Publications

PETRA: Parallel End-to-End Training of Reversible Architectures
Stéphane Rivaud
Thomas Pumir
Mickael Eickenberg
Reversible architectures have been shown to be capable of performing on par with their non-reversible architectures, being applied in deep l… (voir plus)earning for memory savings and generative modeling. In this work, we show how reversible architectures can solve challenges in parallelizing deep model training. We introduce PETRA, a novel alternative to backpropagation for parallelizing gradient computations. PETRA facilitates effective model parallelism by enabling stages (i.e., a set of layers) to compute independently on different devices, while only needing to communicate activations and gradients between each other. By decoupling the forward and backward passes and keeping a single updated version of the parameters, the need for weight stashing is also removed. We develop a custom autograd-like training framework for PETRA, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on CIFAR-10, ImageNet32, and ImageNet, achieving competitive accuracies comparable to backpropagation using ResNet-18, ResNet-34, and ResNet-50 models.
Pixels Under Pressure: Exploring Fine-Tuning Paradigms for Foundation Models in High-Resolution Medical Imaging
Zahra Tehrani Nasab
Advancements in diffusion-based foundation models have improved text-to-image generation, yet most efforts have been limited to low-resoluti… (voir plus)on settings. As high-resolution image synthesis becomes increasingly essential for various applications, particularly in medical imaging domains, fine-tuning emerges as a crucial mechanism for adapting these powerful pre-trained models to task-specific requirements and data distributions. In this work, we present a systematic study, examining the impact of various fine-tuning techniques on image generation quality when scaling to high resolution 512x512 pixels. We benchmark a diverse set of fine-tuning methods, including full fine-tuning strategies and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We dissect how different fine-tuning methods influence key quality metrics, including Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID), Vendi score, and prompt-image alignment. We also evaluate the utility of generated images in a downstream classification task under data-scarce conditions, demonstrating that specific fine-tuning strategies improve both generation fidelity and downstream performance when synthetic images are used for classifier training and evaluation on real images. Our code is accessible through the project website - https://tehraninasab.github.io/PixelUPressure/.
Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems is a Social Science Measurement Challenge
Hanna Wallach
Meera Desai
A. Feder Cooper
Angelina Wang
Chad Atalla
Solon Barocas
Su Lin Blodgett
Alexandra Chouldechova
Emily Corvi
P. A. Dow
Jean Garcia-Gathright
A.R. Olteanu
Nicholas Pangakis
Stefanie Reed
Emily Sheng
Dan Vann
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
Matthew Vogel
Hannah Washington
Abigail Z. Jacobs
The measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems are especially difficult, leading to what has been described as"a… (voir plus) tangle of sloppy tests [and] apples-to-oranges comparisons"(Roose, 2024). In this position paper, we argue that the ML community would benefit from learning from and drawing on the social sciences when developing and using measurement instruments for evaluating GenAI systems. Specifically, our position is that evaluating GenAI systems is a social science measurement challenge. We present a four-level framework, grounded in measurement theory from the social sciences, for measuring concepts related to the capabilities, behaviors, and impacts of GenAI. This framework has two important implications for designing and evaluating evaluations: First, it can broaden the expertise involved in evaluating GenAI systems by enabling stakeholders with different perspectives to participate in conceptual debates. Second, it brings rigor to both conceptual and operational debates by offering a set of lenses for interrogating the validity of measurement instruments and their resulting measurements.
Ex Post Conditions for the Exactness of Optimal Power Flow Conic Relaxations
Jean-Luc Lupien
Convex relaxations of the optimal power flow (OPF) problem provide an efficient alternative to solving the intractable alternating current (… (voir plus)AC) optimal power flow. The conic subset of OPF convex relaxations, in particular, greatly accelerate resolution while leading to high-quality approximations that are exact in several scenarios. However, the sufficient conditions guaranteeing exactness are stringent, e.g., requiring radial topologies. In this short communication, we present two equivalent ex post conditions for the exactness of any conic relaxation of the OPF. These rely on obtaining either a rank-1 voltage matrix or self-coherent cycles. Instead of relying on sufficient conditions a priori, satisfying one of the presented ex post conditions acts as an exactness certificate for the computed solution. The operator can therefore obtain an optimality guarantee when solving a conic relaxation even when a priori exactness requirements are not met. Finally, we present numerical examples from the MATPOWER library where the ex post conditions hold even though the exactness sufficient conditions do not, thereby illustrating the use of the conditions.
