Publications

Deep reinforcement learning for continuous wood drying production line control
François-Alexandre Tremblay
Audrey Durand
Michael Morin
Philippe Marier
Jonathan Gaudreault
2024-01-01
Computers in Industry (publié)
doi.org
E(3)-Equivariant Mesh Neural Networks
Thuan Nguyen Anh Trang
Khang Nhat Ngo
Daniel Levy
Thieu Vo
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Truong Son Hy
Triangular meshes are widely used to represent three-dimensional objects. As a result, many recent works have addressed the need for geometr… (voir plus)ic deep learning on 3D meshes. However, we observe that the complexities in many of these architectures do not translate to practical performance, and simple deep models for geometric graphs are competitive in practice. Motivated by this observation, we minimally extend the update equations of E(n)-Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (EGNNs) (Satorras et al., 2021) to incorporate mesh face information and further improve it to account for long-range interactions through a hierarchy. The resulting architecture, Equivariant Mesh Neural Network (EMNN), outperforms other, more complicated equivariant methods on mesh tasks, with a fast run-time and no expensive preprocessing. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/HySonLab/EquiMesh.
2024-01-01
AISTATS (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Empirical Analysis of Model Selection for Heterogenous Causal Effect Estimation
Divyat Mahajan
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Brady Neal
Vasilis Syrgkanis
We study the problem of model selection in causal inference, specifically for the case of conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estima… (voir plus)tion under binary treatments. Unlike model selection in machine learning, there is no perfect analogue of cross-validation as we do not observe the counterfactual potential outcome for any data point. Towards this, there have been a variety of proxy metrics proposed in the literature, that depend on auxiliary nuisance models estimated from the observed data (propensity score model, outcome regression model). However, the effectiveness of these metrics has only been studied on synthetic datasets as we can access the counterfactual data for them. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis to judge the performance of these metrics introduced in the literature, and novel ones introduced in this work, where we utilize the latest advances in generative modeling to incorporate multiple realistic datasets. Our analysis suggests novel model selection strategies based on careful hyperparameter tuning of CATE estimators and causal ensembling.
2024-01-01
ICLR (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
An Exact Method for (Constrained) Assortment Optimization Problems with Product Costs
Markus Leitner
Andrea Lodi
Roberto Roberti
Claudio Sole
2024-01-01
INFORMS J. Comput. (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Exploring validation metrics for offline model-based optimisation
Christopher Beckham
Alexandre Piché
David Vazquez
Chris Pal
In offline model-based optimisation (MBO) we are interested in using machine learning to de-sign candidates that maximise some measure of d… (voir plus)esirability through an expensive but real-world scoring process. Offline MBO tries to approximate this expensive scoring function and use that to evaluate generated designs, however evaluation is non-exact because one approximation is being evaluated with another. Instead, we ask ourselves: if we did have the real world scoring function at hand, what cheap-to-compute validation metrics would correlate best with this? Since the real-world scoring function is available for simulated MBO datasets, insights obtained from this can be transferred over to real-world offline MBO tasks where the real-world scoring function is expensive to compute. To address this, we propose a conceptual evaluation framework that is amenable to measuring extrapolation, and apply this to conditional denoising diffusion models. Empirically, we find that two validation metrics – agreement and Frechet distance – correlate quite well with the ground truth. When there is high variability in conditional generation, feedback is required in the form of an approximated version of the real-world scoring function. Furthermore, we find that generating high-scoring samples may require heavily weighting the generative model in favour of sample quality, potentially at the cost of sample diversity.
2024-01-01
Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (publié)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Fairness Through Domain Awareness: Mitigating Popularity Bias For Music Discovery
Rebecca Salganik
Fernando Diaz
Golnoosh Farnadi
As online music platforms grow, music recommender systems play a vital role in helping users navigate and discover content within their vast… (voir plus) musical databases. At odds with this larger goal, is the presence of popularity bias, which causes algorithmic systems to favor mainstream content over, potentially more relevant, but niche items. In this work we explore the intrinsic relationship between music discovery and popularity bias. To mitigate this issue we propose a domain-aware, individual fairness-based approach which addresses popularity bias in graph neural network (GNNs) based recommender systems. Our approach uses individual fairness to reflect a ground truth listening experience, i.e., if two songs sound similar, this similarity should be reflected in their representations. In doing so, we facilitate meaningful music discovery that is robust to popularity bias and grounded in the music domain. We apply our BOOST methodology to two discovery based tasks, performing recommendations at both the playlist level and user level. Then, we ground our evaluation in the cold start setting, showing that our approach outperforms existing fairness benchmarks in both performance and recommendation of lesser-known content. Finally, our analysis explains why our proposed methodology is a novel and promising approach to mitigating popularity bias and improving the discovery of new and niche content in music recommender systems.
