Publications

The Brain-Computer Metaphor Debate Is Useless: A Matter of Semantics
Blake A. Richards
Timothy P. Lillicrap
It is commonly assumed that usage of the word “computer” in the brain sciences reflects a metaphor. However, there is no single definiti… (voir plus)on of the word “computer” in use. In fact, based on the usage of the word “computer” in computer science, a computer is merely some physical machinery that can in theory compute any computable function. According to this definition the brain is literally a computer; there is no metaphor. But, this deviates from how the word “computer” is used in other academic disciplines. According to the definition used outside of computer science, “computers” are human-made devices that engage in sequential processing of inputs to produce outputs. According to this definition, brains are not computers, and arguably, computers serve as a weak metaphor for brains. Thus, we argue that the recurring brain-computer metaphor debate is actually just a semantic disagreement, because brains are either literally computers or clearly not very much like computers at all, depending on one's definitions. We propose that the best path forward is simply to put the debate to rest, and instead, have researchers be clear about which definition they are using in their work. In some circumstances, one can use the definition from computer science and simply ask, what type of computer is the brain? In other circumstances, it is important to use the other definition, and to clarify the ways in which our brains are radically different from the laptops, smartphones, and servers that surround us in modern life.
2022-02-07
Frontiers in Computer Science (publié)
doi.org
Minimizing Entropy to Discover Good Solutions to Recurrent Mixed Integer Programs
Charly Robinson La Rocca
Emma Frejinger
Jean-François Cordeau
Current state-of-the-art solvers for mixed-integer programming (MIP) problems are designed to perform well on a wide range of problems. Howe… (voir plus)ver, for many real-world use cases, problem instances come from a narrow distribution. This has motivated the development of specialized methods that can exploit the information in historical datasets to guide the design of heuristics. Recent works have shown that machine learning (ML) can be integrated with an MIP solver to inject domain knowledge and efficiently close the optimality gap. This hybridization is usually done with deep learning (DL), which requires a large dataset and extensive hyperparameter tuning to perform well. This paper proposes an online heuristic that uses the notion of entropy to efficiently build a model with minimal training data and tuning. We test our method on the locomotive assignment problem (LAP), a recurring real-world problem that is challenging to solve at scale. Experimental results show a speed up of an order of magnitude compared to a general purpose solver (CPLEX) with a relative gap of less than 2%. We also observe that for some instances our method can discover better solutions than CPLEX within the time limit.
2022-02-06
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
RECOVER: sequential model optimization platform for combination drug repurposing identifies novel synergistic compounds in vitro
Paul Bertin
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Deepak Sharma
Thomas Gaudelet
Andrew Anighoro
Torsten Gross
Francisco Martínez-Peña
Eileen L. Tang
Suraj M S
Cristian Regep
Jeremy B. R. Hayter
Maksym Korablyov
Nicholas Valiante
Almer Van Der Sloot
Mike Tyers
Charles Roberts
Michael M. Bronstein
Luke L. Lairson
Jake P. Taylor-King
Yoshua Bengio
2022-02-06
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Bayesian Neural Networks
Tom Charnock
Laurence Perreault-Levasseur
François Lanusse
In recent times, neural networks have become a powerful tool for the analysis of complex and abstract data models. However, their introducti… (voir plus)on intrinsically increases our uncertainty about which features of the analysis are model-related and which are due to the neural network. This means that predictions by neural networks have biases which cannot be trivially distinguished from being due to the true nature of the creation and observation of data or not. In order to attempt to address such issues we discuss Bayesian neural networks: neural networks where the uncertainty due to the network can be characterised. In particular, we present the Bayesian statistical framework which allows us to categorise uncertainty in terms of the ingrained randomness of observing certain data and the uncertainty from our lack of knowledge about how data can be created and observed. In presenting such techniques we show how errors in prediction by neural networks can be obtained in principle, and provide the two favoured methods for characterising these errors. We will also describe how both of these methods have substantial pitfalls when put into practice, highlighting the need for other statistical techniques to truly be able to do inference when using neural networks.
2022-02-05
Artificial Intelligence for High Energy Physics (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Exploration with Multi-Sample Target Values for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Michael Teng
Michiel van de Panne
Frank N. Wood
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a value-network that predicts the full distribution of the returns for a given stat… (voir plus)e, often modeled via a quantile-based critic. This approach has been successfully integrated into common RL methods for continuous control, giving rise to algorithms such as Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC). In this paper, we introduce multi-sample target values (MTV) for distributional RL, as a principled replacement for single-sample target value estimation, as commonly employed in current practice. The improved distributional estimates further lend themselves to UCB-based exploration. These two ideas are combined to yield our distributional RL algorithm, E2DC (Extra Exploration with Distributional Critics). We evaluate our approach on a range of continuous control tasks and demonstrate state-of-the-art model-free performance on difficult tasks such as Humanoid control. We provide further insight into the method via visualization and analysis of the learned distributions and their evolution during training.
