Publications

Can neurogenesis act as a neural regularizer?
Lina M. Tran
Adam Santoro
Lulu Liu
Sheena A. Josselyn
Blake Richards
Paul W. Frankland
New neurons are continuously generated in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus throughout adulthood. These new neurons gradually integr… (voir plus)ate into hippocampal circuits, forming new naïve synapses. Viewed from this perspective, these new neurons may represent a significant source of ‘wiring’ noise in hippocampal networks. In machine learning, such noise injection is commonly used as a regularization technique. Regularization techniques help prevent overfitting training data, and allow models to generalize learning to new, unseen data. Using a computational modeling approach, here we ask whether a neurogenesis-like process similarly acts as a regularizer, facilitating generalization in a category learning task. In a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on the CIFAR-10 object recognition dataset, we modeled neurogenesis as a replacement/turnover mechanism, where weights for a randomly chosen small subset of neurons in a chosen hidden layer were re-initialized to new values as the model learned to categorize 10 different classes of objects. We found that neurogenesis enhanced generalization on unseen test data compared to networks with no neurogenesis. Moreover, neurogenic networks either outperformed or performed similarly to networks with conventional noise injection (i.e., dropout, weight decay, and neural noise). These results suggest that neurogenesis can enhance generalization in hippocampal learning through noise-injection, expanding on the roles that neurogenesis may have in cognition. Author Summary In deep neural networks, various forms of noise injection are used as regularization techniques to prevent overfitting and promote generalization on unseen test data. Here, we were interested in whether adult neurogenesis– the lifelong production of new neurons in the hippocampus– might similarly function as a regularizer in the brain. We explored this question computationally, assessing whether implementing a neurogenesis-like process in a hidden layer within a convolutional neural network trained in a category learning task would prevent overfitting and promote generalization. We found that neurogenesis regularization was as least as effective as, or more effective than, conventional regularizers (i.e., dropout, weight decay and neural noise) in improving model performance. These results suggest that optimal levels of hippocampal neurogenesis may improve memory-guided decision making by preventing overfitting, thereby promoting the formation of more generalized memories that can be applied in a broader range of circumstances. We outline how these predictions may be evaluated behaviorally in rodents with altered hippocampal neurogenesis.
2022-04-10
bioRxiv (prépublication)
doi.org
Clones in deep learning code: what, where, and why?
Hadhemi Jebnoun
Md Saidur Rahman
Foutse Khomh
Biruk Asmare Muse
2022-04-08
Empirical Software Engineering (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
NeoRS: A Neonatal Resting State fMRI Data Preprocessing Pipeline
Vicente Enguix
Jeanette K. Kenley
David Luck
Julien Cohen-Adad
G. Lodygensky
Resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has been shown to be a promising tool to study intrinsic brain functional connectivity and assess its … (voir plus)integrity in cerebral development. In neonates, where functional MRI is limited to very few paradigms, rsfMRI was shown to be a relevant tool to explore regional interactions of brain networks. However, to identify the resting state networks, data needs to be carefully processed to reduce artifacts compromising the interpretation of results. Because of the non-collaborative nature of the neonates, the differences in brain size and the reversed contrast compared to adults due to myelination, neonates can’t be processed with the existing adult pipelines, as they are not adapted. Therefore, we developed NeoRS, a rsfMRI pipeline for neonates. The pipeline relies on popular neuroimaging tools (FSL, AFNI, and SPM) and is optimized for the neonatal brain. The main processing steps include image registration to an atlas, skull stripping, tissue segmentation, slice timing and head motion correction and regression of confounds which compromise functional data interpretation. To address the specificity of neonatal brain imaging, particular attention was given to registration including neonatal atlas type and parameters, such as brain size variations, and contrast differences compared to adults. Furthermore, head motion was scrutinized, and motion management optimized, as it is a major issue when processing neonatal rsfMRI data. The pipeline includes quality control using visual assessment checkpoints. To assess the effectiveness of NeoRS processing steps we used the neonatal data from the Baby Connectome Project dataset including a total of 10 neonates. NeoRS was designed to work on both multi-band and single-band acquisitions and is applicable on smaller datasets. NeoRS also includes popular functional connectivity analysis features such as seed-to-seed or seed-to-voxel correlations. Language, default mode, dorsal attention, visual, ventral attention, motor and fronto-parietal networks were evaluated. Topology found the different analyzed networks were in agreement with previously published studies in the neonate. NeoRS is coded in Matlab and allows parallel computing to reduce computational times; it is open-source and available on GitHub (https://github.com/venguix/NeoRS). NeoRS allows robust image processing of the neonatal rsfMRI data that can be readily customized to different datasets.
