Publications

Accelerated green material and solvent discovery with chemistry- and physics-guided generative AI
Eslam G. Al-Sakkari
Ahmed Ragab
Marzouk Benali
Olumoye Ajao
Daria C. Boffito
Hanane Dagdougui
2026-05-31
Artificial Intelligence Chemistry (publié)
doi.org
Automated diagnosis of usual interstitial pneumonia on chest CT via the mean curvature of isophotes
Peter Savadjiev
Morteza Rezanejad
Sahir Bhatnagar
David Camirand
Claude Kauffmann
Kaleem Siddiqi
Ronald J. Dandurand
Patrick Bourgouin
Carl Chartrand-Lefebvre
Alexandre Semionov
To test whether the mean curvature of isophotes (MCI), a geometric image transformation, can be used to improve automatic detection on chest… (voir plus) CT of Usual Interstitial Pneumonia (UIP), a determining radiological pattern in the diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Diseases (ILD). This retrospective study included chest CT scans from 234 patients (123 female,111 male; mean age: 61.6 years; age range: 18-90 years) obtained at two independent institutions between 2007 and 2024. Three different classification models were trained on the original CT images and separately on MCI-transformed CT images: (1) a previously published deep learning model for classifying fibrotic lung disease on chest CT, (2) a classification pipeline based on the EfficientNet-V2 convolutional neural network architecture, and (3) a non-deep-learning model based on the functional principal component analysis (FPCA) of density functions of voxel intensity. All models were trained on data from the first institution and evaluated on data from the second institution with the recall-macro, precision-macro and F1-macro scores. Performance difference between classifier pairs was tested with the Stuart-Maxwell marginal homogeneity test. For a fixed model architecture and training algorithm, MCI-transformed images yield comparable or better classification performance than the original CT images. The best performance improvement achieved with MCI compared to CT was: recall-macro 0.83 vs 0.57, precision-macro 0.81 vs 0.50, F1-macro 0.80 vs 0.49, p=4.2e-5. MCI may be a valuable addition to existing AI systems for screening for UIP on chest CT. Machine learning methods for identifying usual interstitial pneumonia on chest CT perform better when the input CT images are transformed via the mean curvature of isophotes (MCI), a geometric transformation method known from classical computer vision. Three machine learning models were trained on a dataset of 158 patients from one institution and tested on another dataset of 76 patients from an independent institution to discriminate for usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) on chest CT in a 3-group classification task. When keeping the network architecture and parameters fixed, changing the input image domain from the original CT to MCI-transformed images improved classification performance (Stuart-Maxwell test, p < 5e-3) MCI may be a valuable addition to existing machine learning systems for screening for UIP on chest CT, whether based on deep learning or on simpler shallow classifiers.
2026-05-31
European Journal of Radiology Open (publié)
doi.org
Refining the construct of direct verbal suggestibility: Evidence for a hybrid dimensional–typological latent structure
Jérémy Brunel
Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse
Julie Delage
Karim Jerbi CoCo Lab
Pierre Rainville
David Ogez
Mathieu Landry
2026-04-30
Personality and Individual Differences (publié)
doi.org
ced_test
alert(1)
Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Machine Tending
Abdalwhab Abdalwhab
Giovanni Beltrame
David St-Onge
Robotic manipulators hold significant untapped potential for manufacturing industries, particularly when deployed in multi-robot configurati… (voir plus)ons that can enhance resource utilization, increase throughput, and reduce costs. However, industrial manipulators typically operate in isolated one-robot, one-machine setups, limiting both utilization and scalability. Even mobile robot implementations generally rely on centralized architectures, creating vulnerability to single points of failure and requiring robust communication infrastructure. This paper introduces SMAPPO (Scalable Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization), a scalable input-size invariant multi-agent reinforcement learning model for decentralized multi-robot management in industrial environments. MAPPO (Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization) represents the current state-of-the-art approach. We optimized an existing simulator to handle complex multi-agent reinforcement learning scenarios and designed a new multi-machine tending scenario for evaluation. Our novel observation encoder enables SMAPPO to handle varying numbers of agents, machines, and storage areas with minimal or no retraining. Results demonstrate SMAPPO's superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art MAPPO across multiple conditions: full retraining (up to 61% improvement), curriculum learning (up to 45% increased productivity and up to 49% fewer collisions), zero-shot generalization to significantly different scale scenarios (up to 272% better performance without retraining), and adaptability under extremely low initial training (up to 100% increase in parts delivery).
