Publications

Prediction of Final Phosphorus Content of Steel in a Scrap-Based Electric Arc Furnace Using Artificial Neural Networks
Riadh Azzaz
Valentin Hurel
Patrice Ménard
M. Jahazi
S Ebrahimi Kahou
Elmira Moosavi-Khoonsari
2024-10-24
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
ConvNTC: Convolutional neural tensor completion for predicting the disease-related miRNA pairs and cell-related drug pairs
Pei Liu
Xiao Liang
Yuemei Li
Jiawei Luo
2024-10-23
bioRxiv (prépublication)
doi.org
The roles of neural networks in language acquisition
Eva Portelance
Masoud Jasbi

How can modern neural networks like large language models be useful to the field of language acquisition, and more broadly cognitive scie… (voir plus)nce, if they are not a priori designed to be cognitive models? As developments towards natural language understanding and generation have improved leaps and bounds, with models like GPT-4, the question of how they can inform our understanding of human language acquisition has re-emerged. As such, it is critical to examine how in practice linking hypotheses between models and human learners can be safely established. To address these questions, we propose a model taxonomy, including four modeling approaches, each having differing goals, from exploratory hypothesis generation to hypothesis differentiation and testing. We show how the goals of these approaches align with the overarching goals of science and linguistics by connecting our taxonomy to the realist vs. instrumentalist approaches in philosophy of science. We survey recent work having adopted each of our modelling approaches and address the importance of computational modelling in language acquisition studies.

