Publications

Differential neural circuitry behind autism subtypes with imbalanced social-communicative and restricted repetitive behavior symptoms
Natasha Bertelsen
Isotta Landi
Richard A.I. Bethlehem
Jakob Seidlitz
Elena Maria Busuoli
Veronica Mandelli
Eleonora Satta
Stavros Trakoshis
Bonnie Auyeung
Prantik Kundu
Eva Loth
Guillaume Dumas
Sarah Baumeister
Christian Beckmann
Sven Bölte
Thomas Bourgeron
Tony Charman
Sarah Durston
Christine Ecker
Rosemary Holt … (see 15 more)
Mark Johnson
Emily J. H. Jones
Luke Mason
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg
Carolin Moessnang
Marianne Oldehinkel
Antonio Persico
Julian Tillmann
Steven C. R. Williams
Will Spooren
Declan Murphy
Jan K. Buitelaar
Simon Baron-Cohen
Meng-Chuan Lai
Michael V. Lombardo
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.
2020-05-09
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
An Empirical Study of Human Behavioral Agents in Bandits, Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning.
Baihan Lin
Guillermo Cecchi
Djallel Bouneffouf
Jenna Reinen
Irina Rish
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.
2020-05-09
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
Unified Models of Human Behavioral Agents in Bandits, Contextual Bandits and RL
Baihan Lin
Guillermo Cecchi
Djallel Bouneffouf
Jenna Reinen
Irina Rish
2020-05-09
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Desirable features in a decision aid for prenatal screening – what do pregnant women and their partners think? A mixed methods pilot study
Titilayo Tatiana Agbadje
S. A. Rahimi
Mélissa Côté
Andrée-Anne Tremblay
Mariama Penda Diallo
Hélène Elidor
Alex Poulin Herron
Codjo Djignefa Djade
France Légaré
Background To help pregnant women and their partners make informed value-congruent decisions about Down syndrome prenatal screening, our te… (see more)am developed two successive versions of a decision aid (DAv2017 and DAv2014). We aimed to assess pregnant women and their partners’ perceptions of the usefulness of the two DAs for preparing for decision making, their relative acceptability and their most desirable features. Methods This is a mixed methods pilot study. We recruited participants of study (women and their partners) when consulting for prenatal care in three clinical sites in Quebec City. To be eligible, women had to: (a) be at least 18 years old; (b) be more than 16 weeks pregnant; or having given birth in the previous year and (c) be able to speak and write in French or English. Both women and partners were invited to give their informed consent. We collected quantitative data on the usefulness of the DAs for preparing for decision making and their relative acceptability. We developed an interview grid based on the Technology Acceptance Model and Acceptability questionnaire to explore their perceptions of the most desirable features. We performed descriptive statistics and deductive analysis. Results Overall, 23 couples and 16 individual women participated in the study. The majority of participants were between 25 and 34 years old (79% of women and 59% of partners) and highly educated (66.7% of women and 54% of partners had a university-level education). DAv2017 scored higher for usefulness for preparing for decision making (86.2 ± 13 out of 100 for DAv2017 and 77.7 ± 14 for DAv2014). For most dimensions, DAv2017 was more acceptable than DAv2014 (e.g. the amount of information was found “just right” by 80% of participants for DAv2017 against 56% for DAv2014). However, participants preferred the presentation and the values clarification exercise of DAv2014. In their opinion, neither DA presented information in a completely balanced manner. They suggested adding more information about raising Down syndrome children, replacing frequencies with percentages, different values clarification methods, and a section for the partner. Conclusions A new user-centered version of the prenatal screening DA will integrate participants’ suggestions to reflect end users’ priorities.
2020-05-07
(published)
doi.org
Leveraging cluster backbones for improving MAP inference in statistical relational models
Mohamed Hamza Ibrahim
Christopher Pal
Gilles Pesant
2020-05-06
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Option-Critic in Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems
Jhelum Chakravorty
Nadeem Ward
Julien Roy
Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert
Sumana Basu
Andrei Lupu
Doina Precup
In this paper, we investigate learning temporal abstractions in cooperative multi-agent systems, using the options framework (Sutton et al, … (see more)1999). First, we address the planning problem for the decentralized POMDP represented by the multi-agent system, by introducing a \emph{common information approach}. We use the notion of \emph{common beliefs} and broadcasting to solve an equivalent centralized POMDP problem. Then, we propose the Distributed Option Critic (DOC) algorithm, which uses centralized option evaluation and decentralized intra-option improvement. We theoretically analyze the asymptotic convergence of DOC and build a new multi-agent environment to demonstrate its validity. Our experiments empirically show that DOC performs competitively against baselines and scales with the number of agents.