2026-02-28
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (publié)
doi.org
Street review: A participatory AI-based framework for assessing streetscape inclusivity
Rashid Mushkani
Shin (Alexandre) Koseki
Urban centers undergo social, demographic, and cultural changes that shape public street use and require systematic evaluation of public spa… (voir plus)ces. This study presents Street Review, a mixed-methods approach that combines participatory research with AI-based analysis to assess streetscape inclusivity. In Montréal, Canada, 28 residents participated in semi-directed interviews and image evaluations, supported by the analysis of approximately 45,000 street-view images from Mapillary. The approach produced visual analytics, such as heatmaps, to correlate subjective user ratings with physical attributes like sidewalk, maintenance, greenery, and seating. Findings reveal variations in perceptions of inclusivity and accessibility across demographic groups, demonstrating that incorporating diverse user feedback can enhance machine learning models through careful data-labeling and co-production strategies. The Street Review framework offers a systematic method for urban planners and policy analysts to inform planning, policy development, and management of public streets.
2026-02-28
Cities (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
GASS: Geometry-Aware Spherical Sampling for Disentangled Diversity Enhancement in Text-to-Image Generation
Ye Zhu
Kaleb S. Newman
Johannes F. Lutzeyer
Adriana Romero Soriano
Michal Drozdzal
Olga Russakovsky
2026-02-18
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Fluid-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Shishir Sharma
Doina Precup
Theodore J. Perkins
The primary focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been to study interactions among a fixed number of agents embedded in an … (voir plus)environment. However, in the real world, the number of agents is neither fixed nor known a priori. Moreover, an agent can decide to create other agents (for example, a cell may divide, or a company may spin off a division). In this paper, we propose a framework that allows agents to create other agents; we call this a fluid-agent environment. We present game-theoretic solution concepts for fluid-agent games and empirically evaluate the performance of several MARL algorithms within this framework. Our experiments include fluid variants of established benchmarks such as Predator-Prey and Level-Based Foraging, where agents can dynamically spawn, as well as a new environment we introduce that highlights how fluidity can unlock novel solution strategies beyond those observed in fixed-population settings. We demonstrate that this framework yields agent teams that adjust their size dynamically to match environmental demands.
2026-02-15
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A flaw in using pretrained protein language models in protein–protein interaction inference models
Joseph Szymborski
Amin Emad
2026-02-12
Nature Machine Intelligence (publié)
doi.org
Navigating ternary doping in Li-ion cathodes with closed-loop multi-objective Bayesian optimization
Nooshin Zeinali Galabi
Cheng-Hao Liu
Moksh Jain
Marc Kamel
Shipeng Jia
Yoshua Bengio
Eric McCalla
To further improve secondary battery materials, we are increasingly exploring highly complex composition spaces in attempts to optimize mult… (voir plus)iple properties simultaneously. While our past work has done this in systematic manners using high-throughput experimentation, the exponential increase in the search space with triple doping makes grid search prohibitively expensive. Here, we demonstrate a closed-loop, multi-objective machine learning approach to guide the high-throughput workflow to efficiently navigate a space with approximately 14 million unique combinations. The test system is LiCoPO4 which we have previously explored using systematic codoping that was effective in optimizing one property only: energy density. To learn multiple electrochemical metrics, we first pretrain a set transformer on the public Materials Project database as a feature extractor, then attach a multi-task Gaussian process head and finetune the entire model on our high-throughput data. Through 3 rounds of active learning, we demonstrate that with a very small number of samples (as few as 125 random compositions and 63 predicted) we are able to simultaneously optimize four key electrochemical properties. Relative to the undoped system, the best composition raises our composite figure of merit by up to five times. This establishes an end-to-end workflow for accelerated battery materials design to be used in the rapidly growing field of autonomous materials discovery.
2026-02-11
Advances in Materials (publié)
doi.org
Pregnancy AI: Development and Internal Validation of an Artificial Intelligence Tool to Predict Live Births in ICSI and IVF Cycles Using Clinical Features and Embryo Images
Jaume Minano Masip
Penelope Borduas
Isaac-Jacques Kadoch
Simon Phillips
Doina Precup
Daniel Dufort
2026-02-11
Medicina (publié)
doi.org
Stabilizing Native Low-Rank LLM Pretraining
Paul Janson
Edouard Oyallon
Eugene Belilovsky
Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges.… (voir plus) Low-rank factorization offers a promising route to reduce training and inference costs, but the community lacks a stable recipe for training models from scratch using exclusively low-rank weights while matching the performance of the dense model. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be trained from scratch using exclusively low-rank factorized weights for all non-embedding matrices without auxiliary"full-rank"guidance required by prior methods. While native low-rank training often suffers from instability and loss spikes, we identify uncontrolled growth in the spectral norm (largest singular value) of the weight matrix update as the dominant factor. To address this, we introduce Spectron: Spectral renormalization with orthogonalization, which dynamically bounds the resultant weight updates based on the current spectral norms of the factors. Our method enables stable, end-to-end factorized training with negligible overhead. Finally, we establish compute-optimal scaling laws for natively low-rank transformers, demonstrating predictable power-law behavior and improved inference efficiency relative to dense models.
2026-02-11
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org