2024-10-23
Language and Linguistics Compass (publié)
doi.org
Minimally Invasive Morphology Adaptation via Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning
Michael Przystupa
Hongyao Tang
Mariano Phielipp
Santiago Miret
Martin Jagersand
Glen Berseth
Learning reinforcement learning policies to control individual robots is often computationally non-economical because minor variations in ro… (voir plus)bot morphology (e.g. dynamics or number of limbs) can negatively impact policy performance. This limitation has motivated morphology agnostic policy learning, in which a monolithic deep learning policy learns to generalize between robotic morphologies. Unfortunately, these policies still have sub-optimal zero-shot performance compared to end-to-end finetuning on target morphologies. This limitation has ramifications in practical robotic applications, as online finetuning large neural networks can require immense computation. In this work, we investigate \textit{parameter efficient finetuning} techniques to specialize morphology-agnostic policies to a target robot that minimizes the number of learnable parameters adapted during online learning. We compare direct finetuning, which update subsets of the base model parameters, and input-learnable approaches, which add additional parameters to manipulate inputs passed to the base model. Our analysis concludes that tuning relatively few parameters (0.01\% of the base model) can measurably improve policy performance over zero shot. These results serve a prescriptive purpose for future research for which scenarios certain PEFT approaches are best suited for adapting policy's to new robotic morphologies.
2024-10-22
corl.org/2024/Workshop/MAPoDeL (publié)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Multilingual Hallucination Gaps in Large Language Models
Cl'ea Chataigner
Afaf Taïk
Golnoosh Farnadi
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as alternatives to traditional search engines given their capacity to generate text that … (voir plus)resembles human language. However, this shift is concerning, as LLMs often generate hallucinations, misleading or false information that appears highly credible. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of hallucinations across multiple languages in freeform text generation, focusing on what we call multilingual hallucination gaps. These gaps reflect differences in the frequency of hallucinated answers depending on the prompt and language used. To quantify such hallucinations, we used the FactScore metric and extended its framework to a multilingual setting. We conducted experiments using LLMs from the LLaMA, Qwen, and Aya families, generating biographies in 19 languages and comparing the results to Wikipedia pages. Our results reveal variations in hallucination rates, especially between high and low resource languages, raising important questions about LLM multilingual performance and the challenges in evaluating hallucinations in multilingual freeform text generation.
2024-10-22
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Overcoming State and Action Space Disparities in Multi-Domain, Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Reginald McLean
Kai Yuan
Isaac Woungang
Nariman Farsad
Pablo Samuel Castro
Current multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) methods have the ability to perform a large number of tasks with a single policy. However w… (voir plus)hen attempting to interact with a new domain, the MTRL agent would need to be re-trained due to differences in domain dynamics and structure. Because of these limitations, we are forced to train multiple policies even though tasks may have shared dynamics, leading to needing more samples and is thus sample inefficient. In this work, we explore the ability of MTRL agents to learn in various domains with various dynamics by simultaneously learning in multiple domains, without the need to fine-tune extra policies. In doing so we find that a MTRL agent trained in multiple domains induces an increase in sample efficiency of up to 70\% while maintaining the overall success rate of the MTRL agent.
2024-10-22
corl.org/2024/Workshop/MAPoDeL (publié)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Scaling Stick-Breaking Attention: An Efficient Implementation and In-Depth Study
Shawn Tan
Yikang Shen
Songlin Yang
Aaron Courville
Rameswar Panda
The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases… (voir plus) to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges. We investigate an alternative attention mechanism based on the stick-breaking process in larger scale settings. The method works as follows: For each token before the current, we determine a break point, which represents the proportion of the stick, the weight of the attention, to allocate to the current token. We repeat this on the remaining stick, until all tokens are allocated a weight, resulting in a sequence of attention weights. This process naturally incorporates recency bias, which has linguistic motivations for grammar parsing. We study the implications of replacing the conventional softmax-based attention mechanism with stick-breaking attention. We then discuss implementation of numerically stable stick-breaking attention and adapt Flash Attention to accommodate this mechanism. When used as a drop-in replacement for current softmax+RoPE attention systems, we find that stick-breaking attention performs competitively with current methods on length generalisation and downstream tasks. Stick-breaking also performs well at length generalisation, allowing a model trained with
2024-10-22
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
openreview.net
Symmetry-Aware Generative Modeling through Learned Canonicalization
Kusha Sareen
Daniel Levy
Arnab Kumar Mondal
Sékou-Oumar Kaba
Tara Akhound-Sadegh
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Generative modeling of symmetric densities has a range of applications in AI for science, from drug discovery to physics simulations. The ex… (voir plus)isting generative modeling paradigm for invariant densities combines an invariant prior with an equivariant generative process. However, we observe that this technique is not necessary and has several drawbacks resulting from the limitations of equivariant networks. Instead, we propose to model a learned slice of the density so that only one representative element per orbit is learned. To accomplish this, we learn a group-equivariant canonicalization network that maps training samples to a canonical pose and train a non-equivariant generative model over these canonicalized samples. We implement this idea in the context of diffusion models. Our preliminary experimental results on molecular modeling are promising, demonstrating improved sample quality and faster inference time.
2024-10-22
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/NeurReps (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Correction: Al content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: new obligations for media and tech companies
Alistair Knott
Dino Pedreschi
Toshiya Jitsuzumi
Susan Leavy
David Eyers
Tapabrata Chakraborti
Andrew Trotman
Sundar Sundareswaran
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Przemyslaw Biecek
Adrian Weller
Paul D. Teal
Subhadip Basu
Mehmet Haklidir
Virginia Morini
Stuart Russell
Yoshua Bengio
2024-10-21
Ethics and Information Technology (publié)
doi.org
FairLoRA: Unpacking Bias Mitigation in Vision Models with Fairness-Driven Low-Rank Adaptation
Rohan Sukumaran
Aarash Feizi
Adriana Romero-Sorian
Golnoosh Farnadi
2024-10-21
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think
Massimo Caccia
Megh Thakkar
Léo Boisvert
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Alexandre Piché
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Drouin
Maxime Gasse
Alexandre Lacoste
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in developing autonomous web agents capable of performing digital … (voir plus)tasks through web interfaces in a human-like manner. However, even the strongest closed-source models often struggle to achieve robust results on several benchmarks, while a notable performance gap exists between them and open-source counterparts. This study investigates the potential of fine-tuning to enhance the performance of a smaller, lower-performing but cost-efficient LLM by leveraging successful traces from stronger LLMs, referred to as experts. We outline a comprehensive pipeline for data collection, filtering, and supervised fine-tuning and explore various behavior cloning parameters. Our experiments provide key insights into the challenges of fine-tuning LLMs into web agents on benchmarks like MiniWoB and WorkArena. Notably, we find that the fine-tuned agents' ability to predict expert trajectories does not consistently lead to improved downstream task performance. This raises issues such as off-policy bias and the loss of reasoning abilities during fine-tuning. We discuss potential solutions to these challenges and make both the codebase and a dataset of 140M tokens open-source for the community to build upon.
2024-10-21
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/OWA (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Graph Knowledge Distillation to Mixture of Experts
Pavel Rumiantsev
Mark J. Coates
2024-10-21
TMLR (accepté)
doi.org
openreview.net