2020-05-04
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Story of Two Streams: Reinforcement Learning Models from Human Behavior and Neuropsychiatry
Baihan Lin
Guillermo Cecchi
Djallel Bouneffouf
Jenna Reinen
Irina Rish
Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a more general and flexible parametric framework fo… (see more)r reinforcement learning that extends standard Q-learning to a two-stream model for processing positive and negative rewards, and allows to incorporate a wide range of reward-processing biases -- an important component of human decision making which can help us better understand a wide spectrum of multi-agent interactions in complex real-world socioeconomic systems, as well as various neuropsychiatric conditions associated with disruptions in normal reward processing. From the computational perspective, we observe that the proposed Split-QL model and its clinically inspired variants consistently outperform standard Q-Learning and SARSA methods, as well as recently proposed Double Q-Learning approaches, on simulated tasks with particular reward distributions, a real-world dataset capturing human decision-making in gambling tasks, and the Pac-Man game in a lifelong learning setting across different reward stationarities.
2020-05-04
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Robust Speech Recognition
Mirco Ravanelli
Jianyuan Zhong
Santiago Pascual
Pawel Swietojanski
Joao Monteiro
Jan Trmal
Yoshua Bengio
Despite the growing interest in unsupervised learning, extracting meaningful knowledge from unlabelled audio remains an open challenge. To t… (see more)ake a step in this direction, we recently proposed a problem-agnostic speech encoder (PASE), that combines a convolutional encoder followed by multiple neural networks, called workers, tasked to solve self-supervised problems (i.e., ones that do not require manual annotations as ground truth). PASE was shown to capture relevant speech information, including speaker voice-print and phonemes. This paper proposes PASE+, an improved version of PASE for robust speech recognition in noisy and reverberant environments. To this end, we employ an online speech distortion module, that contaminates the input signals with a variety of random disturbances. We then propose a revised encoder that better learns short- and long-term speech dynamics with an efficient combination of recurrent and convolutional networks. Finally, we refine the set of workers used in self-supervision to encourage better cooperation. Results on TIMIT, DIRHA and CHiME-5 show that PASE+ significantly outperforms both the previous version of PASE as well as common acoustic features. Interestingly, PASE+ learns transferable representations suitable for highly mismatched acoustic conditions.
2020-05-03
ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Suitable e-Health Solutions for Older Adults with Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment: Perceptions of Health and Social Care Providers in Quebec City
Marie-Pierre Gagnon
Mame Ndiaye
Mylène Boucher
Samantha Dequanter
Ronald Buyl
Ellen Gorus
Anne Bourbonnais
Anik Giguère
S. A. Rahimi
: e-Health solutions offer a potential to improve the quality of life and safety of older adults with dementia or mild cognitive impairment … (see more)(MCI). In making better decisions for using eHealth technologies, health professionals should be aware and well informed about existing tools. Recent research shows the lack of knowledge on these technologies for older adults with dementia. In Quebec, current market offer for these technologies is supply-based, and not need-based. This study is part of a larger project and aims to understand the perceptions and needs of health and social care providers regarding e-health technologies for older adults with dementia or MCI. One focus group was carried out with six health and social care professionals at the St-Sacrement Hospital in Quebec City, Canada. The focus group enquired about the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with older adults with cognitive impairment. Relevant examples of ICTs were presented to assess their knowledge level. The discussion was tape-recorded and transcripts were coded using the Nvivo software. Results revealed that aside from fall safety technologies, there is a lack of knowledge about other e-Health technologies for this population. Respondents acknowledged the value of ICTs and were willing to recommend some of them. Economic reasons, blind trust on ICTs and lack of confidence in patients’ capacity to use the solutions were the major limitations identified.
2020-05-02
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health (published)
doi.org
General Principles of Gene Dosage Effects on Brain Structure
Claudia Modenato
Kuldeep Kumar
Clara A. Moreau
Catherine Schramm
Guillaume Huguet
Sandra Martin-Brevet
Aurélie Pain
Anne M. Maillard
Sonia Richetin
Borja Rodriguez-Herreros
Lester Melie-Garcia
Ana Dos Santos Silva
Marianne B.M. van den Bree
David E.J. Linden
Carrie E. Bearden
Danilo Bzdok
Sarah Lippé
Mallar Chakravarty
Bogdan Draganski
Sébastien Jacquemont
2020-04-30
Biological Psychiatry (published)
doi.org
HipoRank: Incorporating Hierarchical and Positional Information into Graph-based Unsupervised Long Document Extractive Summarization
Yue Dong
Andrei Mircea
Jackie CK Cheung
We propose a novel graph-based ranking model for unsupervised extractive summarization of long documents. Graph-based ranking models typical… (see more)ly represent documents as undirected fully-connected graphs, where a node is a sentence, an edge is weighted based on sentence-pair similarity, and sentence importance is measured via node centrality. Our method leverages positional and hierarchical information grounded in discourse structure to augment a document's graph representation with hierarchy and directionality. Experimental results on PubMed and arXiv datasets show that our approach outperforms strong unsupervised baselines by wide margins and performs comparably to some of the state-of-the-art supervised models that are trained on hundreds of thousands of examples. In addition, we find that our method provides comparable improvements with various distributional sentence representations; including BERT and RoBERTa models fine-tuned on sentence similarity.
2020-04-30
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Route choice behaviour and travel information in a congested network: Static and dynamic recursive models
G. M. Ramos
Tien Mai
W. Daamen
Emma Frejinger
S. Hoogendoorn
2020-04-30
Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (published)
doi.org