Portrait de Narges Armanfard

Narges Armanfard

Membre académique associé
Professeure adjointe, McGill University, Département de génie électrique et informatique
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage en ligne
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Réseaux de neurones en graphes

Biographie

Narges Armanfard (Ph. D., ing.) est la fondatrice et la chercheuse principale du laboratoire iSMART. Elle est professeure adjointe au Département de génie électrique et informatique de l'Université McGill et membre académique associé à Mila – Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle. Elle est également affiliée au Centre sur les machines intelligentes de McGill (CIM), à l'Initiative de McGill en médecine computationnelle (MiCM) et à l'Institut de génie aérospatial de McGill (MIAE). Sa recherche porte sur le développement d'algorithmes novateurs pour divers domaines tels que l'analyse de données de séries temporelles, la vision par ordinateur, l'apprentissage par renforcement et l'apprentissage par représentation pour des tâches telles que le regroupement de données, la classification et la détection d'anomalies. Ses contributions au domaine de l'IA ont été reconnues par de nombreux prix, décernés notamment par le Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, AgeWell, Vanier-Banting, les Fonds de recherche du Québec, ainsi que l'Université McMaster, l'Université McGill, l'Université de Toronto, les Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada et Scale AI.

Étudiants actuels

Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Publications

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Human Activity Recognition: A Survey and Outlook.
Bahareh Nikpour
Dimitrios Sinodinos
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular research field in computer vision that has already been widely studied. However, it is still a… (voir plus)n active research field since it plays an important role in many current and emerging real-world intelligent systems, like visual surveillance and human-computer interaction. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been used to address the activity recognition problem with various purposes, such as finding attention in video data or obtaining the best network structure. DRL-based HAR has only been around for a short time, and it is a challenging, novel field of study. Therefore, to facilitate further research in this area, we have constructed a comprehensive survey on activity recognition methods that incorporate DRL. Throughout the article, we classify these methods according to their shared objectives and delve into how they are ingeniously framed within the DRL framework. As we navigate through the survey, we conclude by shedding light on the prominent challenges and lingering questions that await the attention of future researchers, paving the way for further advancements and breakthroughs in this exciting domain.
Deep Reinforcement Learning in Human Activity Recognition: A Survey and Outlook.
Bahareh Nikpour
Dimitrios Sinodinos
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a popular research field in computer vision that has already been widely studied. However, it is still a… (voir plus)n active research field since it plays an important role in many current and emerging real-world intelligent systems, like visual surveillance and human-computer interaction. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been used to address the activity recognition problem with various purposes, such as finding attention in video data or obtaining the best network structure. DRL-based HAR has only been around for a short time, and it is a challenging, novel field of study. Therefore, to facilitate further research in this area, we have constructed a comprehensive survey on activity recognition methods that incorporate DRL. Throughout the article, we classify these methods according to their shared objectives and delve into how they are ingeniously framed within the DRL framework. As we navigate through the survey, we conclude by shedding light on the prominent challenges and lingering questions that await the attention of future researchers, paving the way for further advancements and breakthroughs in this exciting domain.
Cross-Task Affinity Learning for Multitask Dense Scene Predictions
Dimitrios Sinodinos
EMA-Net: Efficient Multitask Affinity Learning for Dense Scene Predictions
Dimitrios Sinodinos
Open-Set Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection
Thomas Lai
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho
Explainable Attention for Few-shot Learning and Beyond
Bahareh Nikpour
Language-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Hard Attention in Few-Shot Learning
Bahareh Nikpour
Attention mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing learning models by identifying key portions of input data, particu… (voir plus)larly in scenarios with limited training samples. Inspired by human perception, we propose that focusing on essential data segments, rather than the entire dataset, can improve the accuracy and reliability of the learning models. However, identifying these critical data segments, or"hard attention finding,"is challenging, especially in few-shot learning, due to the scarcity of training data and the complexity of model parameters. To address this, we introduce LaHA, a novel framework that leverages language-guided deep reinforcement learning to identify and utilize informative data regions, thereby improving both interpretability and performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of LaHA.
Language-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Hard Attention in Few-Shot Learning
Bahareh Nikpour
Artificial Intelligence for Detection of Dementia Using Motion Data: A Scoping Review
Lily Puterman-Salzman
Jory Katz
Howard Bergman
Roland Grad
Vladimir Khanassov
Genevieve Gore
