Publications

Training Matters: Unlocking Potentials of Deeper Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
Sitao Luan
Mingde Zhao
Xiao-Wen Chang
Doina Precup
2024-02-20
Complex Networks & Their Applications XII (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
When Do We Need Graph Neural Networks for Node Classification?
Sitao Luan
Chenqing Hua
Qincheng Lu
Jiaqi Zhu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Doina Precup
2024-02-20
Complex Networks & Their Applications XII (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Deep Reinforcement Learning in Human Activity Recognition: A Survey and Outlook.
Bahareh Nikpour
Dimitrios Sinodinos
Narges Armanfard
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular research field in computer vision that has already been widely studied. However, it is still a… (see more)n active research field since it plays an important role in many current and emerging real-world intelligent systems, like visual surveillance and human-computer interaction. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been used to address the activity recognition problem with various purposes, such as finding attention in video data or obtaining the best network structure. DRL-based HAR has only been around for a short time, and it is a challenging, novel field of study. Therefore, to facilitate further research in this area, we have constructed a comprehensive survey on activity recognition methods that incorporate DRL. Throughout the article, we classify these methods according to their shared objectives and delve into how they are ingeniously framed within the DRL framework. As we navigate through the survey, we conclude by shedding light on the prominent challenges and lingering questions that await the attention of future researchers, paving the way for further advancements and breakthroughs in this exciting domain.
2024-02-19
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (published)
doi.org
Deep Reinforcement Learning in Human Activity Recognition: A Survey and Outlook.
Bahareh Nikpour
Dimitrios Sinodinos
Narges Armanfard
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular research field in computer vision that has already been widely studied. However, it is still a… (see more)n active research field since it plays an important role in many current and emerging real-world intelligent systems, like visual surveillance and human-computer interaction. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been used to address the activity recognition problem with various purposes, such as finding attention in video data or obtaining the best network structure. DRL-based HAR has only been around for a short time, and it is a challenging, novel field of study. Therefore, to facilitate further research in this area, we have constructed a comprehensive survey on activity recognition methods that incorporate DRL. Throughout the article, we classify these methods according to their shared objectives and delve into how they are ingeniously framed within the DRL framework. As we navigate through the survey, we conclude by shedding light on the prominent challenges and lingering questions that await the attention of future researchers, paving the way for further advancements and breakthroughs in this exciting domain.
2024-02-19
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (published)
doi.org
Multi-ancestry polygenic risk scores using phylogenetic regularization
Elliot Layne
Shadi Zabad
Yue Li
Mathieu Blanchette
2024-02-17
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
Deep Equilibrium Models For Algorithmic Reasoning
Sophie Xhonneux
Yu He
Andreea Deac
Jian Tang
Gauthier Gidel
In this blogpost we discuss the idea of teaching neural networks to reach fixed points when reasoning. Specifically, on the algorithmic reas… (see more)oning benchmark CLRS the current neural networks are told the number of reasoning steps they need. While a quick fix is to add a termination network that predicts when to stop, a much more salient inductive bias is that the neural network shouldn't change it's answer any further once the answer is correct, i.e. it should reach a fixed point. This is supported by denotational semantics, which tells us that while loops that terminate are the minimum fixed points of a function. We implement this idea with the help of deep equilibrium models and discuss several hurdles one encounters along the way. We show on several algorithms from the CLRS benchmark the partial success of this approach and the difficulty in making it work robustly across all algorithms.
2024-02-16
ICLR.cc/2024/BlogPosts (accepted)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Deep Equilibrium Models For Algorithmic Reasoning
Sophie Xhonneux
Yu He
Andreea Deac
Jian Tang
Gauthier Gidel
In this blogpost we discuss the idea of teaching neural networks to reach fixed points when reasoning. Specifically, on the algorithmic reas… (see more)oning benchmark CLRS the current neural networks are told the number of reasoning steps they need. While a quick fix is to add a termination network that predicts when to stop, a much more salient inductive bias is that the neural network shouldn't change it's answer any further once the answer is correct, i.e. it should reach a fixed point. This is supported by denotational semantics, which tells us that while loops that terminate are the minimum fixed points of a function. We implement this idea with the help of deep equilibrium models and discuss several hurdles one encounters along the way. We show on several algorithms from the CLRS benchmark the partial success of this approach and the difficulty in making it work robustly across all algorithms.
