NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
Join us at Mila in October for a three-day workshop to explore the transformative potential of language technologies and their implications for society.
This program is designed to provide decision-makers, policymakers and professional working in policy with a foundational understanding of AI technology.
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Publications
Towards contrast-agnostic soft segmentation of the spinal cord
Spinal cord segmentation is clinically relevant and is notably used to compute spinal cord cross-sectional area (CSA) for the diagnosis and … (see more)monitoring of cord compression or neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. While several semi and automatic methods exist, one key limitation remains: the segmentation depends on the MRI contrast, resulting in different CSA across contrasts. This is partly due to the varying appearance of the boundary between the spinal cord and the cerebrospinal fluid that depends on the sequence and acquisition parameters. This contrast-sensitive CSA adds variability in multi-center studies where protocols can vary, reducing the sensitivity to detect subtle atrophies. Moreover, existing methods enhance the CSA variability by training one model per contrast, while also producing binary masks that do not account for partial volume effects. In this work, we present a deep learning-based method that produces soft segmentations of the spinal cord. Using the Spine Generic Public Database of healthy participants (
Synthetic biology holds great promise for bioengineering applications such as environmental bioremediation, probiotic formulation, and produ… (see more)ction of renewable biofuels. Humans’ capacity to design biological systems from scratch is limited by their sheer size and complexity. We introduce a framework for training a machine learning model to learn the basic genetic principles underlying the gene composition of bacterial genomes. Our variational autoencoder model, DeepGenomeVector, was trained to take as input corrupted bacterial genetic blueprints (i.e. complete gene sets, henceforth ‘genome vectors’) in which most genes had been “removed”, and re-create the original. The resulting model effectively captures the complex dependencies in genomic networks, as evaluated by both qualitative and quantitative metrics. An in-depth functional analysis of a generated gene vector shows that its encoded pathways are interconnected and nearly complete. On the test set, where the model’s ability to re-generate the original, uncorrupted genome vector was evaluated, an AUC score of 0.98 and an F1 score of 0.82 provide support for the model’s ability to generate diverse, high-quality genome vectors. This work showcases the power of machine learning approaches for synthetic biology and highlights the possibility that just as humans can design an AI that animates a robot, AIs may one day be able to design a genomic blueprint that animates a carbon-based cell. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Genomes serve as the blueprints for life, encoding complex networks of genes whose products must seamlessly interact to result in living organisms. In this work, we develop a framework for training a machine learning algorithm to learn the basic genetic principles that underlie genome composition. This innovation may eventually lead to improvements in the genome design process, increasing the speed and reliability of designs while decreasing cost. It further suggests that AI agents may one day have the potential to design blueprints for carbon-based life.
Unsupervised Improvement of Audio-Text Cross-Modal Representations
Zhepei Wang
Cem Subakan
Krishna Subramani
Junkai Wu
Tiago Tavares
Fabio Ayres
Paris Smaragdis
Recent advances in using language models to obtain cross-modal audio-text representations have overcome the limitations of conventional trai… (see more)ning approaches that use predefined labels. This has allowed the community to make progress in tasks like zero-shot classification, which would otherwise not be possible. However, learning such representations requires a large amount of human-annotated audio-text pairs. In this paper, we study unsupervised approaches to improve the learning framework of such representations with unpaired text and audio. We explore domain-unspecific and domain-specific curation methods to create audio-text pairs that we use to further improve the model. We also show that when domain-specific curation is used in conjunction with a soft-labeled contrastive loss, we are able to obtain significant improvement in terms of zero-shot classification performance on downstream sound event classification or acoustic scene classification tasks.
2023-10-22
2023 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) (published)
Membership inference attacks (MIA) can reveal whether a particular data point was part of the training dataset, potentially exposing sensiti… (see more)ve information about individuals. This article provides theoretical guarantees by exploring the fundamental statistical limitations associated with MIAs on machine learning models. More precisely, we first derive the statistical quantity that governs the effectiveness and success of such attacks. We then deduce that in a very general regression setting with overfitting algorithms, attacks may have a high probability of success. Finally, we investigate several situations for which we provide bounds on this quantity of interest. Our results enable us to deduce the accuracy of potential attacks based on the number of samples and other structural parameters of learning models. In certain instances, these parameters can be directly estimated from the dataset.
In this paper, we explore audio-editing with non-rigid text edits. We show that the proposed editing pipeline is able to create audio edits … (see more)that remain faithful to the input audio. We explore text prompts that perform addition, style transfer, and in-painting. We quantitatively and qualitatively show that the edits are able to obtain results which outperform Audio-LDM, a recently released text-prompted audio generation model. Qualitative inspection of the results points out that the edits given by our approach remain more faithful to the input audio in terms of keeping the original onsets and offsets of the audio events.
Metawebs (networks of potential interactions within a species pool) are a powerful abstraction to understand how large‐scale species inter… (see more)action networks are structured. Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the limitations in data deficiencies, by providing a first approximation of metawebs. One way to improve our ability to predict metawebs is to maximize available information by using graph embeddings, as opposed to an exhaustive list of species interactions. Graph embedding is an emerging field in machine learning that holds great potential for ecological problems. Here, we outline how the challenges associated with inferring metawebs line‐up with the advantages of graph embeddings; followed by a discussion as to how the choice of the species pool has consequences on the reconstructed network, specifically as to the role of human‐made (or arbitrarily assigned) boundaries and how these may influence ecological hypotheses.
Bayesian Persuasion is proposed as a tool for social media platforms to combat the spread of misinformation. Since platforms can use machine… (see more) learning to predict the popularity and misinformation features of to-be-shared posts, and users are largely motivated to share popular content, platforms can strategically signal this informational advantage to change user beliefs and persuade them not to share misinformation. We characterize the optimal signaling scheme with imperfect predictions as a linear program and give sufficient and necessary conditions on the classifier to ensure optimal platform utility is non-decreasing and continuous. Next, this interaction is considered under a performative model, wherein platform intervention affects the user's future behaviour. The convergence and stability of optimal signaling under this performative process are fully characterized. Lastly, we experimentally validate that our approach significantly reduces misinformation in both the single round and performative setting and discuss the broader scope of using information design to combat misinformation.