Publications

An Analytic Hierarchy Process based approach for assessing the performance of photovoltaic solar power plants
Meryam Chafiq
Loubna Benabbou
Ismail Belhaj
Abdelali Djdiaa
Hicham Bouzekri
Abdelaziz Berrado
Application-Driven Innovation in Machine Learning
Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Sara Beery
Bistra Dilkina
Priya L. Donti
Marzyeh Ghassemi
Hannah Kerner
Claire Monteleoni
Esther Rolf
Milind Tambe
Adam White
As applications of machine learning proliferate, innovative algorithms inspired by specific real-world challenges have become increasingly i… (voir plus)mportant. Such work offers the potential for significant impact not merely in domains of application but also in machine learning itself. In this paper, we describe the paradigm of application-driven research in machine learning, contrasting it with the more standard paradigm of methods-driven research. We illustrate the benefits of application-driven machine learning and how this approach can productively synergize with methods-driven work. Despite these benefits, we find that reviewing, hiring, and teaching practices in machine learning often hold back application-driven innovation. We outline how these processes may be improved.
AsmDocGen: Generating Functional Natural Language Descriptions for Assembly Code
Jesia Yuki
Mohammadhossein Amouei
Philippe Charland
Andrew Walenstein
Assessing Neural Network Representations During Training Using Noise-Resilient Diffusion Spectral Entropy
Danqi Liao
Chen Liu
Benjamin W Christensen
Alexander Tong
Guillaume Huguet
Maximilian Nickel
Ian Adelstein
Smita Krishnaswamy
Entropy and mutual information in neural networks provide rich information on the learning process, but they have proven difficult to comput… (voir plus)e reliably in high dimensions. Indeed, in noisy and high-dimensional data, traditional estimates in ambient dimensions approach a fixed entropy and are prohibitively hard to compute. To address these issues, we leverage data geometry to access the underlying manifold and reliably compute these information-theoretic measures. Specifically, we define diffusion spectral entropy (DSE) in neural representations of a dataset as well as diffusion spectral mutual information (DSMI) between different variables representing data. First, we show that they form noise-resistant measures of intrinsic dimensionality and relationship strength in high-dimensional simulated data that outperform classic Shannon entropy, nonparametric estimation, and mutual information neural estimation (MINE). We then study the evolution of representations in classification networks with supervised learning, self-supervision, or overfitting. We observe that (1) DSE of neural representations increases during training; (2) DSMI with the class label increases during generalizable learning but stays stagnant during overfitting; (3) DSMI with the input signal shows differing trends: on MNIST it increases, while on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 it decreases. Finally, we show that DSE can be used to guide better network initialization and that DSMI can be used to predict downstream classification accuracy across 962 models on ImageNet.
Asymmetry in the complexity of the multi-commodity network pricing problem
Quang Minh Bui
Jos'e Neto
BAND: Biomedical Alert News Dataset
Zihao Fu
Meiru Zhang
Zaiqiao Meng
Yannan Shen
Anya Okhmatovskaia
Nigel Collier
A benchmark of individual auto-regressive models in a massive fMRI dataset
Fraçois Paugam
Basile Pinsard
Dense functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets open new avenues to create auto-regressive models of brain activity. Individual idiosyn… (voir plus)crasies are obscured by group models, but can be captured by purely individual models given sufficient amounts of training data. In this study, we compared several deep and shallow individual models on the temporal auto-regression of BOLD time series recorded during a natural video watching task. The best performing models were then analyzed in terms of their data requirements and scaling, subject specificity and the space-time structure of their predicted dynamics. We found the Chebnets, a type of graph convolutional neural network, to be best suited for temporal BOLD auto-regression, closely followed by linear models. Chebnets demonstrated an increase in performance with increasing amounts of data, with no complete saturation at 9 h of training data. Good generalization to other kinds of video stimuli and to resting state data marked the Chebnets’ ability to capture intrinsic brain dynamics rather than only stimulus-specific autocorrelation patterns. Significant subject specificity was found at short prediction time lags. The Chebnets were found to capture lower frequencies at longer prediction time lags, and the spatial correlations in predicted dynamics were found to match traditional functional connectivity networks. Overall, these results demonstrate that large individual fMRI datasets can be used to efficiently train purely individual auto-regressive models of brain activity, and that massive amounts of individual data are required to do so. The excellent performance of the Chebnets likely reflects their ability to combine spatial and temporal interactions on large time scales at a low complexity cost. The non-linearities of the models did not appear as a key advantage. In fact, surprisingly, linear versions of the Chebnets appeared to outperform the original nonlinear ones. Individual temporal auto-regressive models have the potential to improve the predictability of the BOLD signal. This study is based on a massive, publicly-available dataset, which can serve for future benchmarks of individual auto-regressive modeling.
Benchmarking Vision Language Models for Cultural Understanding
Shravan Nayak
Kanishk Jain
Rabiul Awal
Sjoerd van Steenkiste
Lisa Anne Hendricks
Karolina Sta'nczak
Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have notably advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of vi… (voir plus)sual and linguistic data. However, their performance has been typically assessed on general scene understanding - recognizing objects, attributes, and actions - rather than cultural comprehension. This study introduces CulturalVQA, a visual question-answering benchmark aimed at assessing VLM's geo-diverse cultural understanding. We curate a collection of 2,378 image-question pairs with 1-5 answers per question representing cultures from 11 countries across 5 continents. The questions probe understanding of various facets of culture such as clothing, food, drinks, rituals, and traditions. Benchmarking VLMs on CulturalVQA, including GPT-4V and Gemini, reveals disparity in their level of cultural understanding across regions, with strong cultural understanding capabilities for North America while significantly lower performance for Africa. We observe disparity in their performance across cultural facets too, with clothing, rituals, and traditions seeing higher performances than food and drink. These disparities help us identify areas where VLMs lack cultural understanding and demonstrate the potential of CulturalVQA as a comprehensive evaluation set for gauging VLM progress in understanding diverse cultures.
BETAC: Bidirectional Encoder Transformer for Assembly Code Function Name Recovery
Guillaume Breyton
Mohd Saqib
Philippe Charland
Recovering function names from stripped binaries is a crucial and time-consuming task for software reverse engineering’ particularly in en… (voir plus)hancing network reliability, resilience, and security. This paper tackles the challenge of recovering function names in stripped binaries, a fundamental step in reverse engineering. The absence of syntactic information and the possibility of different code producing identical behavior complicate this task. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel model, the Bidirectional Encoder Transformer for Assembly Code (BETAC), leveraging a transformer-based architecture known for effectively processing sequential data. BETAC utilizes self-attention mechanisms and feed-forward networks to discern complex relationships within assembly code for precise function name prediction. We evaluated BETAC against various existing encoder and decoder models in diverse binary datasets, including benign and malicious codes in multiple formats. Our model demonstrated superior performance over previous techniques in certain metrics and showed resilience against code obfuscation.
Bidirectional Generative Pre-training for Improving Time Series Representation Learning
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
He Zhu
Carbon capture, utilization and sequestration systems design and operation optimization: Assessment and perspectives of artificial intelligence opportunities
Eslam G. Al-Sakkari
Ahmed Ragab
Daria Camilla Boffito
Mouloud Amazouz
Causal Adversarial Perturbations for Individual Fairness and Robustness in Heterogeneous Data Spaces
Ahmad-reza Ehyaei
Kiarash Mohammadi
Amir-Hossein Karimi
S. Samadi