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

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

Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Postdoctorat - McGill University
Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Postdoctorat - Université de Montréal
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill University
Maîtrise recherche - McGill University
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Baccalauréat - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Connecting Weighted Automata and Recurrent Neural Networks through Spectral Learning
In this paper, we unravel a fundamental connection between weighted finite automata~(WFAs) and second-order recurrent neural networks~(2-RNN… (voir plus)s): in the case of sequences of discrete symbols, WFAs and 2-RNNs with linear activation functions are expressively equivalent. Motivated by this result, we build upon a recent extension of the spectral learning algorithm to vector-valued WFAs and propose the first provable learning algorithm for linear 2-RNNs defined over sequences of continuous input vectors. This algorithm relies on estimating low rank sub-blocks of the so-called Hankel tensor, from which the parameters of a linear 2-RNN can be provably recovered. The performances of the proposed method are assessed in a simulation study.
Resolving Event Coreference with Supervised Representation Learning and Clustering-Oriented Regularization
Kian Kenyon-Dean
We present an approach to event coreference resolution by developing a general framework for clustering that uses supervised representation … (voir plus)learning. We propose a neural network architecture with novel Clustering-Oriented Regularization (CORE) terms in the objective function. These terms encourage the model to create embeddings of event mentions that are amenable to clustering. We then use agglomerative clustering on these embeddings to build event coreference chains. For both within- and cross-document coreference on the ECB+ corpus, our model obtains better results than models that require significantly more pre-annotated information. This work provides insight and motivating results for a new general approach to solving coreference and clustering problems with representation learning.
Nonlinear Weighted Finite Automata
Weighted finite automata (WFA) can expressively model functions defined over strings but are inherently linear models. Given the recent succ… (voir plus)esses of nonlinear models in machine learning, it is natural to wonder whether extending WFA to the nonlinear setting would be beneficial. In this paper, we propose a novel model of neural network based nonlinear WFA model (NL-WFA) along with a learning algorithm. Our learning algorithm is inspired by the spectral learning algorithm for WFA and relies on a nonlinear decomposition of the so-called Hankel matrix, by means of an auto-encoder network. The expressive power of NL-WFA and the proposed learning algorithm are assessed on both synthetic and real world data, showing that NL-WFA can lead to smaller model sizes and infer complex grammatical structures from data.
Nonlinear Weighted Finite Automata
Weighted finite automata (WFA) can expressively model functions defined over strings but are inherently linear models. Given the recent succ… (voir plus)esses of nonlinear models in machine learning, it is natural to wonder whether extending WFA to the nonlinear setting would be beneficial. In this paper, we propose a novel model of neural network based nonlinear WFA model (NL-WFA) along with a learning algorithm. Our learning algorithm is inspired by the spectral learning algorithm for WFA and relies on a nonlinear decomposition of the so-called Hankel matrix, by means of an auto-encoder network. The expressive power of NL-WFA and the proposed learning algorithm are assessed on both synthetic and real world data, showing that NL-WFA can lead to smaller model sizes and infer complex grammatical structures from data.
Optimizing Home Energy Management and Electric Vehicle Charging with Reinforcement Learning
Di Wu
Vincent Francois-Lavet
Benoit Boulet
Smart grids are advancing the management efficiency and security of power grids with the integration of energy storage, distributed controll… (voir plus)ers, and advanced meters. In particular, with the increasing prevalence of residential automation devices and distributed renewable energy generation, residential energy management is now drawing more attention. Meanwhile, the increasing adoption of electric vehicle (EV) brings more challenges and opportunities for smart residential energy management. This paper formalizes energy management for the residential home with EV charging as a Markov Decision Process and proposes reinforcement learning (RL) based control algorithms to address it. The objective of the proposed algorithms is to minimize the long-term operating cost. We further use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to model the electricity demand as a preprocessing step. Both the RNN prediction and latent representations are used as additional state features for the RL based control algorithms. Experiments on real-world data show that the proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the operating cost and peak power consumption compared to baseline control algorithms.
Temporal Regularization for Markov Decision Process
Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensiona… (voir plus)l domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at the cost of introducing some bias. Most existing regularization techniques focus on spatial (perceptual) regularization. Yet in reinforcement learning, due to the nature of the Bellman equation, there is an opportunity to also exploit temporal regularization based on smoothness in value estimates over trajectories. This paper explores a class of methods for temporal regularization. We formally characterize the bias induced by this technique using Markov chain concepts. We illustrate the various characteristics of temporal regularization via a sequence of simple discrete and continuous MDPs, and show that the technique provides improvement even in high-dimensional Atari games.
Neural Network Based Nonlinear Weighted Finite Automata
Weighted finite automata (WFA) can expressively model functions defined over strings but are inherently linear models. Given the recent succ… (voir plus)esses of nonlinear models in machine learning, it is natural to wonder whether ex-tending WFA to the nonlinear setting would be beneficial. In this paper, we propose a novel model of neural network based nonlinearWFA model (NL-WFA) along with a learning algorithm. Our learning algorithm is inspired by the spectral learning algorithm for WFAand relies on a nonlinear decomposition of the so-called Hankel matrix, by means of an auto-encoder network. The expressive power of NL-WFA and the proposed learning algorithm are assessed on both synthetic and real-world data, showing that NL-WFA can lead to smaller model sizes and infer complex grammatical structures from data.
Predicting Future Disease Activity and Treatment Responders for Multiple Sclerosis Patients Using a Bag-of-Lesions Brain Representation
Andrew Doyle
Douglas Arnold
World Knowledge for Reading Comprehension: Rare Entity Prediction with Hierarchical LSTMs Using External Descriptions
Teng Long
Emmanuel Bengio
Ryan Lowe
Humans interpret texts with respect to some background information, or world knowledge, and we would like to develop automatic reading compr… (voir plus)ehension systems that can do the same. In this paper, we introduce a task and several models to drive progress towards this goal. In particular, we propose the task of rare entity prediction: given a web document with several entities removed, models are tasked with predicting the correct missing entities conditioned on the document context and the lexical resources. This task is challenging due to the diversity of language styles and the extremely large number of rare entities. We propose two recurrent neural network architectures which make use of external knowledge in the form of entity descriptions. Our experiments show that our hierarchical LSTM model performs significantly better at the rare entity prediction task than those that do not make use of external resources.
Bayesian and grAphical Models for Biomedical Imaging
M. Cardoso
Ivor J. A. Simpson
Annemie Ribbens