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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Current works and future directions on application of machine learning in primary care
S. A. Rahimi
Vera Granikov
Pierre Pluye
In this short paper, we explained current machine learning works in primary care based on a scoping review that we performed. The performed … (see more)review was in line with the methodological framework proposed by Colquhoun and colleagues. Lastly, we discussed our observations and gave important directions to the future studies in this fast-growing area.
2020-05-26
International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (published)
Failure to follow medication changes made at hospital discharge is associated with adverse events in 30 days
Daniala L. Weir
Aude Motulsky
Michal Abrahamowicz
Todd C. Lee
Steven Morgan
David L. Buckeridge
Robyn Tamblyn
To evaluate the hypothesis that nonadherence to medication changes made at hospital discharge is associated with an increased risk of advers… (see more)e events in the 30 days postdischarge.
Patients admitted to hospitals in Montreal, Quebec, between 2014 and 2016.
Prospective cohort study.
Nonadherence to medication changes was measured by comparing medications dispensed in the community with those prescribed at hospital discharge. Patient, health system, and drug regimen‐level covariates were measured using medical services and pharmacy claims data as well as data abstracted from the patient's hospital chart. Multivariable Cox models were used to determine the association between nonadherence to medication changes and the risk of adverse events.
Among 2655 patients who met our inclusion criteria, mean age was 69.5 years (SD 14.7) and 1581 (60%) were males. Almost half of patients (n = 1161, 44%) were nonadherent to at least one medication change, and 860 (32%) were readmitted to hospital, visited the emergency department, or died in the 30 days postdischarge. Patients who were not adherent to any of their medication changes had a 35% higher risk of adverse events compared to those who were adherent to all medication changes (1.41 vs 1.27 events/100 person‐days, adjusted hazard ratio: 1.35, 95% CI: 1.06‐1.71).
Almost half of all patients were not adherent to some or all changes made to their medications at hospital discharge. Nonadherence to all changes was associated with an increased risk of adverse events. Interventions addressing barriers to adherence should be considered moving forward.
Depth prediction from monocular images with deep CNNs is a topic of increasing interest to the community. Advances have lead to models capab… (see more)le of predicting disparity maps with consistent scale, which are an acceptable prior for gradient-based direct methods. With this in consideration, we exploit depth prediction as a candidate prior for the coarse initialization, tracking, and marginalization steps of the direct visual odometry system, enabling the second-order optimizer to converge faster into a precise global minimum. In addition, the given depth prior supports large baseline stereo scenarios, maintaining robust pose estimations against challenging motion states such as in-place rotation. We further refine our pose estimation with semi-online loop closure. The experiments on KITTI demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state- of-the-art performance compared to both traditional direct visual odometry and learning-based counterparts.
2020-05-12
2020 17th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) (published)
Extracting events accurately from vast news corpora and organize events logically is critical for news apps and search engines, which aim to… (see more) organize news information collected from the Internet and present it to users in the most sensible forms. Intuitively speaking, an event is a group of news documents that report the same news incident possibly in different ways. In this article, we describe our experience of implementing a news content organization system at Tencent to discover events from vast streams of breaking news and to evolve news story structures in an online fashion. Our real-world system faces unique challenges in contrast to previous studies on topic detection and tracking (TDT) and event timeline or graph generation, in that we (1) need to accurately and quickly extract distinguishable events from massive streams of long text documents, and (2) must develop the structures of event stories in an online manner, in order to guarantee a consistent user viewing experience. In solving these challenges, we propose Story Forest, a set of online schemes that automatically clusters streaming documents into events, while connecting related events in growing trees to tell evolving stories. A core novelty of our Story Forest system is EventX, a semi-supervised scheme to extract events from massive Internet news corpora. EventX relies on a two-layered, graph-based clustering procedure to group documents into fine-grained events. We conducted extensive evaluations based on (1) 60 GB of real-world Chinese news data, (2) a large Chinese Internet news dataset that contains 11,748 news articles with truth event labels, and (3) the 20 News Groups English dataset, through detailed pilot user experience studies. The results demonstrate the superior capabilities of Story Forest to accurately identify events and organize news text into a logical structure that is appealing to human readers.
