Learn how to leverage generative AI to support and improve your productivity at work. The next cohort will take place online on April 28 and 30, 2026, in French.
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Publications
MUDiff: Unified Diffusion for Complete Molecule Generation
Hypnotic phenomena reflect the ability to alter one’s subjective experiences based on targeted verbal suggestions. This ability varies gre… (see more)atly in the population. The brain correlates to explain this variability remain elusive. Addressing this gap, our study employs machine learning to predict hypnotic susceptibility. By recording electroencephalography (EEG) before and after a hypnotic induction and analyzing diverse neurophysiological features, we were able to determine that several features differentiate between high and low hypnotic susceptible individuals both at baseline and during hypnosis. Our analysis revealed that the paramount discriminative feature is non-oscillatory EEG activity before the induction—a new finding in the field. This outcome aligns with the idea that hypnotic susceptibility represents a latent trait observable through a plain five-minutes resting-state EEG.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a substantial threat to human lives and is likely to do so for years to come. Despite the availabili… (see more)ty of vaccines, searching for efficient small-molecule drugs that are widely available, including in low- and middle-income countries, is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we report the results of an open science community effort, the "Billion molecules against Covid-19 challenge", to identify small-molecule inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 or relevant human receptors. Participating teams used a wide variety of computational methods to screen a minimum of 1 billion virtual molecules against 6 protein targets. Overall, 31 teams participated, and they suggested a total of 639,024 molecules, which were subsequently ranked to find 'consensus compounds'. The organizing team coordinated with various contract research organizations (CROs) and collaborating institutions to synthesize and test 878 compounds for biological activity against proteases (Nsp5, Nsp3, TMPRSS2), nucleocapsid N, RdRP (only the Nsp12 domain), and (alpha) spike protein S. Overall, 27 compounds with weak inhibition/binding were experimentally identified by binding-, cleavage-, and/or viral suppression assays and are presented here. Open science approaches such as the one presented here contribute to the knowledge base of future drug discovery efforts in finding better SARS-CoV-2 treatments.
Correlation between Preoperative MRI Parameters and Oswestry Disability Index in Patients with Lumbar Spinal Stenosis: A Retrospective Study
Radu Caprariu
Manuel D. Oprea
Dan V. Poenaru
Diana Andrei
Background and Objectives: Lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) is a degenerative condition posing significant challenges in clinical management. De… (see more)spite the use of radiological parameters and patient-reported outcome measures like the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) for evaluation, there is limited understanding of their interrelationship. This study aimed to investigate the correlation between preoperative MRI parameters and ODI scores in patients with LSS undergoing surgical treatment. Materials and Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 86 patients diagnosed with LSS over a 5-year period. Preoperative MRI measurements, including the cross-sectional area of the psoas muscle, lumbar canal stenosis, neural foramina area, and facet joint osteoarthritis, were assessed. ODI scores were collected preoperatively and at a 1-year follow-up. Statistical analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics software (version 26). Results: Weak to moderate correlations were observed between certain MRI parameters and ODI scores. The initial ODI score had a weak positive correlation with the severity of lumbar canal stenosis according to Schizas criteria (rho = 0.327, p = 0.010) and a moderate negative correlation with the relative cross-sectional area of the psoas muscle (rho = −0.498, p = 0.000). At 1-year follow-up, the ODI had a weak negative correlation with the relative cross-sectional area of the psoas muscle (rho = −0.284, p = 0.026). Conclusions: While the severity of LSS showed a weak correlation with initial ODI, it was not a predictor of 1-year postoperative ODI. Furthermore, although the cross-sectional area of the thecal sac, the sagittal area of the neural foramen, and the grade of facet joint osteoarthritis influence the imagistic severity, none of them correlate with ODI. These findings underscore the need for a comprehensive model that integrates multiple imaging and clinical parameters for a holistic understanding of LSS and its functional outcomes.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from … (see more)scalar reward signals.
A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a tremendous amount of environment interactions for learning.
This can be infeasible in situations where such interactions are expensive, such as in robotics.
Offline RL algorithms try to address this issue by bootstrapping the learning process from existing logged data without needing to interact with the environment from the very beginning.
While online RL algorithms are typically evaluated as a function of the number of environment interactions, there isn't a single established protocol for evaluating offline RL methods.
In this paper, we propose a sequential approach to evaluate offline RL algorithms as a function of the training set size and thus by their data efficiency.
Sequential evaluation provides valuable insights into the data efficiency of the learning process and the robustness of algorithms to distribution changes in the dataset while also harmonizing the visualization of the offline and online learning phases.
Our approach is generally applicable and easy to implement.
We compare several existing offline RL algorithms using this approach and present insights from a variety of tasks and offline datasets.
We investigate the convergence of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under interpolation in relatively smooth and smooth convex optimization. I… (see more)n relatively smooth convex optimization we provide new convergence guarantees for SMD with a constant stepsize. For smooth convex optimization we propose a new adaptive stepsize scheme --- the mirror stochastic Polyak stepsize (mSPS). Notably, our convergence results in both settings do not make bounded gradient assumptions or bounded variance assumptions, and we show convergence to a neighborhood that vanishes under interpolation. Consequently, these results correspond to the first convergence guarantees under interpolation for the exponentiated gradient algorithm for fixed or adaptive stepsizes. mSPS generalizes the recently proposed stochastic Polyak stepsize (SPS) (Loizou et al. 2021) to mirror descent and remains both practical and efficient for modern machine learning applications while inheriting the benefits of mirror descent. We complement our results with experiments across various supervised learning tasks and different instances of SMD, demonstrating the effectiveness of mSPS.