Predicting Vessel Speed Over Ground: A Machine Learning Approach for Enhancing Maritime Transport
Ismail Bourzak
Abdelaziz Berrado
Stéphane Caron
PreSumm: Predicting Summarization Performance Without Summarizing
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC)
Serge Sharoff
Pierre Zweigenbaum
Reinhard Rapp
A protocol for trustworthy EEG decoding with neural networks
Pruning Sparse Tensor Neural Networks Enables Deep Learning for 3D Ultrasound Localization Microscopy
Paul Xing
Jonathan Porée
Maxime Gasse
Jean Provost
Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) is a non-invasive technique that allows for the imaging of micro-vessels in vivo, at depth and with… (voir plus) a resolution on the order of ten microns. ULM is based on the sub-resolution localization of individual microbubbles injected in the bloodstream. Mapping the whole angioarchitecture requires the accumulation of microbubbles trajectories from thousands of frames, typically acquired over a few minutes. ULM acquisition times can be reduced by increasing the microbubble concentration, but requires more advanced algorithms to detect them individually. Several deep learning approaches have been proposed for this task, but they remain limited to 2D imaging, in part due to the associated large memory requirements. Herein, we propose to use sparse tensor neural networks to reduce memory usage in 2D and to improve the scaling of the memory requirement for the extension of deep learning architecture to 3D. We study several approaches to efficiently convert ultrasound data into a sparse format and study the impact of the associated loss of information. When applied in 2D, the sparse formulation reduces the memory requirements by a factor 2 at the cost of a small reduction of performance when compared against dense networks. In 3D, the proposed approach reduces memory requirements by two order of magnitude while largely outperforming conventional ULM in high concentration settings. We show that Sparse Tensor Neural Networks in 3D ULM allow for the same benefits as dense deep learning based method in 2D ULM i.e. the use of higher concentration in silico and reduced acquisition time.
R3Design: deep tertiary structure-based RNA sequence design and beyond
Cheng Tan
Zhangyang Gao
Hanqun Cao
Siyuan Li
Siqi Ma
Stan Z. Li
The rational design of Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules is crucial for advancing therapeutic applications, synthetic biology, and understand… (voir plus)ing the fundamental principles of life. Traditional RNA design methods have predominantly focused on secondary structure-based sequence design, often neglecting the intricate and essential tertiary interactions. We introduce R3Design, a tertiary structure-based RNA sequence design method that shifts the paradigm to prioritize tertiary structure in the RNA sequence design. R3Design significantly enhances sequence design on native RNA backbones, achieving high sequence recovery and Macro-F1 score, and outperforming traditional secondary structure-based approaches by substantial margins. We demonstrate that R3Design can design RNA sequences that fold into the desired tertiary structures by validating these predictions using advanced structure prediction models. This method, which is available through standalone software, provides a comprehensive toolkit for designing, folding, and evaluating RNA at the tertiary level. Our findings demonstrate R3Design’s superior capability in designing RNA sequences, which achieves around \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}
Real-time fine finger motion decoding for transradial amputees with surface electromyography
Zihan Weng
Yang Xiao
Peiyang Li
Chanlin Yi
Hailin Ma
Guang Yao
Yuan Lin
Fali Li
Dezhong Yao 0001
Jingming Hou
Yangsong Zhang
Peng Xu
REARANK: Reasoning Re-ranking Agent via Reinforcement Learning
We present REARANK, a large language model (LLM)-based listwise reasoning reranking agent. REARANK explicitly reasons before reranking, sign… (voir plus)ificantly improving both performance and interpretability. Leveraging reinforcement learning and data augmentation, REARANK achieves substantial improvements over baseline models across popular information retrieval benchmarks, notably requiring only 179 annotated samples. Built on top of Qwen2.5-7B, our REARANK-7B demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4 on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks and even surpasses GPT-4 on reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmarks. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach and highlight how reinforcement learning can enhance LLM reasoning capabilities in reranking.