Publications

Smart about medications (SAM): a digital solution to enhance medication management following hospital discharge
Santiago Márquez Fosser
Nadar Mahmoud
Bettina Habib
Daniala L Weir
Fiona Chan
Rola El Halabieh
Jeanne Vachon
Manish Thakur
Thai Tran
Melissa Bustillo
Caroline Beauchamp
André Bonnici
Robyn Tamblyn
SPeCiaL: Self-Supervised Pretraining for Continual Learning
Lucas Caccia
Comparative Study of Learning Outcomes for Online Learning Platforms
Francois St-Hilaire
Nathan J. Burns
Robert Belfer
Muhammad Shayan
Ariella Smofsky
Dung D. Vu
Antoine Frau
Joseph Potochny
Farid Faraji
Vincent Pavero
Neroli Ko
Ansona Onyi Ching
Sabina Elkins
A. Stepanyan
Adela Matajova
Iulian V. Serban
Ekaterina Kochmar
Incorporating dynamic flight network in SEIR to model mobility between populations
Xiaoye Ding
Shenyang Huang
Abby Leung
RNN with Particle Flow for Probabilistic Spatio-temporal Forecasting
Soumyasundar Pal
Liheng Ma
Yingxue Zhang
M. Coates
Spatio-temporal forecasting has numerous applications in analyzing wireless, traffic, and financial networks. Many classical statistical mod… (voir plus)els often fall short in handling the complexity and high non-linearity present in time-series data. Recent advances in deep learning allow for better modelling of spatial and temporal dependencies. While most of these models focus on obtaining accurate point forecasts, they do not characterize the prediction uncertainty. In this work, we consider the time-series data as a random realization from a nonlinear state-space model and target Bayesian inference of the hidden states for probabilistic forecasting. We use particle flow as the tool for approximating the posterior distribution of the states, as it is shown to be highly effective in complex, high-dimensional settings. Thorough experimentation on several real world time-series datasets demonstrates that our approach provides better characterization of uncertainty while maintaining comparable accuracy to the state-of-the art point forecasting methods.
Rapid simultaneous acquisition of macromolecular tissue volume, susceptibility, and relaxometry maps
Fang Frank Yu
Susie Y. Huang
T. Witzel
Ashwin S. Kumar
Congyu Liao
Tanguy Duval
Berkin Bilgic
Purpose A major obstacle to the clinical implementation of quantitative MR is the lengthy acquisition time required to derive multi-contrast… (voir plus) parametric maps. We sought to reduce the acquisition time for quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and macromolecular tissue volume (MTV) by acquiring both contrasts simultaneously by leveraging their redundancies. The Joint Virtual Coil concept with generalized autocalibrating partially parallel acquisitions (JVC-GRAPPA) was applied to reduce acquisition time further. Methods Three adult volunteers were imaged on a 3T scanner using a multi-echo 3D GRE sequence acquired at three head orientations. MTV, QSM, R2*, T1, and proton density maps were reconstructed. The same sequence (GRAPPA R=4) was performed in subject #1 with a single head orientation for comparison. Fully sampled data was acquired in subject #2, from which retrospective undersampling was performed (R=6 GRAPPA and R=9 JVC-GRAPPA). Prospective undersampling was performed in subject #3 (R=6 GRAPPA and R=9 JVC-GRAPPA) using gradient blips to shift k-space sampling in later echoes. Results Subject #1’s multi-orientation and single-orientation MTV maps were not significantly different based on RMSE. For subject #2, the retrospectively undersampled JVC-GRAPPA and GRAPPA generated similar results as fully sampled data. This approach was validated with the prospectively undersampled images in subject #3. Using QSM, R2*, and MTV, the contributions of myelin and iron content to susceptibility was estimated. Conclusion We have developed a novel strategy to simultaneously acquire data for the reconstruction of five intrinsically co-registered 1-mm isotropic resolution multi-parametric maps, with a scan time of 6 minutes using JVC-GRAPPA.