2022-04-08
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Rapid, automated nerve histomorphometry through open-source artificial intelligence
Simeon Christian Daeschler
Marie-Hélène Bourget
Dorsa Derakhshan
Vasudev Sharma
Stoyan Ivaylov Asenov
Tessa Gordon
Julien Cohen-Adad
Gregory Howard Borschel
2022-04-08
Scientific Reports (publié)
doi.org
Rapid, automated nerve histomorphometry through open-source artificial intelligence
S. Daeschler
Marie-Hélène Bourget
Dorsa Derakhshan
Vasudev Sharma
Stoyan Ivaylov Asenov
Tessa Gordon
Julien Cohen-Adad
G. Borschel
2022-04-08
Scientific Reports (published)
doi.org
Intervertebral Disc Labeling With Learning Shape Information, A Look Once Approach
Reza Azad
Moein Heidari
Julien Cohen-Adad
Ehsan Adeli
Dorit Merhof
Accurate and automatic segmentation of intervertebral discs from medical images is a critical task for the assessment of spine-related disea… (voir plus)ses such as osteoporosis, vertebral fractures, and intervertebral disc herniation. To date, various approaches have been developed in the literature which routinely relies on detecting the discs as the primary step. A disadvantage of many cohort studies is that the localization algorithm also yields false-positive detections. In this study, we aim to alleviate this problem by proposing a novel U-Net-based structure to predict a set of candidates for intervertebral disc locations. In our design, we integrate the image shape information (image gradients) to encourage the model to learn rich and generic geometrical information. This additional signal guides the model to selectively emphasize the contextual representation and suppress the less discriminative features. On the post-processing side, to further decrease the false positive rate, we propose a permutation invariant 'look once' model, which accelerates the candidate recovery procedure. In comparison with previous studies, our proposed approach does not need to perform the selection in an iterative fashion. The proposed method was evaluated on the spine generic public multi-center dataset and demonstrated superior performance compared to previous work. We have provided the implementation code in https://github.com/rezazad68/intervertebral-lookonce
2022-04-06
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.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
Ali Dirani
2022-04-06
Translational Vision Science & Technology (publié)
doi.org
Structure-aware protein self-supervised learning
Can Chen
Jingbo Zhou
Fan Wang
Xue (Steve) Liu
Dejing Dou
Abstract Motivation Protein representation learning methods have shown great potential to many downstream tasks in biological applications. … (voir plus)A few recent studies have demonstrated that the self-supervised learning is a promising solution to addressing insufficient labels of proteins, which is a major obstacle to effective protein representation learning. However, existing protein representation learning is usually pretrained on protein sequences without considering the important protein structural information. Results In this work, we propose a novel structure-aware protein self-supervised learning method to effectively capture structural information of proteins. In particular, a graph neural network model is pretrained to preserve the protein structural information with self-supervised tasks from a pairwise residue distance perspective and a dihedral angle perspective, respectively. Furthermore, we propose to leverage the available protein language model pretrained on protein sequences to enhance the self-supervised learning. Specifically, we identify the relation between the sequential information in the protein language model and the structural information in the specially designed graph neural network model via a novel pseudo bi-level optimization scheme. We conduct experiments on three downstream tasks: the binary classification into membrane/non-membrane proteins, the location classification into 10 cellular compartments, and the enzyme-catalyzed reaction classification into 384 EC numbers, and these experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Availability and implementation The Alphafold2 database is available in https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/. The PDB files are available in https://www.rcsb.org/. The downstream tasks are available in https://github.com/phermosilla/IEConv\_proteins/tree/master/Datasets. The code of the proposed method is available in https://github.com/GGchen1997/STEPS_Bioinformatics.
