Portrait de Doina Precup

Doina Precup

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeure agrégée, McGill University, École d'informatique
Chef d'équipe de recherche, Google DeepMind
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage par renforcement
Modèles probabilistes
Modélisation moléculaire
Raisonnement

Biographie

Doina Precup enseigne à l'Université McGill tout en menant des recherches fondamentales sur l'apprentissage par renforcement, notamment les applications de l'IA dans des domaines ayant des répercussions sociales, tels que les soins de santé. Elle s'intéresse à la prise de décision automatique dans des situations d'incertitude élevée.

Elle est membre de l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR) et de l'Association pour l'avancement de l'intelligence artificielle (AAAI), et dirige le bureau montréalais de DeepMind.

Ses spécialités sont les suivantes : intelligence artificielle, apprentissage machine, apprentissage par renforcement, raisonnement et planification sous incertitude, applications.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
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Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
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Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Birla Institute of Technology
Doctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Postdoctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

Multi-Environment Pretraining Enables Transfer to Action Limited Datasets
David Venuto
Sherry Yang
Pieter Abbeel
Igor Mordatch
Ofir Nachum
Using massive datasets to train large-scale models has emerged as a dominant approach for broad generalization in natural language and visio… (voir plus)n applications. In reinforcement learning, however, a key challenge is that available data of sequential decision making is often not annotated with actions - for example, videos of game-play are much more available than sequences of frames paired with their logged game controls. We propose to circumvent this challenge by combining large but sparsely-annotated datasets from a \emph{target} environment of interest with fully-annotated datasets from various other \emph{source} environments. Our method, Action Limited PreTraining (ALPT), leverages the generalization capabilities of inverse dynamics modelling (IDM) to label missing action data in the target environment. We show that utilizing even one additional environment dataset of labelled data during IDM pretraining gives rise to substantial improvements in generating action labels for unannotated sequences. We evaluate our method on benchmark game-playing environments and show that we can significantly improve game performance and generalization capability compared to other approaches, using annotated datasets equivalent to only
Optimism and Adaptivity in Policy Optimization
Tom Zahavy
Arthur Guez
Sebastian Flennerhag
Temporal Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning with the Successor Representation
Marlos C. Machado
Andre Barreto
Michael Bowling
Offline Policy Optimization in RL with Variance Regularizaton
Samarth Sinha
Zhuoran Yang
Animesh Garg
Zhaoran Wang
Lihong Li
Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning: A Review and Perspectives
Bayesian Q-learning With Imperfect Expert Demonstrations
Guided exploration with expert demonstrations improves data efficiency for reinforcement learning, but current algorithms often overuse expe… (voir plus)rt information. We propose a novel algorithm to speed up Q-learning with the help of a limited amount of imperfect expert demonstrations. The algorithm avoids excessive reliance on expert data by relaxing the optimal expert assumption and gradually reducing the usage of uninformative expert data. Experimentally, we evaluate our approach on a sparse-reward chain environment and six more complicated Atari games with delayed rewards. With the proposed methods, we can achieve better results than Deep Q-learning from Demonstrations (Hester et al., 2017) in most environments.
Complete the Missing Half: Augmenting Aggregation Filtering with Diversification for Graph Convolutional Networks
Mingde Zhao
Xiao-Wen Chang
The core operation of current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the aggregation enabled by the graph Laplacian or message passing, which filte… (voir plus)rs the neighborhood node information. Though effective for various tasks, in this paper, we show that they are potentially a problematic factor underlying all GNN methods for learning on certain datasets, as they force the node representations similar, making the nodes gradually lose their identity and become indistinguishable. Hence, we augment the aggregation operations with their dual, i.e. diversification operators that make the node more distinct and preserve the identity. Such augmentation replaces the aggregation with a two-channel filtering process that, in theory, is beneficial for enriching the node representations. In practice, the proposed two-channel filters can be easily patched on existing GNN methods with diverse training strategies, including spectral and spatial (message passing) methods. In the experiments, we observe desired characteristics of the models and significant performance boost upon the baselines on 9 node classification tasks.
When Do We Need Graph Neural Networks for Node Classification?
Qincheng Lu
Jiaqi Zhu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Simulating Human Gaze with Neural Visual Attention
Bjoern Eskofier
Dario Zanca
The Paradox of Choice: On the Role of Attention in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to … (voir plus)having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by providing shortcuts that skip over multiple time steps. To cope with the breadth, it is desirable to restrict the agent's attention at each step to a reasonable number of possible choices. The concept of affordances (Gibson, 1977) suggests that only certain actions are feasible in certain states. In this work, we first characterize "affordances" as a "hard" attention mechanism that strictly limits the available choices of temporally extended options. We then investigate the role of hard versus soft attention in training data collection, abstract value learning in long-horizon tasks, and handling a growing number of choices. To this end, we present an online, model-free algorithm to learn affordances that can be used to further learn subgoal options. Finally, we identify and empirically demonstrate the settings in which the "paradox of choice" arises, i.e. when having fewer but more meaningful choices improves the learning speed and performance of a reinforcement learning agent.
Towards Safe Mechanical Ventilation Treatment Using Deep Offline Reinforcement Learning
Mechanical ventilation is a key form of life support for patients with pulmonary impairment. Healthcare workers are required to continuously… (voir plus) adjust ventilator settings for each patient, a challenging and time consuming task. Hence, it would be beneficial to develop an automated decision support tool to optimize ventilation treatment. We present DeepVent, a Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) based offline Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent that learns to predict the optimal ventilator parameters for a patient to promote 90 day survival. We design a clinically relevant intermediate reward that encourages continuous improvement of the patient vitals as well as addresses the challenge of sparse reward in RL. We find that DeepVent recommends ventilation parameters within safe ranges, as outlined in recent clinical trials. The CQL algorithm offers additional safety by mitigating the overestimation of the value estimates of out-of-distribution states/actions. We evaluate our agent using Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) and demonstrate that it outperforms physicians from the MIMIC-III dataset.
Assessing Intrapartum Risk of Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy using Fetal Heart Rate with Long Short-term Memory Networks
"Derek Kweku DEGBEDZUI
Michael Kuzniewicz
Cornet Marie-Coralie
Yvonne Wu
Heather Forquer
Lawrence Gerstley
Emily Hamilton
Philip Warrick
Robert Kearney"
This study investigated the prediction of the risk of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy using intrapartum cardiotocography records with a long… (voir plus) short-term memory re-current neural network. Across the 12 hours of labour, HIE sensitivity rose from 0.25 to 0.56 as delivery approached while specificity remained approximately constant with a mean of 0.71 and standard deviation of 0.04. The results show that classification improves as delivery approaches but that performance needs improvement. Future work will address the limitations of this preliminary study by investigating input signal transformations and the use of other network architectures to improve the model performance.