2024-02-16
ICLR.cc/2024/BlogPosts (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows
Dinghuai Zhang
Ling Pan
Ricky T. Q. Chen
Aaron Courville
Yoshua Bengio
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating com… (see more)plex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from reinforcement learning, the current GFlowNet framework is relatively limited in its applicability and cannot handle stochasticity in the reward function. In this work, we adopt a distributional paradigm for GFlowNets, turning each flow function into a distribution, thus providing more informative learning signals during training. By parameterizing each edge flow through their quantile functions, our proposed \textit{quantile matching} GFlowNet learning algorithm is able to learn a risk-sensitive policy, an essential component for handling scenarios with risk uncertainty. Moreover, we find that the distributional approach can achieve substantial improvement on existing benchmarks compared to prior methods due to our enhanced training algorithm, even in settings with deterministic rewards.
2024-02-16
TMLR (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Discrete Probabilistic Inference as Control in Multi-path Environments
Tristan Deleu
Padideh Nouri
Nikolay Malkin
Doina Precup
Yoshua Bengio
We consider the problem of sampling from a discrete and structured distribution as a sequential decision problem, where the objective is to … (see more)find a stochastic policy such that objects are sampled at the end of this sequential process proportionally to some predefined reward. While we could use maximum entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) to solve this problem for some distributions, it has been shown that in general, the distribution over states induced by the optimal policy may be biased in cases where there are multiple ways to generate the same object. To address this issue, Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn a stochastic policy that samples objects proportionally to their reward by approximately enforcing a conservation of flows across the whole Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper, we extend recent methods correcting the reward in order to guarantee that the marginal distribution induced by the optimal MaxEnt RL policy is proportional to the original reward, regardless of the structure of the underlying MDP. We also prove that some flow-matching objectives found in the GFlowNet literature are in fact equivalent to well-established MaxEnt RL algorithms with a corrected reward. Finally, we study empirically the performance of multiple MaxEnt RL and GFlowNet algorithms on multiple problems involving sampling from discrete distributions.
2024-02-15
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video
Adrien Bardes
Quentin Garrido
Jean Ponce
Xinlei Chen
Michael Rabbat
Yann Lecun
Mahmoud Assran
Nicolas Ballas
This paper explores feature prediction as a stand-alone objective for unsupervised learning from video and introduces V-JEPA, a collection o… (see more)f vision models trained solely using a feature prediction objective, without the use of pretrained image encoders, text, negative examples, reconstruction, or other sources of supervision. The models are trained on 2 million videos collected from public datasets and are evaluated on downstream image and video tasks. Our results show that learning by predicting video features leads to versatile visual representations that perform well on both motion and appearance-based tasks, without adaption of the model's parameters; e.g., using a frozen backbone. Our largest model, a ViT-H/16 trained only on videos, obtains 81.9% on Kinetics-400, 72.2% on Something-Something-v2, and 77.9% on ImageNet1K.
2024-02-15
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video
Adrien Bardes
Quentin Garrido
Jean Ponce
Xinlei Chen
Michael Rabbat
Yann Lecun
Mahmoud Assran
Nicolas Ballas
This paper explores feature prediction as a stand-alone objective for unsupervised learning from video and introduces V-JEPA, a collection o… (see more)f vision models trained solely using a feature prediction objective, without the use of pretrained image encoders, text, negative examples, reconstruction, or other sources of supervision. The models are trained on 2 million videos collected from public datasets and are evaluated on downstream image and video tasks. Our results show that learning by predicting video features leads to versatile visual representations that perform well on both motion and appearance-based tasks, without adaption of the model's parameters; e.g., using a frozen backbone. Our largest model, a ViT-H/16 trained only on videos, obtains 81.9% on Kinetics-400, 72.2% on Something-Something-v2, and 77.9% on ImageNet1K.
2024-02-15
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Bidirectional Generative Pre-training for Improving Healthcare Time-series Representation Learning
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
He Zhu
David Buckeridge
Yue Li
Learning time-series representations for discriminative tasks, such as classification and regression, has been a long-standing challenge in … (see more)the healthcare domain. Current pre-training methods are limited in either unidirectional next-token prediction or randomly masked token prediction. We propose a novel architecture called Bidirectional Timely Generative Pre-trained Transformer (BiTimelyGPT), which pre-trains on biosignals and longitudinal clinical records by both next-token and previous-token prediction in alternating transformer layers. This pre-training task preserves original distribution and data shapes of the time-series. Additionally, the full-rank forward and backward attention matrices exhibit more expressive representation capabilities. Using biosignals and longitudinal clinical records, BiTimelyGPT demonstrates superior performance in predicting neurological functionality, disease diagnosis, and physiological signs. By visualizing the attention heatmap, we observe that the pre-trained BiTimelyGPT can identify discriminative segments from biosignal time-series sequences, even more so after fine-tuning on the task.
2024-02-14
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org