Understanding Capacity Saturation in Incremental Learning
Shenyang Huang
Vincent Francois-Lavet
Double-Linear Thompson Sampling for Context-Attentive Bandits
Djallel Bouneffouf
Raphael Feraud
Sohini Upadhyay
Yasaman Khazaeni
In this paper, we analyze and extend an online learning frame-work known as Context-Attentive Bandit, motivated by various practical applica… (voir plus)tions, from medical diagnosis to dialog systems, where due to observation costs only a small subset of a potentially large number of context variables can be observed at each iteration; however, the agent has a freedom to choose which variables to observe. We derive a novel algorithm, called Context-Attentive Thompson Sampling (CATS), which builds upon the Linear Thompson Sampling approach, adapting it to Context-Attentive Bandit setting. We provide a theoretical regret analysis and an extensive empirical evaluation demonstrating advantages of the proposed approach over several baseline methods on a variety of real-life datasets.
Toward Skills Dialog Orchestration with Online Learning
Djallel Bouneffouf
Raphael Feraud
Sohini Upadhyay
Mayank Agarwal
Yasaman Khazaeni
Building multi-domain AI agents is a challenging task and an open problem in the area of AI. Within the domain of dialog, the ability to orc… (voir plus)hestrate multiple independently trained dialog agents, or skills, to create a unified system is of particular significance. In this work, we study the task of online posterior dialog orchestration, where we define posterior orchestration as the task of selecting a subset of skills which most appropriately answer a user input using features extracted from both the user input and the individual skills. To account for the various costs associated with extracting skill features, we consider online posterior orchestration under a skill execution budget. We formalize this setting as Context Attentive Bandit with Observations (CABO), a variant of context attentive bandits, and evaluate it on proprietary conversational datasets.
Encoder-Decoder Neural Architecture Optimization for Keyword Spotting
Tong Mo
SAND-mask: An Enhanced Gradient Masking Strategy for the Discovery of Invariances in Domain Generalization
Soroosh Shahtalebi
Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet
Touraj Laleh
Mojtaba Faramarzi
Kartik Ahuja
A major bottleneck in the real-world applications of machine learning models is their failure in generalizing to unseen domains whose data d… (voir plus)istribution is not i.i.d to the training domains. This failure often stems from learning non-generalizable features in the training domains that are spuriously correlated with the label of data. To address this shortcoming, there has been a growing surge of interest in learning good explanations that are hard to vary, which is studied under the notion of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Generalization. The search for good explanations that are \textit{invariant} across different domains can be seen as finding local (global) minimas in the loss landscape that hold true across all of the training domains. In this paper, we propose a masking strategy, which determines a continuous weight based on the agreement of gradients that flow in each edge of network, in order to control the amount of update received by the edge in each step of optimization. Particularly, our proposed technique referred to as"Smoothed-AND (SAND)-masking", not only validates the agreement in the direction of gradients but also promotes the agreement among their magnitudes to further ensure the discovery of invariances across training domains. SAND-mask is validated over the Domainbed benchmark for domain generalization and significantly improves the state-of-the-art accuracy on the Colored MNIST dataset while providing competitive results on other domain generalization datasets.
Continual Learning in Deep Networks: an Analysis of the Last Layer
Timothee LESORT
Thomas George
We study how different output layers in a deep neural network learn and forget in continual learning settings. The following three factors… (voir plus) can affect catastrophic forgetting in the output layer: (1) weights modifications, (2) interference, and (3) projection drift. In this paper, our goal is to provide more insights into how changing the output layers may address (1) and (2). Some potential solutions to those issues are proposed and evaluated here in several continual learning scenarios. We show that the best-performing type of the output layer depends on the data distribution drifts and/or the amount of data available. In particular, in some cases where a standard linear layer would fail, it turns out that changing parameterization is sufficient in order to achieve a significantly better performance, whithout introducing a continual-learning algorithm and instead using the standard SGD to train a model. Our analysis and results shed light on the dynamics of the output layer in continual learning scenarios, and suggest a way of selecting the best type of output layer for a given scenario.