2022-04-06
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Using Interactive Feedback to Improve the Accuracy and Explainability of Question Answering Systems Post-Deployment
Zichao Li
Prakhar Sharma
Xing Han Lu
Jackie Cheung
Siva Reddy
Most research on question answering focuses on the pre-deployment stage; i.e., building an accurate model for deployment.In this paper, we a… (voir plus)sk the question: Can we improve QA systems further post-deployment based on user interactions? We focus on two kinds of improvements: 1) improving the QA system’s performance itself, and 2) providing the model with the ability to explain the correctness or incorrectness of an answer.We collect a retrieval-based QA dataset, FeedbackQA, which contains interactive feedback from users. We collect this dataset by deploying a base QA system to crowdworkers who then engage with the system and provide feedback on the quality of its answers.The feedback contains both structured ratings and unstructured natural language explanations.We train a neural model with this feedback data that can generate explanations and re-score answer candidates. We show that feedback data not only improves the accuracy of the deployed QA system but also other stronger non-deployed systems. The generated explanations also help users make informed decisions about the correctness of answers.
2022-04-06
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Comparison of multicenter MRI protocols for visualizing the spinal cord gray matter
Julien Cohen-Adad
Eva Alonso‐Ortiz
Stephanie Alley
M. M. Laganá
Francesca Baglio
S. Vannesjo
Haleh Karbasforoushan
Maryam Seif
A. Seifert
Junqian Xu
Joo-won Kim
René Labounek
Lubomír Vojtíšek
Marek Dostál
Jan Valošek
Rebecca Sara Samson
Francesco Grussu
Marco Battiston
C. G. Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott
Marios C. Yiannakas … (voir 4 de plus)
Guillaume Gilbert
Torben Schneider
Brian Johnson
Ferran Prados
Spinal cord gray‐matter imaging is valuable for a number of applications, but remains challenging. The purpose of this work was to compare… (voir plus) various MRI protocols at 1.5 T, 3 T, and 7 T for visualizing the gray matter.
2022-04-05
Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (published)
doi.org
Comparison of multicenter MRI protocols for visualizing the spinal cord gray matter
Julien Cohen-Adad
Eva Alonso‐Ortiz
Stephanie Alley
Maria Marcella Lagana
Francesca Baglio
Signe Johanna Vannesjo
Haleh Karbasforoushan
Maryam Seif
Alan C. Seifert
Junqian Xu
Joo‐Won Kim
René Labounek
Lubomír Vojtíšek
Marek Dostál
Jan Valošek
Rebecca S. Samson
Francesco Grussu
Marco Battiston
Claudia A. M. Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott
Marios C. Yiannakas … (voir 4 de plus)
Guillaume Gilbert
Torben Schneider
Brian Johnson
Ferran Prados
Spinal cord gray‐matter imaging is valuable for a number of applications, but remains challenging. The purpose of this work was to compare… (voir plus) various MRI protocols at 1.5 T, 3 T, and 7 T for visualizing the gray matter.
2022-04-05
Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (publié)
doi.org
E VALUATING G ENERALIZATION IN GF LOW N ETS FOR M OLECULE D ESIGN
Andrei Cristian Nica
Moksh J. Jain
Emmanuel Bengio
Cheng-Hao Liu
Maksym Korablyov
Michael M. Bronstein
Yoshua Bengio
Deep learning bears promise for drug discovery problems such as de novo molecular design. Generating data to train such models is a costly a… (voir plus)nd time-consuming process, given the need for wet-lab experiments or expensive simulations. This problem is compounded by the notorious data-hungriness of machine learning algorithms. In small molecule generation the recently proposed GFlowNet method has shown good performance in generating diverse high-scoring candidates, and has the interesting advantage of being an off-policy offline method. Finding an appropriate generalization evaluation metric for such models, one predictive of the desired search performance (i.e. finding high-scoring diverse candidates), will help guide online data collection for such an algorithm. In this work, we develop techniques for evaluating GFlowNet performance on a test set, and identify the most promising metric for predicting generalization. We present empirical results on several small-molecule design tasks in drug discovery, for several GFlowNet training setups, and we find a metric strongly correlated with diverse high-scoring batch generation. This metric should be used to identify the best generative model from which to sample batches of molecules to be evaluated.
2022-04-05
ICLR.cc/2022/Workshop/MLDD (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net