Publications

Multivariate, Transgenerational Associations of the COVID-19 Pandemic Across Minoritized and Marginalized Communities.
Sarah W. Yip
Ayana Jordan
Robert J. Kohler
Avram J. Holmes
Danilo Bzdok
Importance The experienced consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have diverged across individuals, families, and communities, resulting in i… (voir plus)nequity within a host of factors. There is a gap of quantitative evidence about the transgenerational impacts of these experiences and factors. Objective To identify baseline predictors of COVID-19 experiences, as defined by child and parent report, using a multivariate pattern-learning framework from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort. Design, Setting, and Participants ABCD is an ongoing prospective longitudinal study of child and adolescent development in the United States including 11 875 youths, enrolled at age 9 to 10 years. Using nationally collected longitudinal profiling data from 9267 families, a multivariate pattern-learning strategy was developed to identify factor combinations associated with transgenerational costs of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. ABCD data (release 3.0) collected from 2016 to 2020 and released between 2019 and 2021 were analyzed in combination with ABCD COVID-19 rapid response data from the first 3 collection points (May-August 2020). Exposures Social distancing and other response measures imposed by COVID-19, including school closures and shutdown of many childhood recreational activities. Main Outcomes and Measures Mid-COVID-19 experiences as defined by the ABCD's parent and child COVID-19 assessments. Results Deep profiles from 9267 youth (5681 female [47.8%]; mean [SD] age, 119.0 [7.5] months) and their caregivers were quantitatively examined. Enabled by a pattern-learning analysis, social determinants of inequity, including family structure, socioeconomic status, and the experience of racism, were found to be primarily associated with transgenerational impacts of COVID-19, above and beyond other candidate predictors such as preexisting medical or psychiatric conditions. Pooling information across more than 17 000 baseline pre-COVID-19 family indicators and more than 280 measures of day-to-day COVID-19 experiences, non-White (ie, families who reported being Asian, Black, Hispanic, other, or a combination of those choices) and/or Spanish-speaking families were found to have decreased resources (mode 1, canonical vector weight [CVW] = 0.19; rank 5 of 281), escalated likelihoods of financial worry (mode 1, CVW = -0.20; rank 4), and food insecurity (mode 1, CVW = 0.21; rank 2), yet were more likely to have parent-child discussions regarding COVID-19-associated health and prevention issues, such as handwashing (mode 1, CVW = 0.14; rank 9), conserving food or other items (mode 1, CVW = 0.21; rank 1), protecting elderly individuals (mode 1, CVW = 0.11; rank 21), and isolating from others (mode 1, CVW = 0.11; rank 23). In contrast, White families (mode 1, CVW = -0.07; rank 3), those with higher pre-COVID-19 income (mode 1, CVW = -0.07; rank 5), and presence of a parent with a postgraduate degree (mode 1, CVW = -0.06; rank 14) experienced reduced COVID-19-associated impact. In turn, children from families experiencing reduced COVID-19 impacts reported longer nighttime sleep durations (mode 1, CVW = 0.13; rank 14), less difficulties with remote learning (mode 2, CVW = 0.14; rank 7), and decreased worry about the impact of COVID-19 on their family's financial stability (mode 1, CVW = 0.134; rank 13). Conclusions and Relevance The findings of this study indicate that community-level, transgenerational intervention strategies may be needed to combat the disproportionate burden of pandemics on minoritized and marginalized racial and ethnic populations.
