Publications

FairLoRA: Unpacking Bias Mitigation in Vision Models with Fairness-Driven Low-Rank Adaptation
Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think
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.
Graph Knowledge Distillation to Mixture of Experts
Pavel Rumiantsev
Mark J. Coates
Health satisfaction outcome from integrated autonomous mobile clinics
Yuzhang Huang
Shaoshan Liu
Zhongying Pan
Carl Wu
Herng-Chia Chiu
Xue Liu
Leiyu Shi
Interpersonal neural synchrony as a mechanism of therapeutic alliance? A systematic review of hyperscanning in clinical encounters
Lena Adel
Lincoln E. Moses
Elisabeth Irvine
Kyle T. Greenway
Michael Lifshitz
Therapeutic alliance is defined as the collaborative relationship between patient and therapist. Strong therapeutic alliances have been asso… (voir plus)ciated with positive clinical outcomes, but much remains unknown about alliance and its physiological basis. Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) – the synchronization of neural signals between interacting individuals – is emerging as a novel lens for studying interactions with relatively objective and time-sensitive neuroimaging techniques. We searched four databases to identify studies of INS in clinical encounters. Our search yielded 161 articles, 46 met criteria for full-text review and 12 were included. The included articles reported INS across a total of 174 dyads, all published since 2018. Despite diverse methodologies, INS was observed in all studies and was often related to therapeutic outcomes. However, results were mixed regarding associations between INS and therapeutic alliance. These results highlight that, while promising, additional research is needed to elucidate the relationship between INS, therapeutic alliance and clinical outcomes. Future studies should aim to standardize methodologies, explore temporal dynamics (e.g., through longitudinal assessments), and include larger sample sizes.
Dynamic Neural Control Flow Execution: An Agent-Based Deep Equilibrium Approach for Binary Vulnerability Detection
Litao Li
Steven H. H. Ding
Andrew Walenstein
Philippe Charland
Benjamin C. M. Fung
Enhancing Click-through Rate Prediction in Recommendation Domain with Search Query Representation
Yuening Wang
Man Chen
Yaochen Hu
Wei Guo
Yingxue Zhang
Huifeng Guo
Yang Liu
Mark J. Coates
GFlowNets for Hamiltonian decomposition in groups of compatible operators
Isaac L. Huidobro-Meezs
R. A. Vargas-Hern'andez
Quantum computing presents a promising alternative for the direct simulation of quantum systems with the potential to explore chemical probl… (voir plus)ems beyond the capabilities of classical methods. However, current quantum algorithms are constrained by hardware limitations and the increased number of measurements required to achieve chemical accuracy. To address the measurement challenge, techniques for grouping commuting and anti-commuting terms, driven by heuristics, have been developed to reduce the number of measurements needed in quantum algorithms on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework using GFlowNets to group fully (FC) or qubit-wise commuting (QWC) terms within a given Hamiltonian. The significance of this approach is demonstrated by the reduced number of measurements for the found groupings; 51% and 67% reduction factors respectively for FC and QWC partitionings with respect to greedy coloring algorithms, highlighting the potential of GFlowNets for future applications in the measurement problem. Furthermore, the flexibility of our algorithm extends its applicability to other resource optimization problems in Hamiltonian simulation, such as circuit design.
Hitting the High-dimensional notes: an ODE for SGD learning dynamics on GLMs and multi-index models
We analyze the dynamics of streaming stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the high-dimensional limit when applied to generalized linear mode… (voir plus)ls and multi-index models (e.g. logistic regression, phase retrieval) with general data-covariance. In particular, we demonstrate a deterministic equivalent of SGD in the form of a system of ordinary differential equations that describes a wide class of statistics, such as the risk and other measures of sub-optimality. This equivalence holds with overwhelming probability when the model parameter count grows proportionally to the number of data. This framework allows us to obtain learning rate thresholds for stability of SGD as well as convergence guarantees. In addition to the deterministic equivalent, we introduce an SDE with a simplified diffusion coefficient (homogenized SGD) which allows us to analyze the dynamics of general statistics of SGD iterates. Finally, we illustrate this theory on some standard examples and show numerical simulations which give an excellent match to the theory.
Innovative transfusion strategies for blood deserts in disaster settings
Ayla Gerk
Robert Glatter
Generating Tabular Data Using Heterogeneous Sequential Feature Forest Flow Matching
Circulating IL-17F, but not IL-17A, is elevated in severe COVID-19 and leads to an ERK1/2 and p38 MAPK-dependent increase in ICAM-1 cell surface expression and neutrophil adhesion on endothelial cells
Jérôme Bédard-Matteau
Katelyn Yixiu Liu
Lyvia Fourcade
Douglas D. Fraser
Simon Rousseau
Severe COVID-19 is associated with neutrophilic inflammation and immunothrombosis. Several members of the IL-17 cytokine family have been as… (voir plus)sociated with neutrophilic inflammation and activation of the endothelium. Therefore, we investigated whether these cytokines were associated with COVID-19. We investigated the association between COVID-19 and circulating plasma levels of IL-17 cytokine family members in participants to the Biobanque québécoise de la COVID-19 (BQC19), a prospective observational cohort and an independent cohort from Western University (London, Ontario). We measured the in vitro impact of IL-17F on intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1) cell surface expression and neutrophil adhesion on endothelial cells in culture. The contribution of two Mitogen Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) pathways was determined using small molecule inhibitors PD184352 (a MKK1/MKK2 inhibitor) and BIRB0796 (a p38 MAPK inhibitor). We found increased IL-17D and IL-17F plasma levels when comparing SARS-CoV-2-positive vs negative hospitalized participants. Moreover, increased plasma levels of IL-17D, IL-17E and IL-17F were noted when comparing severe versus mild COVID-19. IL-17F, but not IL-17A, was significantly elevated in people with COVID-19 compared to healthy controls and with more severe disease. In vitro work on endothelial cells treated with IL-17F for 24h showed an increase cell surface expression of ICAM-1 accompanied by neutrophil adhesion. The introduction of two MAPK inhibitors significantly reduced the binding of neutrophils while also reducing ICAM-1 expression at the surface level of endothelial cells, but not its intracellular expression. Overall, these results have identified an association between two cytokines of the IL-17 family (IL-17D and IL-17F) with COVID-19 and disease severity. Considering that IL-17F stimulation promotes neutrophil adhesion to the endothelium in a MAPK-dependent manner, it is attractive to speculate that this pathway may contribute to pathogenic immunothrombosis in concert with other molecular effectors.