Portrait de Jian Tang

Jian Tang

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, HEC Montréal, Département de sciences de la décision
Professeur associé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Président, China Longyuan Power Group Corporation

Biographie

Jian Tang est professeur associé à Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Il est également titulaire d'une chaire de recherche en IA Canada-CIFAR et fondateur de BioGeometry, une startup spécialisée dans l'IA générative pour la découverte d'anticorps. Ses principaux domaines de recherche sont les modèles génératifs profonds, l'apprentissage automatique des graphes et leurs applications à la découverte de médicaments. Il est un leader international dans le domaine de l'apprentissage automatique des graphes, et son travail représentatif sur l'apprentissage de la représentation des nœuds, LINE, a été largement reconnu et cité plus de 5 000 fois. Il a également réalisé de nombreux travaux pionniers sur l'IA pour la découverte de médicaments, notamment le premier cadre d'apprentissage automatique à source ouverte pour la découverte de médicaments, TorchDrug et TorchProtein.

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Stagiaire de recherche - HEC Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Stagiaire de recherche - Beijing Institute of Technology
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - Université de Montréal

Publications

Implications of Topological Imbalance for Representation Learning on Biomedical Knowledge Graphs
Stephen Bonner
Ufuk Kirik
Ola Engkvist
I. Barrett
Adoption of recently developed methods from machine learning has given rise to creation of drug-discovery knowledge graphs (KGs) that utiliz… (voir plus)e the interconnected nature of the domain. Graph-based modelling of the data, combined with KG embedding (KGE) methods, are promising as they provide a more intuitive representation and are suitable for inference tasks such as predicting missing links. One common application is to produce ranked lists of genes for a given disease, where the rank is based on the perceived likelihood of association between the gene and the disease. It is thus critical that these predictions are not only pertinent but also biologically meaningful. However, KGs can be biased either directly due to the underlying data sources that are integrated or due to modelling choices in the construction of the graph, one consequence of which is that certain entities can get topologically overrepresented. We demonstrate the effect of these inherent structural imbalances, resulting in densely connected entities being highly ranked no matter the context. We provide support for this observation across different datasets, models as well as predictive tasks. Further, we present various graph perturbation experiments which yield more support to the observation that KGE models can be more influenced by the frequency of entities rather than any biological information encoded within the relations. Our results highlight the importance of data modelling choices, and emphasizes the need for practitioners to be mindful of these issues when interpreting model outputs and during KG composition.
Full-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction With Reinforced Recurrent Networks
Cheng Yang
Hao Wang
Chuan Shi
Maosong Sun
Ganqu Cui
Zhiyuan Liu
Information diffusion prediction is an important task, which studies how information items spread among users. With the success of deep lear… (voir plus)ning techniques, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown their powerful capability in modeling information diffusion as sequential data. However, previous works focused on either microscopic diffusion prediction, which aims at guessing who will be the next influenced user at what time, or macroscopic diffusion prediction, which estimates the total numbers of influenced users during the diffusion process. To the best of our knowledge, few attempts have been made to suggest a unified model for both microscopic and macroscopic scales. In this article, we propose a novel full-scale diffusion prediction model based on reinforcement learning (RL). RL incorporates the macroscopic diffusion size information into the RNN-based microscopic diffusion model by addressing the nondifferentiable problem. We also employ an effective structural context extraction strategy to utilize the underlying social graph information. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models on both microscopic and macroscopic diffusion predictions on three real-world datasets.
Full-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction With Reinforced Recurrent Networks
Cheng Yang
Hao Wang
Chuan Shi
Maosong Sun
Ganqu Cui
Zhiyuan Liu
Information diffusion prediction is an important task, which studies how information items spread among users. With the success of deep lear… (voir plus)ning techniques, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown their powerful capability in modeling information diffusion as sequential data. However, previous works focused on either microscopic diffusion prediction, which aims at guessing who will be the next influenced user at what time, or macroscopic diffusion prediction, which estimates the total numbers of influenced users during the diffusion process. To the best of our knowledge, few attempts have been made to suggest a unified model for both microscopic and macroscopic scales. In this article, we propose a novel full-scale diffusion prediction model based on reinforcement learning (RL). RL incorporates the macroscopic diffusion size information into the RNN-based microscopic diffusion model by addressing the nondifferentiable problem. We also employ an effective structural context extraction strategy to utilize the underlying social graph information. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models on both microscopic and macroscopic diffusion predictions on three real-world datasets.
Predicting Infectiousness for Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Martin Weiss
Tristan Deleu
Meng Qu
Victor Schmidt
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Hannah Alsdurf
Olexa Bilaniuk
gaetan caron
pierre luc carrier
Joumana Ghosn
satya ortiz gagne
Bernhard Schölkopf … (voir 3 de plus)
abhinav sharma
andrew williams
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide, overwhelming manual contact tracing in many countries and resulting in widespread lockdo… (voir plus)wns for emergency containment. Large-scale digital contact tracing (DCT) has emerged as a potential solution to resume economic and social activity while minimizing spread of the virus. Various DCT methods have been proposed, each making trade-offs between privacy, mobility restrictions, and public health. The most common approach, binary contact tracing (BCT), models infection as a binary event, informed only by an individual's test results, with corresponding binary recommendations that either all or none of the individual's contacts quarantine. BCT ignores the inherent uncertainty in contacts and the infection process, which could be used to tailor messaging to high-risk individuals, and prompt proactive testing or earlier warnings. It also does not make use of observations such as symptoms or pre-existing medical conditions, which could be used to make more accurate infectiousness predictions. In this paper, we use a recently-proposed COVID-19 epidemiological simulator to develop and test methods that can be deployed to a smartphone to locally and proactively predict an individual's infectiousness (risk of infecting others) based on their contact history and other information, while respecting strong privacy constraints. Predictions are used to provide personalized recommendations to the individual via an app, as well as to send anonymized messages to the individual's contacts, who use this information to better predict their own infectiousness, an approach we call proactive contact tracing (PCT). We find a deep-learning based PCT method which improves over BCT for equivalent average mobility, suggesting PCT could help in safe re-opening and second-wave prevention.
