Publications

Virtual Reality for Pediatric Trauma Education - A Preliminary Face and Content Validation Study
Fabio Botelho
Said Ashkar
Shreenik Kundu
Tj Matthews
Elena Guadgano
Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science
Isaac Eckert
Anne Bruneau
D. Metsger
Simon Joly
T. Dickinson
Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science
Isaac Eckert
Anne Bruneau
D. Metsger
Simon Joly
T. Dickinson
ProGRes: Prompted Generative Rescoring on ASR n-Best
Ada Defne Tur
Adel Moumen
Progres: Prompted Generative Rescoring on ASR N-Best
Ada Defne Tur
Adel Moumen
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their ability to improve the performance of speech recognizers by effectively rescoring the n-best h… (see more)ypotheses generated during the beam search process. However, the best way to exploit recent generative instruction-tuned LLMs for hypothesis rescoring is still unclear. This paper proposes a novel method that uses instruction-tuned LLMs to dynamically expand the n-best speech recognition hypotheses with new hypotheses generated through appropriately-prompted LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a new zero-shot method for ASR n-best rescoring, which combines confidence scores, LLM sequence scoring, and prompt-based hypothesis generation. We compare Llama-3-Instruct, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4 Turbo as prompt-based generators with Llama-3 as sequence scorer LLM. We evaluated our approach using different speech recognizers and observed significant relative improvement in the word error rate (WER) ranging from 5% to 25%.
Progres: Prompted Generative Rescoring on ASR N-Best
Ada Defne Tur
Adel Moumen
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their ability to improve the performance of speech recognizers by effectively rescoring the n-best h… (see more)ypotheses generated during the beam search process. However, the best way to exploit recent generative instruction-tuned LLMs for hypothesis rescoring is still unclear. This paper proposes a novel method that uses instruction-tuned LLMs to dynamically expand the n-best speech recognition hypotheses with new hypotheses generated through appropriately-prompted LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a new zero-shot method for ASR n-best rescoring, which combines confidence scores, LLM sequence scoring, and prompt-based hypothesis generation. We compare Llama-3-Instruct, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4 Turbo as prompt-based generators with Llama-3 as sequence scorer LLM. We evaluated our approach using different speech recognizers and observed significant relative improvement in the word error rate (WER) ranging from 5% to 25%.
Learning Multi-agent Multi-machine Tending by Mobile Robots
Abdalwhab Abdalwhab
David St-Onge
Robotics can help address the growing worker shortage challenge of the manufacturing industry. As such, machine tending is a task collaborat… (see more)ive robots can tackle that can also highly boost productivity. Nevertheless, existing robotics systems deployed in that sector rely on a fixed single-arm setup, whereas mobile robots can provide more flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce a multi-agent multi-machine tending learning framework by mobile robots based on Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) techniques with the design of a suitable observation and reward. Moreover, an attention-based encoding mechanism is developed and integrated into Multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) algorithm to boost its performance for machine tending scenarios. Our model (AB-MAPPO) outperformed MAPPO in this new challenging scenario in terms of task success, safety, and resources utilization. Furthermore, we provided an extensive ablation study to support our various design decisions.
Active Semantic Mapping and Pose Graph Spectral Analysis for Robot Exploration
Rongge Zhang
Haechan Mark Bong
Exploration in unknown and unstructured environments is a pivotal requirement for robotic applications. A robot’s exploration behavior can… (see more) be inherently affected by the performance of its Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) subsystem, although SLAM and exploration are generally studied separately. In this paper, we formulate exploration as an active mapping problem and extend it with semantic information. We introduce a novel active metric-semantic SLAM approach, leveraging recent research advances in information theory and spectral graph theory: we combine semantic mutual information and the connectivity metrics of the underlying pose graph of the SLAM subsystem. We use the resulting utility function to evaluate different trajectories to select the most favorable strategy during exploration. Exploration and SLAM metrics are analyzed in experiments. Running our algorithm on the Habitat dataset, we show that, while maintaining efficiency close to the state-of-the-art exploration methods, our approach effectively increases the performance of metric-semantic SLAM with a 21% reduction in average map error and a 9% improvement in average semantic classification accuracy.
Active Semantic Mapping and Pose Graph Spectral Analysis for Robot Exploration
Rongge Zhang
Haechan Mark Bong
ARGV: 3D genome structure exploration using augmented reality
Chrisostomos Drogaris
Yanlin Zhang
Éric Zhang
Elena Nazarova
Roman Sarrazin-Gendron
Sélik Wilhelm-Landry
Yan Cyr
Jacek Majewski
Jérôme Waldispühl
A long-context RNA foundation model for predicting transcriptome architecture
Ali Saberi
Benedict Choi
Sean Wang
Aldo Hernández-Corchado
Mohsen Naghipourfar
Arsham Mikaeili Namini
Vijay Ramani
Hamed S. Najafabadi
Hani Goodarzi
Linking DNA sequence to genomic function remains one of the grand challenges in genetics and genomics. Here, we combine large-scale single-m… (see more)olecule transcriptome sequencing of diverse cancer cell lines with cutting-edge machine learning to build LoRNASH, an RNA foundation model that learns how the nucleotide sequence of unspliced pre-mRNA dictates transcriptome architecture—the relative abundances and molecular structures of mRNA isoforms. Owing to its use of the StripedHyena architecture, LoRNASH handles extremely long sequence inputs (∼65 kilobase pairs), allowing for quantitative, zero-shot prediction of all aspects of transcriptome architecture, including isoform abundance, isoform structure, and the impact of DNA sequence variants on transcript structure and abundance. We anticipate that our public data release and proof-of-concept model will accelerate varying aspects of RNA biotechnology. More broadly, we envision the use of LoRNASH as a foundation for fine-tuning of any transcriptome-related downstream prediction task, including cell-type specific gene expression, splicing, and general RNA processing.
MeshUp: Multi-Target Mesh Deformation via Blended Score Distillation
Hyunwoo Kim
Itai Lang
Thibault Groueix
Vladimir Kim
Rana Hanocka
We propose MeshUp, a technique that deforms a 3D mesh towards multiple target concepts, and intuitively controls the region where each conce… (see more)pt is expressed. Conveniently, the concepts can be defined as either text queries, e.g.,"a dog"and"a turtle,"or inspirational images, and the local regions can be selected as any number of vertices on the mesh. We can effectively control the influence of the concepts and mix them together using a novel score distillation approach, referred to as the Blended Score Distillation (BSD). BSD operates on each attention layer of the denoising U-Net of a diffusion model as it extracts and injects the per-objective activations into a unified denoising pipeline from which the deformation gradients are calculated. To localize the expression of these activations, we create a probabilistic Region of Interest (ROI) map on the surface of the mesh, and turn it into 3D-consistent masks that we use to control the expression of these activations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BSD empirically and show that it can deform various meshes towards multiple objectives. Our project page is at https://threedle.github.io/MeshUp.