2024-01-01
ECIR (4) (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Game Theoretical Formulation for Residential Community Microgrid via Mean Field Theory: Proof of Concept
Mohamad Aziz
Hanane Dagdougui
Issmail ElHallaoui
Incentive-based demand response aggregators are widely recognized as a powerful strategy to increase the flexibility of residential communit… (voir plus)y MG (RCM) while allowing consumers’ assets to participate in the operation of the power system in critical peak times. RCM implementing demand response approaches are of high interest as collectively, they have a high impact on shaping the demand curve during peak time while providing a wide range of economic and technical benefits to consumers and utilities. The penetration of distributed energy resources such as battery energy storage and photovoltaic systems introduces additional flexibility to manage the community loads and increase revenue. This letter proposes a game theoretical formulation for an incentive-based residential community microgrid, where an incentive-based pricing mechanism is developed to encourage peak demand reduction and share the incentive demand curve with the residential community through the aggregator. The aggregator’s objective is to maximize the welfare of the residential community by finding the optimal community equilibrium electricity price. Each household communicates with each other and with the distributed system operator (DSO) through the aggregator and aims to minimize the local electricity cost.
2024-01-01
IEEE Control Systems Letters (publié)
doi.org
An improved column-generation-based matheuristic for learning classification trees
Krunal Kishor Patel
Guy Desaulniers
Andrea Lodi
2024-01-01
Comput. Oper. Res. (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Improving the Generalizability and Robustness of Large-Scale Traffic Signal Control
Tianyu Shi
François-Xavier Devailly
Denis Larocque
Laurent Charlin
A number of deep reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches propose to control traffic signals. Compared to traditional approaches, RL approache… (voir plus)s can learn from higher-dimensionality input road and vehicle sensors and better adapt to varying traffic conditions resulting in reduced travel times (in simulation). However, these RL methods require training from massive traffic sensor data. To offset this relative inefficiency, some recent RL methods have the ability to first learn from small-scale networks and then generalize to unseen city-scale networks without additional retraining (zero-shot transfer). In this work, we study the robustness of such methods along two axes. First, sensor failures and GPS occlusions create missing-data challenges and we show that recent methods remain brittle in the face of these missing data. Second, we provide a more systematic study of the generalization ability of RL methods to new networks with different traffic regimes. Again, we identify the limitations of recent approaches. We then propose using a combination of distributional and vanilla reinforcement learning through a policy ensemble. Building upon the state-of-the-art previous model which uses a decentralized approach for large-scale traffic signal control with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), we first learn models using a distributional reinforcement learning (DisRL) approach. In particular, we use implicit quantile networks (IQN) to model the state-action return distribution with quantile regression. For traffic signal control problems, an ensemble of standard RL and DisRL yields superior performance across different scenarios, including different levels of missing sensor data and traffic flow patterns. Furthermore, the learning scheme of the resulting model can improve zero-shot transferability to different road network structures, including both synthetic networks and real-world networks (e.g., Luxembourg, Manhattan). We conduct extensive experiments to compare our approach to multi-agent reinforcement learning and traditional transportation approaches. Results show that the proposed method improves robustness and generalizability in the face of missing data, varying road networks, and traffic flows.
2024-01-01
IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Inertia-Based Indices to Determine the Number of Clusters in K-Means: An Experimental Evaluation
Andrei Rykov
Renato Cordeiro De Amorim
Vladimir Makarenkov
Boris Mirkin
This paper gives an experimentally supported review and comparison of several indices based on the conventional K-means inertia criterion fo… (voir plus)r determining the number of clusters,
2024-01-01
IEEE Access (publié)
doi.org
INViTE: INterpret and Control Vision-Language Models with Text Explanations
Haozhe Chen
Junfeng Yang
Carl Vondrick
Chengzhi Mao
Columbia University
M. University
Large-scale pre-trained vision foundation models, such as CLIP, have become de facto backbones for various vision tasks. However, due to the… (voir plus)ir black-box nature, understanding the underlying rules behind these models’ predictions and controlling model behaviors have remained open challenges. We present INViTE: a framework for INterpreting Vision Transformer’s latent tokens with Text Explanations. Given a latent token, INViTE retains its semantic information to the final layer using transformer’s local operations and retrieves the closest text for explanation. INViTE enables understanding of model visual reasoning procedure without needing additional model training or data collection. Based on the obtained interpretations, INViTE allows for model editing that controls model reasoning behaviors and improves model robustness against biases and spurious correlations. Our code is available at https://github.com/tonychenxyz/vit-interpret.
2024-01-01
International Conference on Learning Representations (publié)
openreview.net
openreview.net
ÌròyìnSpeech: A multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus
Tolúlope' Ògúnremí
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún
Aremu Anuoluwapo
Iroro Orife
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
2024-01-01
LREC/COLING (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org