Publications

The Impact of Pediatric Surgery Global Travel Fellowships: A Study by the Canadian Association of Paediatric Surgeons Global Partnership Committee.
Sacha Williams
Natasha Bejjani
Elena Guadagno
Robert Baird
Shahrzad Joharifard
Melanie Morris
Robin Petroze
Dan Poenaru
Sherif Emil
2025-12-31
Journal of Pediatric Surgery (published)
doi.org
The Intricate Dance of Prompt Complexity, Quality, Diversity and Consistency in T2I Models
Zhang Xiaofeng
Aaron Courville
Michal Drozdzal
Adriana Romero-Soriano
Text-to-image (T2I) models offer great potential for creating virtually limitless synthetic data, a valuable resource compared to fixed and … (see more)finite real datasets. Previous works evaluate the utility of synthetic data from T2I models on three key desiderata: quality, diversity, and consistency. While prompt engineering is the primary means of interacting with T2I models, the systematic impact of prompt complexity on these critical utility axes remains underexplored. In this paper, we first conduct synthetic experiments to motivate the difficulty of generalization w.r.t. prompt complexity and explain the observed difficulty with theoretical derivations. Then, we introduce a new evaluation framework that can compare the utility of real data and synthetic data, and present a comprehensive analysis of how prompt complexity influences the utility of synthetic data generated by commonly used T2I models. We conduct our study across diverse datasets, including CC12M, ImageNet-1k, and DCI, and evaluate different inference-time intervention methods. Our synthetic experiments show that generalizing to more general conditions is harder than the other way round, since the former needs an estimated likelihood that is not learned by diffusion models. Our large-scale empirical experiments reveal that increasing prompt complexity results in lower conditional diversity and prompt consistency, while reducing the synthetic-to-real distribution shift, which aligns with the synthetic experiments. Moreover, current inference-time interventions can augment the diversity of the generations at the expense of moving outside the support of real data. Among those interventions, prompt expansion, by deliberately using a pre-trained language model as a likelihood estimator, consistently achieves the highest performance in both image diversity and aesthetics, even higher than that of real data. Combining advanced guidance interventions with prompt expansion results in the most appealing utility trade-offs of synthetic data.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
openreview.net
openreview.net
The Markovian Thinker
Milad Aghajohari
Kamran Chitsaz
Amirhossein Kazemnejad
Sarath Chandar
Alessandro Sordoni
Aaron Courville
Siva Reddy
Reasoning LLMs suffer from quadratic compute growth as their context length increases, making reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards… (see more) (RLVR) and test-time scaling prohibitively expensive. Prior work has tried to lighten the computational burden by shortening reasoning traces through pruning, summarization, or multi-stage training, but these methods remain bound to quadratic costs. We introduce Delethink, a thinking algorithm that realizes the Markovian Thinking Paradigm. Instead of producing one long monolithic reasoning trace, Delethink thinks in a sequence of chunks, the Delethink trace. Each chunk continues reasoning by referring only to a fixed number of prior tokens, which functions as a Markovian state sufficient for progressing reasoning, while deleting the rest. This preserves continuity without carrying the quadratic baggage. As a result, compute scales linearly and peak memory remains constant. In experiments, we show that Delethink can be applied directly to off-the-shelf reasoning models ranging from
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
openreview.net
openreview.net
On the sensitivity of SAR C- and L-band dual-polarized data for detection of early deforestation in the tropics
Africa I. Flores-Anderson
Jeffrey A. Cardille
Josef Kellndorfer
Franz J. Meyer
Pontus Olofsson
2025-12-31
Remote Sensing of Environment (published)
doi.org
The Silent Thought: Modeling Internal Cognition in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models via Latent Reasoning
Donghang Wu
Tianyu Zhang
Yuxin Li
Hexin Liu
Chen Chen
Eng Siong Chng
Yoshua Bengio
During conversational interactions, humans subconsciously engage in concurrent thinking while listening to a speaker. Although this internal… (see more) cognitive processing may not always manifest as explicit linguistic structures, it is instrumental in formulating high-quality responses. Inspired by this cognitive phenomenon, we propose a novel **F**ull-duplex **LA**tent and **I**nternal **R**easoning method named FLAIR that conducts *latent* thinking simultaneously with speech perception. Unlike conventional "thinking" mechanisms in NLP, which require post-hoc generation, our approach aligns seamlessly with spoken dialogue systems: during the user’s speaking phase, it recursively feeds the latent embedding output from the previous step into the next step, enabling continuous reasoning that strictly adheres to causality without introducing additional latency. To enable this latent reasoning, we design an Evidence Lower Bound-based objective that supports efficient supervised finetuning via teacher forcing, circumventing the need for explicit reasoning annotations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this think-while-listening design, which achieves competitive results on a range of speech benchmarks. Furthermore, FLAIR robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Machine Learning (Accept (regular))
