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
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

For SALE: State-Action Representation Learning for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Wei-Di Chang
Edward J. Smith
Shixiang Shane Gu
In the field of reinforcement learning (RL), representation learning is a proven tool for complex image-based tasks, but is often overlooked… (voir plus) for environments with low-level states, such as physical control problems. This paper introduces SALE, a novel approach for learning embeddings that model the nuanced interaction between state and action, enabling effective representation learning from low-level states. We extensively study the design space of these embeddings and highlight important design considerations. We integrate SALE and an adaptation of checkpoints for RL into TD3 to form the TD7 algorithm, which significantly outperforms existing continuous control algorithms. On OpenAI gym benchmark tasks, TD7 has an average performance gain of 276.7% and 50.7% over TD3 at 300k and 5M time steps, respectively, and works in both the online and offline settings.
Prediction and Control in Continual Reinforcement Learning
Nishanth Anand
Temporal difference (TD) learning is often used to update the estimate of the value function which is used by RL agents to extract useful po… (voir plus)licies. In this paper, we focus on value function estimation in continual reinforcement learning. We propose to decompose the value function into two components which update at different timescales: a permanent value function, which holds general knowledge that persists over time, and a transient value function, which allows quick adaptation to new situations. We establish theoretical results showing that our approach is well suited for continual learning and draw connections to the complementary learning systems (CLS) theory from neuroscience. Empirically, this approach improves performance significantly on both prediction and control problems.
When Do Graph Neural Networks Help with Node Classification? Investigating the Impact of Homophily Principle on Node Distinguishability
Qincheng Lu
Jiaqi Zhu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Jure Leskovec
Homophily principle, i.e., nodes with the same labels are more likely to be connected, has been believed to be the main reason for the perfo… (voir plus)rmance superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over Neural Networks on node classification tasks. Recent research suggests that, even in the absence of homophily, the advantage of GNNs still exists as long as nodes from the same class share similar neighborhood patterns. However, this argument only considers intra-class Node Distinguishability (ND) but neglects inter-class ND, which provides incomplete understanding of homophily on GNNs. In this paper, we first demonstrate such deficiency with examples and argue that an ideal situation for ND is to have smaller intra-class ND than inter-class ND. To formulate this idea and study ND deeply, we propose Contextual Stochastic Block Model for Homophily (CSBM-H) and define two metrics, Probabilistic Bayes Error (PBE) and negative generalized Jeffreys divergence, to quantify ND. With the metrics, we visualize and analyze how graph filters, node degree distributions and class variances influence ND, and investigate the combined effect of intra- and inter-class ND. Besides, we discovered the mid-homophily pitfall, which occurs widely in graph datasets. Furthermore, we verified that, in real-work tasks, the superiority of GNNs is indeed closely related to both intra- and inter-class ND regardless of homophily levels. Grounded in this observation, we propose a new hypothesis-testing based performance metric beyond homophily, which is non-linear, feature-based and can provide statistical threshold value for GNNs' the superiority. Experiments indicate that it is significantly more effective than the existing homophily metrics on revealing the advantage and disadvantage of graph-aware modes on both synthetic and benchmark real-world datasets.
Learning domain-invariant classifiers for infant cry sounds
Hemanth K. Sheetha
Arsenii Gorin
Hybrid Scattering Transform - Long Short-Term Memory Networks for Intrapartum Fetal Heart Rate Classification
"Derek Kweku DEGBEDZUI
Michael W Kuzniewicz
Marie-Coralie Cornet
Yvonne Wu
Heather Forquer
Lawrence Gerstley
Emily F. Hamilton
P. Warrick
Robert E. Kearney
This study assessed the early detection of the increased risk of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy using raw fetal heart rate and its transfor… (voir plus)mation with scattering transform and a long short-term memory recurrent neural network. There was no significant difference between the two approaches. However, the use of scattering transform produced lower computational demands. Considering scalability to the large data in our database and computational efficiency, the experiments involving scattering transform coefficients will be selected to conduct subsequent experiments. Future works will address the limitations of this study, including the low model performance.
Minimal Value-Equivalent Partial Models for Scalable and Robust Planning in Lifelong Reinforcement Learning
Learning models of the environment from pure interaction is often considered an essential component of building lifelong reinforcement learn… (voir plus)ing agents. However, the common practice in model-based reinforcement learning is to learn models that model every aspect of the agent’s environment, regardless of whether they are important in coming up with optimal decisions or not. In this paper, we argue that such models are not particularly well-suited for performing scalable and robust planning in lifelong reinforcement learning scenarios and we propose new kinds of models that only model the relevant aspects of the environment, which we call \emph{minimal value-equivalent partial models}. After providing a formal definition for these models, we provide theoretical results demonstrating the scalability advantages of performing planning with such models and then perform experiments to empirically illustrate our theoretical results. Then, we provide some useful heuristics on how to learn these kinds of models with deep learning architectures and empirically demonstrate that models learned in such a way can allow for performing planning that is robust to distribution shifts and compounding model errors. Overall, both our theoretical and empirical results suggest that minimal value-equivalent partial models can provide significant benefits to performing scalable and robust planning in lifelong reinforcement learning scenarios.
MUDiff: Unified Diffusion for Complete Molecule Generation
Forecaster: Towards Temporally Abstract Tree-Search Planning from Pixels
The ability to plan at many different levels of abstraction enables agents to envision the long-term repercussions of their decisions and th… (voir plus)us enables sample-efficient learning. This becomes particularly beneficial in complex environments from high-dimensional state space such as pixels, where the goal is distant and the reward sparse. We introduce Forecaster, a deep hierarchical reinforcement learning approach which plans over high-level goals leveraging a temporally abstract world model. Forecaster learns an abstract model of its environment by modelling the transitions dynamics at an abstract level and training a world model on such transition. It then uses this world model to choose optimal high-level goals through a tree-search planning procedure. It additionally trains a low-level policy that learns to reach those goals. Our method not only captures building world models with longer horizons, but also, planning with such models in downstream tasks. We empirically demonstrate Forecaster's potential in both single-task learning and generalization to new tasks in the AntMaze domain.
DGFN: Double Generative Flow Networks
Finding Increasingly Large Extremal Graphs with AlphaZero and Tabu Search
Abbas Mehrabian
Hyunjik Kim
Nicolas Sonnerat
Matej Balog
Gheorghe Comanici
Tudor Berariu
Andrew Lee
Anian Ruoss
Anna Bulanova
Daniel Toyama
Sam Blackwell
Bernardino Romera Paredes
Laurent Orseau
Joonkyung Lee
Anurag Murty Naredla
Adam Zsolt Wagner
A cry for help: Early detection of brain injury in newborns
Samantha Latremouille
Arsenii Gorin
Junhao Wang
Uchenna Ekwochi
P. Ubuane
O. Kehinde
Muhammad A. Salisu
Datonye Briggs
A Definition of Continual Reinforcement Learning
David Abel
Andre Barreto
Benjamin Van Roy
Hado van Hasselt
Satinder Singh