2022-04-01
JAMA Psychiatry (publié)
doi.org
Population heterogeneity in clinical cohorts affects the predictive accuracy of brain imaging
O. Benkarim
Casey Paquola
Bo-yong Park
Valeria Kebets
Seokjun Hong
Reinder Vos de Wael
Shaoshi Zhang
B.T. Thomas Yeo
Michael Eickenberg
Tian Ge
Jean-Baptiste Poline
B. Bernhardt
Danilo Bzdok
Brain imaging research enjoys increasing adoption of supervised machine learning for single-participant disease classification. Yet, the suc… (voir plus)cess of these algorithms likely depends on population diversity, including demographic differences and other factors that may be outside of primary scientific interest. Here, we capitalize on propensity scores as a composite confound index to quantify diversity due to major sources of population variation. We delineate the impact of population heterogeneity on the predictive accuracy and pattern stability in 2 separate clinical cohorts: the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE, n = 297) and the Healthy Brain Network (HBN, n = 551). Across various analysis scenarios, our results uncover the extent to which cross-validated prediction performances are interlocked with diversity. The instability of extracted brain patterns attributable to diversity is located preferentially in regions part of the default mode network. Collectively, our findings highlight the limitations of prevailing deconfounding practices in mitigating the full consequences of population diversity.
2022-04-01
PLoS Biology (published)
doi.org
Predicting Visual Improvement After Macular Hole Surgery: A Combined Model Using Deep Learning and Clinical Features
Alexandre Lachance
Mathieu Godbout
Fares Antaki
Mélanie Hébert
Serge Bourgault
Mathieu Caissie
Éric Tourville
Audrey Durand
A. Dirani
Purpose The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility of deep learning (DL) methods to enhance the prediction of visual acuity (VA… (voir plus)) improvement after macular hole (MH) surgery from a combined model using DL on high-definition optical coherence tomography (HD-OCT) B-scans and clinical features. Methods We trained a DL convolutional neural network (CNN) using pre-operative HD-OCT B-scans of the macula and combined with a logistic regression model of pre-operative clinical features to predict VA increase ≥15 Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) letters at 6 months post-vitrectomy in closed MHs. A total of 121 MHs with 242 HD-OCT B-scans and 484 clinical data points were used to train, validate, and test the model. Prediction of VA increase was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and F1 scores. We also extracted the weight of each input feature in the hybrid model. Results All performances are reported on the held-out test set, matching results obtained with cross-validation. Using a regression on clinical features, the AUROC was 80.6, with an F1 score of 79.7. For the CNN, relying solely on the HD-OCT B-scans, the AUROC was 72.8 ± 14.6, with an F1 score of 61.5 ± 23.7. For our hybrid regression model using clinical features and CNN prediction, the AUROC was 81.9 ± 5.2, with an F1 score of 80.4 ± 7.7. In the hybrid model, the baseline VA was the most important feature (weight = 59.1 ± 6.9%), while the weight of HD-OCT prediction was 9.6 ± 4.2%. Conclusions Both the clinical data and HD-OCT models can predict postoperative VA improvement in patients undergoing vitrectomy for a MH with good discriminative performances. Combining them into a hybrid model did not significantly improve performance. Translational Relevance OCT-based DL models can predict postoperative VA improvement following vitrectomy for MH but fusing those models with clinical data might not provide improved predictive performance.
2022-04-01
Translational Vision Science & Technology (published)
doi.org
Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions
Benno Krojer
Vaibhav Adlakha
Vibhav Vineet
Yash Goyal
Edoardo Ponti
Siva Reddy
The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utte… (voir plus)rance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description.As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images.Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames.We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe.Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans.Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.
2022-03-29
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Fast-Converging Simulated Annealing for Ising Models Based on Integral Stochastic Computing
Naoya Onizawa
K. Katsuki
Duckgyu Shin
Warren Gross
Takahiro Hanyu
Probabilistic bits (p-bits) have recently been presented as a spin (basic computing element) for the simulated annealing (SA) of Ising model… (voir plus)s. In this brief, we introduce fast-converging SA based on p-bits designed using integral stochastic computing. The stochastic implementation approximates a p-bit function, which can search for a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem at lower energy than conventional p-bits. Searching around the global minimum energy can increase the probability of finding a solution. The proposed stochastic computing-based SA method is compared with conventional SA and quantum annealing (QA) with a D-Wave Two quantum annealer on the traveling salesman, maximum cut (MAX-CUT), and graph isomorphism (GI) problems. The proposed method achieves a convergence speed a few orders of magnitude faster while dealing with an order of magnitude larger number of spins than the other methods.
