Publications

Myeloarchitecture gradients in the human insula: Histological underpinnings and association to intrinsic functional connectivity
Jessica Royer
Casey Paquola
Sara Larivière
Reinder Vos de Wael
Shahin Tavakol
Alexander J. Lowe
Oualid Benkarim
Alan C. Evans
Jonathan Smallwood
Birgit Frauscher
Boris C. Bernhardt
Natural Language Processing and Text Mining with Graph-Structured Representations
N-BEATS: Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting
Boris N. Oreshkin
Dmitri Carpov
We focus on solving the univariate times series point forecasting problem using deep learning. We propose a deep neural architecture based o… (voir plus)n backward and forward residual links and a very deep stack of fully-connected layers. The architecture has a number of desirable properties, being interpretable, applicable without modification to a wide array of target domains, and fast to train. We test the proposed architecture on several well-known datasets, including M3, M4 and TOURISM competition datasets containing time series from diverse domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for two configurations of N-BEATS for all the datasets, improving forecast accuracy by 11% over a statistical benchmark and by 3% over last year's winner of the M4 competition, a domain-adjusted hand-crafted hybrid between neural network and statistical time series models. The first configuration of our model does not employ any time-series-specific components and its performance on heterogeneous datasets strongly suggests that, contrarily to received wisdom, deep learning primitives such as residual blocks are by themselves sufficient to solve a wide range of forecasting problems. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed architecture can be augmented to provide outputs that are interpretable without considerable loss in accuracy.
An operator view of policy gradient methods
Dibya Ghosh
Marlos C. Machado
Nicolas Roux
We cast policy gradient methods as the repeated application of two operators: a policy improvement operator …
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An important challenge in the field of exponential random graphs (ERGs) is the fitting of non-trivial ERGs on large graphs. By utilizing fas… (voir plus)t matrix block-approximation techniques, we propose an approximative framework to such non-trivial ERGs that result in dyadic independence (i.e., edge independent) distributions, while being able to meaningfully model local information of the graph (e.g., degrees) as well as global information (e.g., clustering coefficient, assortativity, etc.) if desired. This allows one to efficiently generate random networks with similar properties as an observed network, and the models can be used for several downstream tasks such as link prediction. Our methods are scalable to sparse graphs consisting of millions of nodes. Empirical evaluation demonstrates competitiveness in terms of both speed and accuracy with state-of-the-art methods—which are typically based on embedding the graph into some lowdimensional space— for link prediction, showcasing the potential of a more direct and interpretable probablistic model for this task.
Practical Dynamic SC-Flip Polar Decoders: Algorithm and Implementation
Furkan Ercan
Thibaud Tonnellier
Nghia Doan
Warren J. Gross
SC-Flip (SCF) is a low-complexity polar code decoding algorithm with improved performance, and is an alternative to high-complexity (CRC)-ai… (voir plus)ded SC-List (CA-SCL) decoding. However, the performance improvement of SCF is limited since it can correct up to only one channel error (
Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets
Gabriele Corso
Luca Cavalleri
Pietro Lio
G RADIENT -B ASED N EURAL DAG L EARNING WITH I NTERVENTIONS
Decision making based on statistical association alone can be a dangerous endeavor due to non-causal associations. Ideally, one would rely o… (voir plus)n causal relationships that enable reasoning about the effect of interventions. Several methods have been proposed to discover such relationships from observational and inter-ventional data. Among them, GraN-DAG, a method that relies on the constrained optimization of neural networks, was shown to produce state-of-the-art results among algorithms relying purely on observational data. However, it is limited to observational data and cannot make use of interventions. In this work, we extend GraN-DAG to support interventional data and show that this improves its ability to infer causal structures
Reinforced active learning for image segmentation
Arantxa Casanova
Pedro O. Pinheiro
Christopher Pal
Learning-based approaches for semantic segmentation have two inherent challenges. First, acquiring pixel-wise labels is expensive and time-c… (voir plus)onsuming. Second, realistic segmentation datasets are highly unbalanced: some categories are much more abundant than others, biasing the performance to the most represented ones. In this paper, we are interested in focusing human labelling effort on a small subset of a larger pool of data, minimizing this effort while maximizing performance of a segmentation model on a hold-out set. We present a new active learning strategy for semantic segmentation based on deep reinforcement learning (RL). An agent learns a policy to select a subset of small informative image regions -- opposed to entire images -- to be labeled, from a pool of unlabeled data. The region selection decision is made based on predictions and uncertainties of the segmentation model being trained. Our method proposes a new modification of the deep Q-network (DQN) formulation for active learning, adapting it to the large-scale nature of semantic segmentation problems. We test the proof of concept in CamVid and provide results in the large-scale dataset Cityscapes. On Cityscapes, our deep RL region-based DQN approach requires roughly 30% less additional labeled data than our most competitive baseline to reach the same performance. Moreover, we find that our method asks for more labels of under-represented categories compared to the baselines, improving their performance and helping to mitigate class imbalance.
A Reinforcement Learning Pipeline for Band Gap-directed Crystal Generation
Property-driven AI-automated material discovery presents unique challenges owing to the complex nature of the chemical structural space and … (voir plus)computationally expensive simulations. For crystalline solids, the band gap is an important property for designing semiconductors and batteries. However, optimizing crystals for a target band gap is difficult and not well-explored. Reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise towards optimizing crystals, as it can freely explore the chemical space. However, it relies on regular band gap evaluations, which can only be accurately computed through expensive Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations. In this study, we propose an active learning-inspired pipeline that combines RL and DFT simulations for optimizing crystal compositions given a target band gap. The pipeline includes an RL policy for predicting atom types and a band gap network that is fine-tuned with DFT data. Preliminary results indicate the need for furthering the state-of-the-art to address the inherent challenges of the problem.
Reinforcement Learning with Competitive Ensembles of Information-Constrained Primitives
Reinforcement learning agents that operate in diverse and complex environments can benefit from the structured decomposition of their behavi… (voir plus)or. Often, this is addressed in the context of hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the aim is to decompose a policy into lower-level primitives or options, and a higher-level meta-policy that triggers the appropriate behaviors for a given situation. However, the meta-policy must still produce appropriate decisions in all states. In this work, we propose a policy design that decomposes into primitives, similarly to hierarchical reinforcement learning, but without a high-level meta-policy. Instead, each primitive can decide for themselves whether they wish to act in the current state. We use an information-theoretic mechanism for enabling this decentralized decision: each primitive chooses how much information it needs about the current state to make a decision and the primitive that requests the most information about the current state acts in the world. The primitives are regularized to use as little information as possible, which leads to natural competition and specialization. We experimentally demonstrate that this policy architecture improves over both flat and hierarchical policies in terms of generalization.
Revisiting Successor Features for Inverse Reinforcement Learning