Publications

Performance-gated deliberation: A context-adapted strategy in which urgency is opportunity cost
Maximilian Puelma Touzel
Paul Cisek
Predicting the probability distribution of bus travel time to measure the reliability of public transport services
L. Ricard
Guy Desaulniers
Louis-Martin Rousseau
Predicting the probability distribution of bus travel time to measure the reliability of public transport services
L'ea Ricard
Guy Desaulniers
Louis-Martin Rousseau
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering
Jing Zhang
Xiaokang Zhang
Jifan Yu
Jie Tang
Cuiping Li
Hong Chen
On the estimation of discrete choice models to capture irrational customer behaviors
Sanjay Dominik Jena
Claudio Sole
The random utility maximization model is by far the most adopted framework to estimate consumer choice behavior. However, behavioral economi… (voir plus)cs has provided strong empirical evidence of irrational choice behaviors, such as halo effects, that are incompatible with this framework. Models belonging to the random utility maximization family may therefore not accurately capture such irrational behavior. Hence, more general choice models, overcoming such limitations, have been proposed. However, the flexibility of such models comes at the price of increased risk of overfitting. As such, estimating such models remains a challenge. In this work, we propose an estimation method for the recently proposed generalized stochastic preference choice model, which subsumes the family of random utility maximization models and is capable of capturing halo effects. In particular, we propose a column-generation method to gradually refine the discrete choice model based on partially ranked preference sequences. Extensive computational experiments indicate that our model, explicitly accounting for irrational preferences, can significantly boost the predictive accuracy on both synthetic and real-world data instances. Summary of Contribution: In this work, we propose an estimation method for the recently proposed generalized stochastic preference choice model, which subsumes the family of random utility maximization models and is capable of capturing halo effects. Specifically, we show how to use partially ranked preferences to efficiently model rational and irrational customer types from transaction data. Our estimation procedure is based on column generation, where relevant customer types are efficiently extracted by expanding a treelike data structure containing the customer behaviors. Furthermore, we propose a new dominance rule among customer types whose effect is to prioritize low orders of interactions among products. An extensive set of experiments assesses the predictive accuracy of the proposed approach by comparing it against rank-based methods with only rational preferences and with more general benchmarks from the literature. Our results show that accounting for irrational preferences can boost predictive accuracy by 12.5% on average when tested on a real-world data set from a large chain of grocery and drug stores.
The generalizability of pre-processing techniques on the accuracy and fairness of data-driven building models: a case study
Ying Sun
Fariborz Haghighat
The Power of Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Semantic Parsing
Nathan Schucher
Harm de Vries
Prompt tuning has recently emerged as an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to a number of language understanding and… (voir plus) generation tasks. In this paper, we investigate prompt tuning for semantic parsing—the task of mapping natural language utterances onto formal meaning representations. On the low-resource splits of Overnight and TOPv2, we find that a prompt tuned T5-xl significantly outperforms its fine-tuned counterpart, as well as strong GPT-3 and BART baselines. We also conduct ablation studies across different model scales and target representations, finding that, with increasing model scale, prompt tuned T5 models improve at generating target representations that are far from the pre-training distribution.
Unsupervised Dependency Graph Network
Yikang Shen
Shawn Tan
Peng Li
Jie Zhou
Using Interactive Feedback to Improve the Accuracy and Explainability of Question Answering Systems Post-Deployment
Zichao Li
Prakhar Sharma
Xing Han Lu
Public Perspectives on Exposure Notification Apps: A Patient and Citizen Co-Designed Study
Esli Osmanlliu
Jesseca Paquette
Maria Alejandra Rodriguez Duarte
Sylvain Bédard
Nathalie de Marcellis-Warin
Majlinda Zhegu
Marie-Eve Bouthillier
Annie-Danielle Grenier
Paul Lewis
Marie-Pascale Pomey
Canada deployed a digital exposure notification app (COVID Alert) as a strategy to support manual contact tracing. Our aims are to (1) asses… (voir plus)s the use, knowledge, and concerns of the COVID Alert app, (2) identify predictors of app downloads, and (3) develop strategies to promote social acceptability. A 36-item questionnaire was co-designed by 12 citizens and patients partnered with 16 academic researchers and was distributed in the province of Québec, Canada, from May 27 to 28 June 2021. Of 959 respondents, 43% had downloaded the app. Messaging from government sources constituted the largest influence on app download. Infrequent social contacts and perceived app inefficacy were the main reasons not to download the app. Cybersecurity, data confidentiality, loss of privacy, and geolocation were the most frequent concerns. Nearly half of the respondents inaccurately believed that the app used geolocation. Most respondents supported citizen involvement in app development. The identified predictors for app uptake included nine characteristics. In conclusion, this project highlights four key themes on how to promote the social acceptability of such tools: (1) improved communication and explanation of key app characteristics, (2) design features that incentivize adoption, (3) inclusive socio-technical features, and (4) upstream public partnership in development and deployment.
Public Perspectives on Exposure Notification Apps: A Patient and Citizen Co-Designed Study
Esli Osmanlliu
Jesseca Paquette
Maria Alejandra Rodriguez Duarte
Sylvain Bédard
Nathalie de Marcellis-Warin
Majlinda Zhegu
Marie-Eve Bouthillier
Annie-Danielle Grenier
Paul Lewis
Marie-Pascale Pomey
Canada deployed a digital exposure notification app (COVID Alert) as a strategy to support manual contact tracing. Our aims are to (1) asses… (voir plus)s the use, knowledge, and concerns of the COVID Alert app, (2) identify predictors of app downloads, and (3) develop strategies to promote social acceptability. A 36-item questionnaire was co-designed by 12 citizens and patients partnered with 16 academic researchers and was distributed in the province of Québec, Canada, from May 27 to 28 June 2021. Of 959 respondents, 43% had downloaded the app. Messaging from government sources constituted the largest influence on app download. Infrequent social contacts and perceived app inefficacy were the main reasons not to download the app. Cybersecurity, data confidentiality, loss of privacy, and geolocation were the most frequent concerns. Nearly half of the respondents inaccurately believed that the app used geolocation. Most respondents supported citizen involvement in app development. The identified predictors for app uptake included nine characteristics. In conclusion, this project highlights four key themes on how to promote the social acceptability of such tools: (1) improved communication and explanation of key app characteristics, (2) design features that incentivize adoption, (3) inclusive socio-technical features, and (4) upstream public partnership in development and deployment.
GANSpiration: Balancing Targeted and Serendipitous Inspiration in User Interface Design with Style-Based Generative Adversarial Network
Mohammad Amin Mozaffari
Xinyuan Zhang
Jinghui Cheng
Inspiration from design examples plays a crucial role in the creative process of user interface design. However, current tools and technique… (voir plus)s that support inspiration usually only focus on example browsing with limited user control or similarity-based example retrieval, leading to undesirable design outcomes such as focus drift and design fixation. To address these issues, we propose the GANSpiration approach that suggests design examples for both targeted and serendipitous inspiration, leveraging a style-based Generative Adversarial Network. A quantitative evaluation revealed that the outputs of GANSpiration-based example suggestion approaches are relevant to the input design, and at the same time include diverse instances. A user study with professional UI/UX practitioners showed that the examples suggested by our approach serve as viable sources of inspiration for overall design concepts and specific design elements. Overall, our work paves the road of using advanced generative machine learning techniques in supporting the creative design practice.