2022-02-05
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
TIML: Task-Informed Meta-Learning for Agriculture
Gabriel Tseng
Hannah Kerner
David Rolnick
Labeled datasets for agriculture are extremely spatially imbalanced. When developing algorithms for data-sparse regions, a natural approach … (voir plus)is to use transfer learning from data-rich regions. While standard transfer learning approaches typically leverage only direct inputs and outputs, geospatial imagery and agricultural data are rich in metadata that can inform transfer learning algorithms, such as the spatial coordinates of data-points or the class of task being learned. We build on previous work exploring the use of meta-learning for agricultural contexts in data-sparse regions and introduce task-informed meta-learning (TIML), an augmentation to model-agnostic meta-learning which takes advantage of task-specific metadata. We apply TIML to crop type classification and yield estimation, and find that TIML significantly improves performance compared to a range of benchmarks in both contexts, across a diversity of model architectures. While we focus on tasks from agriculture, TIML could offer benefits to any meta-learning setup with task-specific metadata, such as classification of geo-tagged images and species distribution modelling.
2022-02-03
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Quantum-Inspired Interpretable AI-Empowered Decision Support System for Detection of Early-Stage Rheumatoid Arthritis in Primary Care Using Scarce Dataset
Samira Abbasgholizadeh Rahimi
Mojtaba Kolahdoozi
Arka Mitra
Jose L. Salmeron
Amir Mohammad Navali
Alireza Sadeghpour
Seyed Amir Mir Mohammadi
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory and long-term autoimmune disease that can lead to joint and bone erosion. This can lead … (voir plus)to patients’ disability if not treated in a timely manner. Early detection of RA in settings such as primary care (as the first contact with patients) can have an important role on the timely treatment of the disease. We aim to develop a web-based Decision Support System (DSS) to provide a proper assistance for primary care providers in early detection of RA patients. Using Sparse Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, as well as quantum-learning algorithm, we developed an online web-based DSS to assist in early detection of RA patients, and subsequently classify the disease severity into six different levels. The development process was completed in collaborating with two specialists in orthopedic as well as rheumatology orthopedic surgery. We used a sample of anonymous patient data for development of our model which was collected from Shohada University Hospital, Tabriz, Iran. We compared the results of our model with other machine learning methods (e.g., linear discriminant analysis, Support Vector Machines, and K-Nearest Neighbors). In addition to outperforming other methods of machine learning in terms of accuracy when all of the clinical features are used (accuracy of 69.23%), our model identified the relation of the different features with each other and gave higher explainability comparing to the other methods. For future works, we suggest applying the proposed model in different contexts and comparing the results, as well as assessing its usefulness in clinical practice.
2022-02-02
Mathematics (publié)
doi.org
Active Learning for Capturing Human Decision Policies in a Data Frugal Context
Loïc Grossetête
Alexandre Marois
Bénédicte Chatelais
Christian Gagné
Daniel Lafond
2022-02-01
Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (publié)
doi.org
How Do Open Source Software Contributors Perceive and Address Usability?: Valued Factors, Practices, and Challenges
Wenting Wang
Jinghui Cheng
Jin L.C. Guo
Given the recent changes in the open source software (OSS) landscape, we examined OSS contributors’ current valued factors, practices, and… (voir plus) challenges concerning usability. Our survey provides insights for OSS practitioners and tool designers to promote a user-centric mindset and improve usability practice in OSS communities.
2022-01-31
IEEE Software (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Improving Sample Efficiency of Value Based Models Using Attention and Vision Transformers
Amir Ardalan Kalantari
Mohammad Amini
Sarath Chandar
Doina Precup
Much of recent Deep Reinforcement Learning success is owed to the neural architecture's potential to learn and use effective internal repres… (voir plus)entations of the world. While many current algorithms access a simulator to train with a large amount of data, in realistic settings, including while playing games that may be played against people, collecting experience can be quite costly. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning architecture whose purpose is to increase sample efficiency without sacrificing performance. We design this architecture by incorporating advances achieved in recent years in the field of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. Specifically, we propose a visually attentive model that uses transformers to learn a self-attention mechanism on the feature maps of the state representation, while simultaneously optimizing return. We demonstrate empirically that this architecture improves sample complexity for several Atari environments, while also achieving better performance in some of the games.
2022-01-31
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Exploring social inequalities in healthcare trajectories following diagnosis of diabetes: a state sequence analysis of linked survey and administrative data
Rachel McKay
Laurence Letarte
Alain Gillian Lucie David Manon Catherine Anaïs Benoit Alexandre Amélie Pasquale Valérie Marie-Pascale Mike Anne-Marie Marc Josiane Mireille Stéphanie Pierre Annie Isabelle Danielle Denis Jaime André Geneviève Jean-François Roxanne Marc-Antoine Pier Sonia Vanasse
Alain Gillian Lucie David Manon Catherine Anaïs Benoit A Vanasse Bartlett Blais Buckeridge Choinière Hudon
Alain Vanasse
Gillian Bartlett
Lucie Blais
David L Buckeridge
Manon Choinière
Catherine Hudon
Anaïs Lacasse
Benoit Lamarche
Alexandre Lebel
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée
Pasquale Roberge
Valérie Émond
Marie-Pascale Pomey
Mike Benigeri
Anne-Marie Cloutier
Marc Dorais … (voir 16 de plus)
Josiane Courteau
Mireille Courteau
Stéphanie Plante
Pierre Cambon
Annie Giguère
Isabelle Leroux
Danielle St-Laurent
Denis Roy
Jaime Borja
André Néron
Geneviève Landry
Jean-François Ethier
Roxanne Dault
Marc-Antoine Côté-Marcil
Pier Tremblay
Sonia Quirion
2022-01-30
BMC Health Services Research (publié)
doi.org
Memory-Aware Functional IR for Higher-Level Synthesis of Accelerators
Christof Schlaak
Tzung-Han Juang
Christophe Dubach
2022-01-30
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (publié)
doi.org