Isabelle Vedel
Machelle Wilchesky
Negar Ghourchian
Background: Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease resulting in the loss of cognitive and psychological functions. Artificial intelligence … (voir plus)(AI) may help in detection and screening of dementia; however, little is known in this area. Objectives: The objective of this study was to identify and evaluate AI interventions for detection of dementia using motion data. Method: The review followed the framework proposed by O’Malley’s and Joanna Briggs Institute methodological guidance for scoping reviews. We adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist for reporting the results. An information specialist performed a comprehensive search from the date of inception until November 2020, in five bibliographic databases: MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science Core Collection, CINAHL, and IEEE Xplore. We included studies aimed at the deployment and testing or implementation of AI interventions using motion data for the detection of dementia among a diverse population, encompassing varying age, sex, gender, economic backgrounds, and ethnicity, extending to their health care providers across multiple health care settings. Studies were excluded if they focused on Parkinson’s or Huntington’s disease. Two independent reviewers screened the abstracts, titles, and then read the full-texts. Disagreements were resolved by consensus, and if this was not possible, the opinion of a third reviewer was sought. The reference lists of included studies were also screened. Results: After removing duplicates, 2,632 articles were obtained. After title and abstract screening and full-text screening, 839 articles were considered for categorization. The authors categorized the papers into six categories, and data extraction and synthesis was performed on 20 included papers from the motion tracking data category. The included studies assessed cognitive performance (n = 5, 25%); screened dementia and cognitive decline (n = 8, 40%); investigated visual behaviours (n = 4, 20%); and analyzed motor behaviors (n = 3, 15%). Conclusions: We presented evidence of AI systems being employed in the detection of dementia, showcasing the promising potential of motion tracking within this domain. Although some progress has been made in this field recently, there remain notable research gaps that require further exploration and investigation. Future endeavors need to compare AI interventions using motion data with traditional screening methods or other tech-enabled dementia detection mechanisms. Besides, future works should aim at understanding how gender and sex, and ethnic and cultural sensitivity can contribute to refining AI interventions, ensuring they are accessible, equitable, and beneficial across all society.
Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Contaminated Data: Application to Physiological Signals
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho
Deep Multirepresentation Learning for Data Clustering.
Mohammadreza Sadeghi
Deep clustering incorporates embedding into clustering in order to find a lower-dimensional space suitable for clustering tasks. Conventiona… (voir plus)l deep clustering methods aim to obtain a single global embedding subspace (aka latent space) for all the data clusters. In contrast, in this article, we propose a deep multirepresentation learning (DML) framework for data clustering whereby each difficult-to-cluster data group is associated with its own distinct optimized latent space and all the easy-to-cluster data groups are associated with a general common latent space. Autoencoders (AEs) are employed for generating cluster-specific and general latent spaces. To specialize each AE in its associated data cluster(s), we propose a novel and effective loss function which consists of weighted reconstruction and clustering losses of the data points, where higher weights are assigned to the samples more probable to belong to the corresponding cluster(s). Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DML framework and loss function outperform state-of-the-art clustering approaches. In addition, the results show that the DML method significantly outperforms the SOTA on imbalanced datasets as a result of assigning an individual latent space to the difficult clusters.
Spatial Hard Attention Modeling via Deep Reinforcement Learning for Skeleton-Based Human Activity Recognition
Bahareh Nikpour
Deep learning-based algorithms have been very successful in skeleton-based human activity recognition. Skeleton data contains 2-D or 3-D coo… (voir plus)rdinates of human body joints. The main focus of most of the existing skeleton-based activity recognition methods is on designing new deep architectures to learn discriminative features, where all body joints are considered equally important in recognition. However, the importance of joints varies as an activity proceeds within a video and across different activities. In this work, we hypothesize that selecting relevant joints, prior to recognition, can enhance performance of the existing deep learning-based recognition models. We propose a spatial hard attention finding method that aims to remove the uninformative and/or misleading joints at each frame. We formulate the joint selection problem as a Markov decision process and employ deep reinforcement learning to train the proposed spatial-attention-aware agent. No extra labels are needed for the agent’s training. The agent takes a sequence of features extracted from skeleton video as input and outputs a sequence of probabilities for joints. The proposed method can be considered as a general framework that can be integrated with the existing skeleton-based activity recognition methods for performance improvement purposes. We obtain very competitive activity recognition results on three commonly used human activity recognition datasets.