and generalization of dynamics models is key to the success of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). As the complexity of task… (see more)s increases, so does the sample inefficiency of learning accurate dynamics models. However, many complex tasks also exhibit sparsity in the dynamics, i.e., actions have only a local effect on the system dynamics. In this paper, we exploit this property with a causal invariance perspective in the single-task setting, introducing a new type of state abstraction called \textit{model-invariance}. Unlike previous forms of state abstractions, a model-invariance state abstraction leverages causal sparsity over state variables. This allows for compositional generalization to unseen states, something that non-factored forms of state abstractions cannot do. We prove that an optimal policy can be learned over this model-invariance state abstraction and show improved generalization in a simple toy domain. Next, we propose a practical method to approximately learn a model-invariant representation for complex domains and validate our approach by showing improved modelling performance over standard maximum likelihood approaches on challenging tasks, such as the MuJoCo-based Humanoid. Finally, within the MBRL setting we show strong performance gains with respect to sample efficiency across a host of other continuous control tasks.
Concurrent prescriptions for opioids and benzodiazepines and risk of opioid overdose: protocol for a retrospective cohort study using linked administrative data
Collaboration among mobile devices (MDs) is becoming more important, as it could augment computing capacity at the network edge through peer… (see more)-to-peer service provisioning, and directly enhance real-time computational performance in smart Internet-of-Things applications. As an important aspect of collaboration mechanism, conventional resource trading (RT) among MDs relies on an onsite interaction process, i.e., price negotiation between service providers and requesters, which, however, inevitably incurs excessive latency and degrades RT efficiency. To overcome this challenge, this article adopts the concept of futures contract (FC) used in financial market, and proposes a smart futures for low latency RT. This new technique enables MDs to form trading coalitions and negotiate multilateral forward contracts applied to a collaboration term in the future. To maximize the benefits of self-interested MDs, the negotiation process of FC is modelled as a coalition formation game comprised of three components executed in an iterative manner, i.e., futures resource allocation, revenue sharing and payment allocation, and distributed decision-making of individual MD. Additionally, a FC enforcement scheme is implemented to efficiently manage the onsite resource sharing via recording resource balances of different task-types and MDs. Simulation results prove the superiority of smart futures in RT latency reduction and trading fairness provisioning.
2021-02-18
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (published)
Collaboration among mobile devices (MDs) is becoming more important, as it could augment computing capacity at the network edge through peer… (see more)-to-peer service provisioning, and directly enhance real-time computational performance in smart Internet-of-Things applications. As an important aspect of collaboration mechanism, conventional resource trading (RT) among MDs relies on an onsite interaction process, i.e., price negotiation between service providers and requesters, which, however, inevitably incurs excessive latency and degrades RT efficiency. To overcome this challenge, this article adopts the concept of futures contract (FC) used in financial market, and proposes a smart futures for low latency RT. This new technique enables MDs to form trading coalitions and negotiate multilateral forward contracts applied to a collaboration term in the future. To maximize the benefits of self-interested MDs, the negotiation process of FC is modelled as a coalition formation game comprised of three components executed in an iterative manner, i.e., futures resource allocation, revenue sharing and payment allocation, and distributed decision-making of individual MD. Additionally, a FC enforcement scheme is implemented to efficiently manage the onsite resource sharing via recording resource balances of different task-types and MDs. Simulation results prove the superiority of smart futures in RT latency reduction and trading fairness provisioning.
2021-02-18
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (published)
Nested dropout is a variant of dropout operation that is able to order network parameters or features based on the pre-defined importance du… (see more)ring training. It has been explored for: I. Constructing nested nets Cui et al. 2020, Cui et al. 2021: the nested nets are neural networks whose architectures can be adjusted instantly during testing time, e.g., based on computational constraints. The nested dropout implicitly ranks the network parameters, generating a set of sub-networks such that any smaller sub-network forms the basis of a larger one. II. Learning ordered representation Rippel et al. 2014: the nested dropout applied to the latent representation of a generative model (e.g., auto-encoder) ranks the features, enforcing explicit order of the dense representation over dimensions. However, the dropout rate is fixed as a hyper-parameter during the whole training process. For nested nets, when network parameters are removed, the performance decays in a human-specified trajectory rather than in a trajectory learned from data. For generative models, the importance of features is specified as a constant vector, restraining the flexibility of representation learning. To address the problem, we focus on the probabilistic counterpart of the nested dropout. We propose a variational nested dropout (VND) operation that draws samples of multi-dimensional ordered masks at a low cost, providing useful gradients to the parameters of nested dropout. Based on this approach, we design a Bayesian nested neural network that learns the order knowledge of the parameter distributions. We further exploit the VND under different generative models for learning ordered latent distributions. In experiments, we show that the proposed approach outperforms the nested network in terms of accuracy, calibration, and out-of-domain detection in classification tasks. It also outperforms the related generative models on data generation tasks.