2020-05-12
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (published)
Domain randomization is a popular technique for improving domain transfer, often used in a zero-shot setting when the target domain is unkno… (see more)wn or cannot easily be used for training. In this work, we empirically examine the effects of domain randomization on agent generalization. Our experiments show that domain randomization may lead to suboptimal, high-variance policies, which we attribute to the uniform sampling of environment parameters. We propose Active Domain Randomization, a novel algorithm that learns a parameter sampling strategy. Our method looks for the most informative environment variations within the given randomization ranges by leveraging the discrepancies of policy rollouts in randomized and reference environment instances. We find that training more frequently on these instances leads to better overall agent generalization. In addition, when domain randomization and policy transfer fail, Active Domain Randomization offers more insight into the deficiencies of both the chosen parameter ranges and the learned policy, allowing for more focused debugging. Our experiments across various physics-based simulated and a real-robot task show that this enhancement leads to more robust, consistent policies.
2020-05-11
Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (published)
The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in … (see more)many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration (e.g., Go-Explore) have been proposed to maintain the high exploration rate necessary to find high performing and generalizable policies. Soft actor-critic(SAC) is another method for improving exploration that aims to combine efficient learning via off-policy updates while maximizing the policy entropy. In this work, we extend SAC to a richer class of probability distributions (e.g., multimodal) through normalizing flows (NF) and show that this significantly improves performance by accelerating the discovery of good policies while using much smaller policy representations. Our approach, which we call SAC-NF, is a simple, efficient,easy-to-implement modification and improvement to SAC on continuous control baselines such as MuJoCo and PyBullet Roboschool domains. Finally, SAC-NF does this while being significantly parameter efficient, using as few as 5.5% the parameters for an equivalent SAC model.
2020-05-11
Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (published)
Millions of blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people navigate urban environments every day, using smartphones for high-level path-planning a… (see more)nd white canes or guide dogs for local information. However, many BVI people still struggle to travel to new places. In our endeavor to create a navigation assistant for the BVI, we found that existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments were unsuitable for the task. This work introduces SEVN, a sidewalk simulation environment and a neural network-based approach to creating a navigation agent. SEVN contains panoramic images with labels for house numbers, doors, and street name signs, and formulations for several navigation tasks. We study the performance of an RL algorithm (PPO) in this setting. Our policy model fuses multi-modal observations in the form of variable resolution images, visible text, and simulated GPS data to navigate to a goal door. We hope that this dataset, simulator, and experimental results will provide a foundation for further research into the creation of agents that can assist members of the BVI community with outdoor navigation.
2020-05-11
Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (published)
Social-communication (SC) and restricted repetitive behaviors (RRB) are autism diagnostic symptom domains. SC and RRB severity can markedly … (see more)differ within and between individuals and may be underpinned by different neural circuitry and genetic mechanisms. Modeling SC-RRB balance could help identify how neural circuitry and genetic mechanisms map onto such phenotypic heterogeneity. Here we developed a phenotypic stratification model that makes highly accurate (97-99%) out-of-sample SC=RRB, SC>RRB, and RRB>SC subtype predictions. Applying this model to resting state fMRI data from the EU-AIMS LEAP dataset (n=509), we find that while the phenotypic subtypes share many commonalities in terms of intrinsic functional connectivity, they also show subtype-specific qualitative differences compared to a typically-developing group (TD). Specifically, the somatomotor network is hypoconnected with perisylvian circuitry in SC>RRB and visual association circuitry in SC=RRB. The SC=RRB subtype also showed hyperconnectivity between medial motor and anterior salience circuitry. Genes that are highly expressed within these subtype-specific networks show a differential enrichment pattern with known ASD associated genes, indicating that such circuits are affected by differing autism-associated genomic mechanisms. These results suggest that SC-RRB imbalance subtypes share some commonalities but also express subtle differences in functional neural circuitry and the genomic underpinnings behind such circuitry.
Artificial behavioral agents are often evaluated based on their consistent behaviors and performance to take sequential actions in an enviro… (see more)nment to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. However, human decision making in real life usually involves different strategies and behavioral trajectories that lead to the same empirical outcome. Motivated by clinical literature of a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, we propose here a more general and flexible parametric framework for sequential decision making that involves a two-stream reward processing mechanism. We demonstrated that this framework is flexible and unified enough to incorporate a family of problems spanning multi-armed bandits (MAB), contextual bandits (CB) and reinforcement learning (RL), which decompose the sequential decision making process in different levels. Inspired by the known reward processing abnormalities of many mental disorders, our clinically-inspired agents demonstrated interesting behavioral trajectories and comparable performance on simulated tasks with particular reward distributions, a real-world dataset capturing human decision-making in gambling tasks, and the PacMan game across different reward stationarities in a lifelong learning setting.