doi.org
openreview.net
The Surprising Difficulty of Search in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Wei-Di Chang
Mikael Henaff
Brandon Amos
Gregory Dudek
Scott Fujimoto
This paper investigates search in model-based reinforcement learning (RL). Conventional wisdom holds that long-term predictions and compound… (see more)ing errors are the primary obstacles for model-based RL. We challenge this view, showing that search is not a plug-and-play replacement for a learned policy. Surprisingly, we find that search can harm performance even when the model is highly accurate. Instead, we show that mitigating distribution shift matters more than improving model or value function accuracy. Building on this insight, we identify key techniques for enabling effective search, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple popular benchmark domains.
2025-12-31
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Think Fast: Real-Time IoT Intrusion Reasoning Using IDS and LLMs at the Edge Gateway
Saeid Jamshidi
Omar Abdel Wahab
Rolando Herrero
Foutse Khomh
Martine Bellaiche
Samira Keivanpour
Negar Shahabi
Amin Nikanjam
Kawser Wazed Nafi
2025-12-31
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
TN-SHAP-G: Graph-Structured Tensor Network Surrogates for Shapley Values and Interactions
Farzaneh Heidari
Guillaume Rabusseau
Shapley values are a widely used tool for attributing importance and interactions among input variables in black-box models, but their compu… (see more)tation involves a function defined over an exponentially large space of subsets. We propose TN-SHAP-G, a framework that exploits structure in graph-structured inputs to compute Shapley values and higher-order interaction indices efficiently. Given a predictor and a fixed masking scheme, TN-SHAP-G learns a compact, graph-aligned multilinear surrogate that approximates the masked-input behavior, represented as a tensor network whose topology mirrors the input graph. Once trained from a small number of oracle queries, the surrogate enables deterministic recovery of first- and higher-order Shapley indices via the multilinear extension, without additional model queries or Monte Carlo variance. Experiments on molecular benchmarks show that the learned factorization closely matches exact Shapley values on small graphs and scales efficiently to larger graphs where sampling-based methods become infeasible.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Machine Learning (Accept (regular))
doi.org
openreview.net
Towards Agentic Intelligence for Materials Science
Huan Zhang
Yizhan Li
Wenhao Huang
Ziyu Hou
Yu Song
Xuye Liu
Farshid Effaty
Jinya Jiang
Sifan Wu
Qianggang Ding
Izumi Takahara
Leonard R. MacGillivray
Teruyasu Mizoguchi
Tianshu Yu
Lizi Liao
Yuyu Luo
Yu Rong
Jia LI
Ying Diao
Heng Ji … (see 1 more)
Bang Liu
The convergence of artificial intelligence and materials science presents a transformative opportunity, but achieving true acceleration in d… (see more)iscovery requires moving beyond task-isolated, fine-tuned models toward agentic systems that plan, act, and learn across the full discovery loop. This survey advances a unique pipeline-centric view that spans from corpus curation and pretraining, through domain adaptation and instruction tuning, to goal-conditioned agents interfacing with simulation and experimental platforms. Unlike prior reviews, we treat the entire process as an end-to-end system to be optimized for tangible discovery outcomes rather than proxy benchmarks. This perspective allows us to trace how upstream design choices-such as data curation and training objectives-can be aligned with downstream experimental success through effective credit assignment. To bridge communities and establish a shared frame of reference, we first present an integrated lens that aligns terminology, evaluation, and workflow stages across AI and materials science. We then analyze the field through two focused lenses: From the AI perspective, the survey details LLM strengths in pattern recognition, predictive analytics, and natural language processing for literature mining, materials characterization, and property prediction; from the materials science perspective, it highlights applications in materials design, process optimization, and the acceleration of computational workflows via integration with external tools (e.g., DFT, robotic labs). Finally, we contrast passive, reactive approaches with agentic design, cataloging current contributions while motivating systems that pursue long-horizon goals with autonomy, memory, and tool use. This survey charts a practical roadmap towards autonomous, safety-aware LLM agents aimed at discovering novel and useful materials.