2022-03-28
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (published)
doi.org
Fast-Converging Simulated Annealing for Ising Models Based on Integral Stochastic Computing
Naoya Onizawa
Kota Katsuki
Duckgyu Shin
Warren Gross
Takahiro Hanyu
Probabilistic bits (p-bits) have recently been presented as a spin (basic computing element) for the simulated annealing (SA) of Ising model… (voir plus)s. In this brief, we introduce fast-converging SA based on p-bits designed using integral stochastic computing. The stochastic implementation approximates a p-bit function, which can search for a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem at lower energy than conventional p-bits. Searching around the global minimum energy can increase the probability of finding a solution. The proposed stochastic computing-based SA method is compared with conventional SA and quantum annealing (QA) with a D-Wave Two quantum annealer on the traveling salesman, maximum cut (MAX-CUT), and graph isomorphism (GI) problems. The proposed method achieves a convergence speed a few orders of magnitude faster while dealing with an order of magnitude larger number of spins than the other methods.
2022-03-28
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (publié)
doi.org
From Points to Functions: Infinite-dimensional Representations in Diffusion Models
Sarthak Mittal
Guillaume Lajoie
Stefan Bauer
Arash Mehrjou
Diffusion-based generative models learn to iteratively transfer unstructured noise to a complex target distribution as opposed to Generative… (voir plus) Adversarial Networks (GANs) or the decoder of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) which produce samples from the target distribution in a single step. Thus, in diffusion models every sample is naturally connected to a random trajectory which is a solution to a learned stochastic differential equation (SDE). Generative models are only concerned with the final state of this trajectory that delivers samples from the desired distribution. Abstreiter et. al showed that these stochastic trajectories can be seen as continuous filters that wash out information along the way. Consequently, it is reasonable to ask if there is an intermediate time step at which the preserved information is optimal for a given downstream task. In this work, we show that a combination of information content from different time steps gives a strictly better representation for the downstream task. We introduce an attention and recurrence based modules that ``learn to mix'' information content of various time-steps such that the resultant representation leads to superior performance in downstream tasks.
2022-03-28
ICLR.cc/2022/Workshop/DGM4HSD (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Improving Source Separation by Explicitly Modeling Dependencies between Sources
Ethan Manilow
Curtis Hawthorne
Anna (Cheng-Zhi) Huang
Bryan A. Pardo
Jesse Engel
We propose a new method for training a supervised source separation system that aims to learn the interdependent relationships between all c… (voir plus)ombinations of sources in a mixture. Rather than independently estimating each source from a mix, we reframe the source separation problem as an Orderless Neural Autoregressive Density Estimator (NADE), and estimate each source from both the mix and a random subset of the other sources. We adapt a standard source separation architecture, Demucs, with additional inputs for each individual source, in addition to the input mixture. We randomly mask these input sources during training so that the network learns the conditional dependencies between the sources. By pairing this training method with a blocked Gibbs sampling procedure at inference time, we demonstrate that the network can iteratively improve its separation performance by conditioning a source estimate on its earlier source estimates. Experiments on two source separation datasets show that training a Demucs model with an Orderless NADE approach and using Gibbs sampling (up to 512 steps) at inference time strongly outperforms a Demucs baseline that uses a standard regression loss and direct (one step) estimation of sources.
