Publications

The Effect of Diversity in Meta-Learning
Ramnath Kumar
Tristan Deleu
Yoshua Bengio
Recent studies show that task distribution plays a vital role in the meta-learner's performance. Conventional wisdom is that task diversity … (see more)should improve the performance of meta-learning. In this work, we find evidence to the contrary; (i) our experiments draw into question the efficacy of our learned models: similar manifolds can be learned with a subset of the data (lower task diversity). This finding questions the advantage of providing more data to the model, and (ii) adding diversity to the task distribution (higher task diversity) sometimes hinders the model and does not lead to a significant improvement in performance as previously believed. To strengthen our findings, we provide both empirical and theoretical evidence.
2023-06-25
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
openreview.net
Towards Safe Mechanical Ventilation Treatment Using Deep Offline Reinforcement Learning
Flemming Kondrup
Thomas Jiralerspong
Elaine Lau
Nathan de Lara
Jacob Shkrob
My Duc Tran
Doina Precup
Sumana Basu
Mechanical ventilation is a key form of life support for patients with pulmonary impairment. Healthcare workers are required to continuously… (see more) adjust ventilator settings for each patient, a challenging and time consuming task. Hence, it would be beneficial to develop an automated decision support tool to optimize ventilation treatment. We present DeepVent, a Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) based offline Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent that learns to predict the optimal ventilator parameters for a patient to promote 90 day survival. We design a clinically relevant intermediate reward that encourages continuous improvement of the patient vitals as well as addresses the challenge of sparse reward in RL. We find that DeepVent recommends ventilation parameters within safe ranges, as outlined in recent clinical trials. The CQL algorithm offers additional safety by mitigating the overestimation of the value estimates of out-of-distribution states/actions. We evaluate our agent using Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) and demonstrate that it outperforms physicians from the MIMIC-III dataset.
2023-06-25
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Partial Ordered Statistics Decoding with Enhanced Error Patterns
Marwan Jalaleddine
Huayi Zhou
Jiajie Li
Warren J. Gross
Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) excels at decoding high-rate codes but struggles to decode low-rate codes with reasonable co… (see more)mplexity. Ordered Statistics Decoding (OSD) specifically excels in decoding short codes irrespective of rates; however, OSD necessitates the use of Gaussian elimination which introduces additional time, space and computational complexity. Partial Ordered Statistics Decoding (POSD) was proposed to reduce the time, space, and computational complexity of OSD; however, the current partition-based POSD has poor decoding performance since it does not generate test error patterns across partitions. In this paper, we propose to improve the decoding performance of POSD by incorporating test error patterns inspired by GRAND methods. This work offers a trade-off between performance and complexity compared to existing decoders such as GRAND and OSD. We enhance POSD by optimizing the scheduling of Test Error Patterns (TEPs) and show that our technique can be applied to any code in a standard form. At a target BER 10−4 with eBCH (128,64) the enhanced error patterns achieve more than 0.6 dB gain in performance compared to the POSD with partition-based error patterns. Moreover, at a target frame error rate of 10−5, POSD uses 10× less binary operations compared to GRAND when decoding eBCH (128,64) and RLC(128,64) codes. With BCH (127,29) and RLC(128,32), at a target frame error rate of 10−2, POSD with enhanced error patterns with a maximum number of queries (MQ) of 104 achieves up to a 2 dB gain to its GRAND equivalent which is using 107 maximum number of queries.
2023-06-24
2023 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) (published)
doi.org
CeBed: A Benchmark for Deep Data-Driven OFDM Channel Estimation
Amal Feriani
Di Wu
Steve Liu
Gregory Dudek
2023-06-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Goal-conditioned GFlowNets for Controllable Multi-Objective Molecular Design
Julien Roy
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Christopher Pal
Emmanuel Bengio
In recent years, in-silico molecular design has received much attention from the machine learning community. When designing a new compound f… (see more)or pharmaceutical applications, there are usually multiple properties of such molecules that need to be optimised: binding energy to the target, synthesizability, toxicity, EC50, and so on. While previous approaches have employed a scalarization scheme to turn the multi-objective problem into a preference-conditioned single objective, it has been established that this kind of reduction may produce solutions that tend to slide towards the extreme points of the objective space when presented with a problem that exhibits a concave Pareto front. In this work we experiment with an alternative formulation of goal-conditioned molecular generation to obtain a more controllable conditional model that can uniformly explore solutions along the entire Pareto front.