COVI-AgentSim: an Agent-based Model for Evaluating Methods of Digital Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Martin Weiss
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
abhinav sharma
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Victor Schmidt
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Tristan Deleu
andrew williams
Akshay Patel
Meng Qu
Olexa Bilaniuk
gaetan caron
pierre luc carrier
satya ortiz gagne
Marc-Andre Rousseau
Joumana Ghosn
Yang Zhang
Bernhard Schölkopf
Joanna Merckx
COVI White Paper
Hannah Alsdurf
Tristan Deleu
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Valerie Pisano
Benjamin Prud'homme
Meng Qu
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
abhinav sharma
Brooke Struck … (voir 3 de plus)
Martin Weiss
Yun William Yu
COVI White Paper-Version 1.1
Hannah Alsdurf
Tristan Deleu
Prateek Gupta
Daphne Ippolito
Richard Janda
Max Jarvie
Tyler J. Kolody
Sekoul Krastev
Robert Obryk
Dan Pilat
Valerie Pisano
Benjamin Prud'homme
Meng Qu
Nasim Rahaman
Jean-franois Rousseau
abhinav sharma
Brooke Struck … (voir 3 de plus)
Martin Weiss
Yun William Yu
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has resulted in significant strain on health care and public health institutions around the world. Contac… (voir plus)t tracing is an essential tool for public health officials and local communities to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Standard manual contact tracing of people infected with Covid-19, while the current gold standard, has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile applications has the potential to shift the paradigm of Covid-19 community spread. Although some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems through either GPS or Bluetooth, more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same benefit without concentrating data in the hands of a state authority or in for-profit corporations. Additionally, machine learning methods can be used to circumvent some of the limitations of standard digital tracing by incorporating many clues (including medical conditions, self-reported symptoms, and numerous encounters with people at different risk levels, for different durations and distances) and their uncertainty into a more graded and precise estimation of infection and contagion risk. The estimated risk can be used to provide early risk awareness, personalized recommendations and relevant information to the user and connect them to health services. Finally, the non-identifying data about these risks can inform detailed epidemiological models trained jointly with the machine learning predictor, and these models can provide statistical evidence for the interaction and importance of different factors involved in the transmission of the disease. They can also be used to monitor, evaluate and optimize different health policy and confinement/deconfinement scenarios according to medical and economic productivity indicators. However, such a strategy based on mobile apps and machine learning should proactively mitigate potential ethical and privacy risks, which could have substantial impacts on society (not only impacts on health but also impacts such as stigmatization and abuse of personal data). Here, we present an overview of the rationale, design, ethical considerations and privacy strategy of ‘COVI,’ a Covid-19 public peer-to-peer contact tracing and risk awareness mobile application developed in Canada. Addendum 2020-07-14: The government of Canada has declined to endorse COVI and will be promoting a different app for decentralized contact tracing. In the interest of preventing fragmentation of the app landscape, COVI will therefore not be deployed to end users. We are currently still in the process of finalizing the project, and plan to release our code and models for academic consumption and to make them accessible to other States should they wish to deploy an app based on or inspired by said code and models. University of Ottawa, Mila, Université de Montréal, The Alan Turing Institute, University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, The Decision Lab, HEC Montréal, Max Planck Institute, Libéo, University of Toronto. Corresponding author general: richard.janda@mcgill.ca Corresponding author for public health: abhinav.sharma@mcgill.ca Corresponding author for privacy: ywyu@math.toronto.edu Corresponding author for machine learning: yoshua.bengio@mila.quebec Corresponding author for user perspective: brooke@thedecisionlab.com Corresponding author for technical implementation: jean-francois.rousseau@libeo.com 1 ar X iv :2 00 5. 08 50 2v 2 [ cs .C R ] 2 7 Ju l 2 02 0
Contextualized Non-local Neural Networks for Sequence Learning
Pengfei Liu
Shuaichen Chang
Xuanjing Huang
Recently, a large number of neural mechanisms and models have been proposed for sequence learning, of which selfattention, as exemplified by… (voir plus) the Transformer model, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines and draws on the complementary strengths of these two methods. Specifically, we propose contextualized non-local neural networks (CN3), which can both dynamically construct a task-specific structure of a sentence and leverage rich local dependencies within a particular neighbourhood.Experimental results on ten NLP tasks in text classification, semantic matching, and sequence labelling show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines and discovers task-specific dependency structures, thus providing better interpretability to users.
Session-Based Social Recommendation via Dynamic Graph Attention Networks
Weiping Song
Zhiping Xiao
Yifan Wang
Ming Zhang
Online communities such as Facebook and Twitter are enormously popular and have become an essential part of the daily life of many of their … (voir plus)users. Through these platforms, users can discover and create information that others will then consume. In that context, recommending relevant information to users becomes critical for viability. However, recommendation in online communities is a challenging problem: 1) users' interests are dynamic, and 2) users are influenced by their friends. Moreover, the influencers may be context-dependent. That is, different friends may be relied upon for different topics. Modeling both signals is therefore essential for recommendations. We propose a recommender system for online communities based on a dynamic-graph-attention neural network. We model dynamic user behaviors with a recurrent neural network, and context-dependent social influence with a graph-attention neural network, which dynamically infers the influencers based on users' current interests. The whole model can be efficiently fit on large-scale data. Experimental results on several real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over several competitive baselines including state-of-the-art models.