Portrait de Joseph Viviano

Joseph Viviano

Scientifique en apprentissage automatique, Direction scientifique

Publications

Action Abstractions for Amortized Sampling
As trajectories sampled by policies used by reinforcement learning (RL) and generative flow networks (GFlowNets) grow longer, credit assignm… (voir plus)ent and exploration become more challenging, and the long planning horizon hinders mode discovery and generalization. The challenge is particularly pronounced in entropy-seeking RL methods, such as generative flow networks, where the agent must learn to sample from a structured distribution and discover multiple high-reward states, each of which take many steps to reach. To tackle this challenge, we propose an approach to incorporate the discovery of action abstractions, or high-level actions, into the policy optimization process. Our approach involves iteratively extracting action subsequences commonly used across many high-reward trajectories and `chunking' them into a single action that is added to the action space. In empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world environments, our approach demonstrates improved sample efficiency performance in discovering diverse high-reward objects, especially on harder exploration problems. We also observe that the abstracted high-order actions are interpretable, capturing the latent structure of the reward landscape of the action space. This work provides a cognitively motivated approach to action abstraction in RL and is the first demonstration of hierarchical planning in amortized sequential sampling.
Multi-Domain Balanced Sampling Improves Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Chest X-ray Pathology Prediction Models
Learning models that generalize under different distribution shifts in medical imaging has been a long-standing research challenge. There ha… (voir plus)ve been several proposals for efficient and robust visual representation learning among vision research practitioners, especially in the sensitive and critical biomedical domain. In this paper, we propose an idea for out-of-distribution generalization of chest X-ray pathologies that uses a simple balanced batch sampling technique. We observed that balanced sampling between the multiple training datasets improves the performance over baseline models trained without balancing.