2022-03-28
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Learning What You Need from What You Did: Product Taxonomy Expansion with User Behaviors Supervision
Sijie Cheng
Zhouhong Gu
Bang Liu
Rui Xie
Wei Wu
Yanghua Xiao
Taxonomies have been widely used in various domains to underpin numerous applications. Specially, product taxonomies serve an essential role… (voir plus) in the e-commerce domain for the recommendation, browsing, and query understanding. However, taxonomies need to constantly capture the newly emerged terms or concepts in e-commerce platforms to keep up-to-date, which is expensive and labor-intensive if it relies on manual maintenance and updates. Therefore, we target the taxonomy expansion task to attach new concepts to existing taxonomies automatically. In this paper, we present a self-supervised and user behavior-oriented product taxonomy expansion framework to append new concepts into existing taxonomies. Our framework extracts hyponymy relations that conform to users' intentions and cognition. Specifically, i) to fully exploit user behavioral information, we extract candidate hyponymy relations that match user interests from query-click concepts; ii) to enhance the semantic information of new concepts and better detect hyponymy relations, we model concepts and relations through both user-generated content and structural information in existing taxonomies and user click logs, by leveraging Pre-trained Language Models and Graph Neural Network combined with Contrastive Learning; iii) to reduce the cost of dataset construction and overcome data skews, we construct a high-quality and balanced training dataset from existing taxonomy with no supervision. Extensive experiments on real-world product taxonomies in Meituan Platform, a leading Chinese vertical e-commerce platform to order take-out with more than 70 million daily active users, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our method enlarges the size of real-world product taxonomies from 39,263 to 94,698 relations with 88% precision. Our implementation is available: https://github.com/AdaCheng/Product_Taxonomy_Expansion.
2022-03-28
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Forgetting Enhances Episodic Control With Structured Memories
Annik Yalnizyan-Carson
Blake Richards
Forgetting is a normal process in healthy brains, and evidence suggests that the mammalian brain forgets more than is required based on limi… (voir plus)tations of mnemonic capacity. Episodic memories, in particular, are liable to be forgotten over time. Researchers have hypothesized that it may be beneficial for decision making to forget episodic memories over time. Reinforcement learning offers a normative framework in which to test such hypotheses. Here, we show that a reinforcement learning agent that uses an episodic memory cache to find rewards in maze environments can forget a large percentage of older memories without any performance impairments, if they utilize mnemonic representations that contain structural information about space. Moreover, we show that some forgetting can actually provide a benefit in performance compared to agents with unbounded memories. Our analyses of the agents show that forgetting reduces the influence of outdated information and states which are not frequently visited on the policies produced by the episodic control system. These results support the hypothesis that some degree of forgetting can be beneficial for decision making, which can help to explain why the brain forgets more than is required by capacity limitations.
2022-03-25
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (publié)
doi.org
Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks
Giancarlo Kerg
Sarthak Mittal
David Rolnick
Yoshua Bengio
Blake Richards
Guillaume Lajoie
Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution performance but struggle in out-of-distribution settings. This is especiall… (voir plus)y true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing rules in sequences, as required in many intelligence tests. In contrast, our brains are remarkably flexible at such tasks, an attribute that is likely linked to anatomical constraints on computations. Inspired by this, recent work has explored how enforcing that relational representations remain distinct from sensory representations can help artificial systems. Building on this work, we further explore and formalize the advantages afforded by ``partitioned'' representations of relations and sensory details. We investigate inductive biases that ensure abstract relations are learned and represented distinctly from sensory data across several neural network architectures and show that they outperform existing architectures on out-of-distribution generalization for various relational tasks. These results show that partitioning relational representations from other information streams may be a simple way to augment existing network architectures' robustness when performing relational computations.
2022-03-25
ICLR.cc/2022/Workshop/OSC (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Neurobiological Correlates of Change in Adaptive Behavior in Autism.
Charlotte M. Pretzsch
Tim Schäfer
Michael V. Lombardo
Varun Warrier
Caroline Mann
Anke Bletsch
Chris H. Chatham
Dorothea L. Floris
Julian Tillmann
Afsheen Yousaf
Emily J. H. Jones
Tony Charman
Sara Ambrosino
Thomas Bourgeron
Guillaume Dumas
Eva Loth
Beth Oakley
Jan K. Buitelaar
Freddy Cliquet
Claire Leblond … (voir 7 de plus)
Simon Baron-Cohen
Christian Beckmann
Tobias Banaschewski
Sarah Durston
Christine M. Freitag
Declan Murphy
Christine Ecker
2022-03-25
American Journal of Psychiatry (publié)
doi.org