2025-12-31
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Towards All-Atom Foundation Models for Biomolecular Binding Affinity Prediction
Liang Shi
Zuobai Zhang
Huiyu Cai
Santiago Miret
Zhi Yang
Jian Tang
Biomolecular interactions play a critical role in biological processes. While recent breakthroughs like AlphaFold 3 have enabled accurate mo… (see more)deling of biomolecular complex structures, predicting binding affinity remains challenging mainly due to limited high-quality data. Recent methods are often specialized for specific types of biomolecular interactions, limiting their generalizability. In this work, we repurpose AlphaFold 3 for representation learning to predict binding affinity, a non-trivial task that requires shifting from generative structure prediction to encoding observed geometry, simplifying the heavily conditioned trunk module, and designing a framework to jointly capture sequence and structural information. To address these challenges, we introduce the **Atom-level Diffusion Transformer (ADiT)**, which takes sequence and structure as inputs, employs a unified tokenization scheme, integrates diffusion transformers, and removes dependencies on multiple sequence alignments and templates. We pre-train three ADiT variants on the PDB dataset with a denoising objective and evaluate them across protein-ligand, drug-target, protein-protein, and antibody-antigen interactions. The model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across benchmarks, scales effectively with model size, and successfully identifies wet-lab validated affinity-enhancing antibody mutations, establishing a generalizable framework for biomolecular interactions. We plan to release the code upon acceptance.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
openreview.net
openreview.net
Towards Learned Optimization Free Lunch
Abhinav Moudgil
Boris Knyazev
Eugene Belilovsky
Learned optimizers are powerful alternatives to hand-designed rules like Adam, yet they have seen limited practical adoption since they ofte… (see more)n fail to meta-generalize beyond their training distribution and incur high meta-training cost. For instance, prior work, VeLO, scaled meta-training to 4,000 TPU months (
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
openreview.net
openreview.net
Towards Multi-Brain Decoding in Autism: A Self-Supervised Learning Approach
Ghazaleh Ranjabaran
Quentin Moreau
Adrien Dubois
Guillaume Dumas
Abstract This study introduces a self-supervised learning (SSL) approach to hyperscanning electroencephalog… (see more)raphy (EEG) data, targeting the identification of autism spectrum condition (ASC) during social interactions. Hyperscanning enables simultaneous recording of neural activity across interacting individuals, offering a novel path for studying brain-to-brain synchrony in ASC. Leveraging a large-scale, single-brain EEG dataset for SSL pretraining, we developed a multi-brain classification model fine-tuned with hyperscanning data from dyadic interactions involving ASC and neurotypical participants. The SSL model demonstrated superior performance (78.13% accuracy) compared to supervised baselines and logistic regression using spectral EEG biomarkers. These results underscore the efficacy of SSL in addressing the challenges of limited labeled data, enhancing EEG-based diagnostic tools for ASC, and advancing research in social neuroscience.
2025-12-31
Neuroinformatics (published)
doi.org