Publications

Randomized Confidence Bounds for Stochastic Partial Monitoring
Maxime Heuillet
Ola Ahmad
The Impact of Educational Materials on Parental Anxiety and Productivity: A Clinical Trial in Pediatric Appendicitis
Julia Ferreira
Nadia Safa
Fabio Botelho
Robin Petroze
Hussein Wissanji
Pramod Puligandla
Kenneth Shaw
Maeve Trudeau
Sherif Emil
Elena Guadagno
Jean-Martin Laberge
AICOM-MP: an AI-based Monkeypox Detector for Resource-Constrained Environments
Tianyi Yang
Tianze Yang
Andrew Liu
Na An
Jie Tang
Shaoshan Liu
Computing Approximate Nash Equilibria for Integer Programming Games
Aloïs Duguet
Gabriele Dragotto
Sandra-ulrich Ngueveu
Effective Protein-Protein Interaction Exploration with PPIretrieval
Chenqing Hua
Connor Coley
Shuangjia Zheng
PQMass: Probabilistic Assessment of the Quality of Generative Models using Probability Mass Estimation
Pablo Lemos
Sammy N. Sharief
Nikolay Malkin
Focal Modulation Networks for Interpretable Sound Classification
The increasing success of deep neural networks has raised concerns about their inherent black-box nature, posing challenges related to inter… (voir plus)pretability and trust. While there has been extensive exploration of interpretation techniques in vision and language, interpretability in the audio domain has received limited attention, primarily focusing on post-hoc explanations. This paper addresses the problem of interpretability by-design in the audio domain by utilizing the recently proposed attention-free focal modulation networks (FocalNets). We apply FocalNets to the task of environmental sound classification for the first time and evaluate their interpretability properties on the popular ESC-50 dataset. Our method outperforms a similarly sized vision transformer both in terms of accuracy and interpretability. Furthermore, it is competitive against PIQ, a method specifically designed for post-hoc interpretation in the audio domain.
Polynomial Lawvere Logic
Giorgio Bacci
Radu Mardare
Gordon D. Plotkin
Toward Human-AI Alignment in Large-Scale Multi-Player Games
Sugandha Sharma
Guy Davidson
Anssi Kanervisto
Udit Arora
Katja Hofmann
Ida Momennejad
Achieving human-AI alignment in complex multi-agent games is crucial for creating trustworthy AI agents that enhance gameplay. We propose a … (voir plus)method to evaluate this alignment using an interpretable task-sets framework, focusing on high-level behavioral tasks instead of low-level policies. Our approach has three components. First, we analyze extensive human gameplay data from Xbox's Bleeding Edge (100K+ games), uncovering behavioral patterns in a complex task space. This task space serves as a basis set for a behavior manifold capturing interpretable axes: fight-flight, explore-exploit, and solo-multi-agent. Second, we train an AI agent to play Bleeding Edge using a Generative Pretrained Causal Transformer and measure its behavior. Third, we project human and AI gameplay to the proposed behavior manifold to compare and contrast. This allows us to interpret differences in policy as higher-level behavioral concepts, e.g., we find that while human players exhibit variability in fight-flight and explore-exploit behavior, AI players tend towards uniformity. Furthermore, AI agents predominantly engage in solo play, while humans often engage in cooperative and competitive multi-agent patterns. These stark differences underscore the need for interpretable evaluation, design, and integration of AI in human-aligned applications. Our study advances the alignment discussion in AI and especially generative AI research, offering a measurable framework for interpretable human-agent alignment in multiplayer gaming.
Bayesian Deep Learning for Remaining Useful Life Estimation via Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Luca Della Libera
Jacopo Andreoli
Davide Dalle Pezze
Gian Antonio Susto
A crucial task in predictive maintenance is estimating the remaining useful life of physical systems. In the last decade, deep learning has … (voir plus)improved considerably upon traditional model-based and statistical approaches in terms of predictive performance. However, in order to optimally plan maintenance operations, it is also important to quantify the uncertainty inherent to the predictions. This issue can be addressed by turning standard frequentist neural networks into Bayesian neural networks, which are naturally capable of providing confidence intervals around the estimates. Several methods exist for training those models. Researchers have focused mostly on parametric variational inference and sampling-based techniques, which notoriously suffer from limited approximation power and large computational burden, respectively. In this work, we use Stein variational gradient descent, a recently proposed algorithm for approximating intractable distributions that overcomes the drawbacks of the aforementioned techniques. In particular, we show through experimental studies on simulated run-to-failure turbofan engine degradation data that Bayesian deep learning models trained via Stein variational gradient descent consistently outperform with respect to convergence speed and predictive performance both the same models trained via parametric variational inference and their frequentist counterparts trained via backpropagation. Furthermore, we propose a method to enhance performance based on the uncertainty information provided by the Bayesian models. We release the source code at https://github.com/lucadellalib/bdl-rul-svgd.
Carthago Delenda Est: Co-opetitive Indirect Information Diffusion Model for Influence Operations on Online Social Media
Jwen Fai Low
Farkhund Iqbal
Claude Fachkha
A database of the healthy human spinal cord morphometry in the PAM50 template space
Jan Valošek
Sandrine Bédard
Miloš Keřkovský
Tomáš Rohan
Abstract Measures of spinal cord morphometry computed from magnetic resonance images serve as relevant prognostic biomarkers for a range of … (voir plus)spinal cord pathologies, including traumatic and non-traumatic spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative diseases. However, interpreting these imaging biomarkers is difficult due to considerable intra- and inter-subject variability. Yet, there is no clear consensus on a normalization method that would help reduce this variability and more insights into the distribution of these morphometrics are needed. In this study, we computed a database of normative values for six commonly used measures of spinal cord morphometry: cross-sectional area, anteroposterior diameter, transverse diameter, compression ratio, eccentricity, and solidity. Normative values were computed from a large open-access dataset of healthy adult volunteers (N = 203) and were brought to the common space of the PAM50 spinal cord template using a newly proposed normalization method based on linear interpolation. Compared to traditional image-based registration, the proposed normalization approach does not involve image transformations and, therefore, does not introduce distortions of spinal cord anatomy. This is a crucial consideration in preserving the integrity of the spinal cord anatomy in conditions such as spinal cord injury. This new morphometric database allows researchers to normalize based on sex and age, thereby minimizing inter-subject variability associated with demographic and biological factors. The proposed methodology is open-source and accessible through the Spinal Cord Toolbox (SCT) v6.0 and higher.