2023-06-22
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/DeployableGenerativeAI (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Using modular connectome-based predictive modeling to reveal brain-behavior relationships of individual differences in working memory
Huayi Yang
Junjun Zhang
Zhenlan Jin
Pouya Bashivan
Ling Li
2023-06-21
Brain Structure and Function (published)
doi.org
Accelerating exploration and representation learning with offline pre-training
Bogdan Mazoure
Jacob Bruce
Doina Precup
Rob Fergus
Ankit Anand
Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement lea… (see more)rning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory capability, altering the agent's intrinsic motivation (i.e. exploration) or its worldview (i.e. knowledge representation). Many of these components could be learned from offline data. In this work, we follow the hypothesis that exploration and representation learning can be improved by separately learning two different models from a single offline dataset. We show that learning a state representation using noise-contrastive estimation and a model of auxiliary reward separately from a single collection of human demonstrations can significantly improve the sample efficiency on the challenging NetHack benchmark. We also ablate various components of our experimental setting and highlight crucial insights.
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/ILHF (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Cognitive Models as Simulators: Using Cognitive Models to Tap into Implicit Human Feedback
Ardavan S. Nobandegani
Thomas Shultz
Irina Rish
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/ILHF (accepted)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Constant Memory Attention Block
Leo Feng
Frederick Tung
Hossein Hajimirsadeghi
Yoshua Bengio
Mohamed Osama Ahmed
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/ES-FoMO (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models: How to (re)warm your model?
Kshitij Gupta
Benjamin Therien
Adam Ibrahim
Mats Leon Richter
Quentin Gregory Anthony
Eugene Belilovsky
Irina Rish
Timothee LESORT
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to restart the process over again once new data becomes a… (see more)vailable. A much cheaper and more efficient solution would be to enable the continual pre-training of these models, i.e. updating pre-trained models with new data instead of re-training them from scratch. However, the distribution shift induced by novel data typically results in degraded performance on past data. Taking a step towards efficient continual pre-training, in this work, we examine the effect of different warm-up strategies. Our hypothesis is that the learning rate must be re-increased to improve compute efficiency when training on a new dataset. We study the warmup phase of models pre-trained on the Pile (upstream data, 300B tokens) as we continue to pre-train on SlimPajama (downstream data, 297B tokens), following a linear warmup and cosine decay schedule. We conduct all experiments on the Pythia 410M language model architecture and evaluate performance through validation perplexity. We experiment with different pre-training checkpoints, various maximum learning rates, and various warmup lengths. Our results show that while rewarming models first increases the loss on upstream and downstream data, in the longer run it improves the downstream performance, outperforming models trained from scratch
2023-06-19
ES-FoMO @ International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Deep Clustering with Self-supervision using Pairwise Data Similarities
Mohammadreza Sadeghi
Narges Armanfard
Deep clustering incorporates embedding into clustering to find a lower-dimensional space appropriate for clustering. Most of the existing me… (see more)thods try to group similar data points through simultaneously minimizing clustering and reconstruction losses, employing an autoencoder (AE). However, they all ignore the relevant useful information available within pairwise data relationships. In this paper we propose a novel deep clustering framework with self-supervision using pairwise data similarities (DCSS). The proposed method consists of two successive phases. First, we propose a novel AE-based approach that aims to aggregate similar data points near a common group center in the latent space of an AE. The AE's latent space is obtained by minimizing weighted reconstruction and centering losses of data points, where weights are defined based on similarity of data points and group centers. In the second phase, we map the AE's latent space, using a fully connected network MNet, onto a K-dimensional space used to derive the final data cluster assignments, where K is the number of clusters. MNet is trained to strengthen (weaken) similarity of similar (dissimilar) samples. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DCSS for data clustering and as a general framework for boosting up state-of-the-art clustering methods.
2023-06-19
INDIGO (preprint)
doi.org
GFlowNets for Causal Discovery: an Overview
Dragos Cristian Manta
Edward J Hu
Yoshua Bengio
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SODS (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net