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Michael S. Yao

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3 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Diversity By Design: Leveraging Distribution Matching for Offline Model-Based Optimization

Michael S. Yao
James C. Gee
Osbert Bastani

The goal of offline model-based optimization (MBO) is to propose new designs that maximize a reward function given only an offline dataset. However, an important desiderata is to also propose a diverse set of final candidates that capture many optimal and near-optimal design configurations. We propose D iversit y I n A dversarial M odel-based O ptimization ( DynAMO ) as a novel method to introduce design diversity as an explicit objective into any MBO problem. Our key insight is to formulate diversity as a distribution matching problem where the distribution of generated designs captures the inherent diversity contained within the offline dataset. Extensive experiments spanning multiple scientific domains show that DynAMO can be used with common optimization methods to significantly improve the diversity of proposed designs while still discovering high-quality candidates.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

A Textbook Remedy for Domain Shifts: Knowledge Priors for Medical Image Analysis

Yue Yang
Mona Gandhi
Yufei Wang
Yifan Wu
Michael S. Yao
Chris Callison-Burch
James C. Gee
Mark Yatskar

While deep networks have achieved broad success in analyzing natural images, when applied to medical scans, they often fail in unexcepted situations. We investigate this challenge and focus on model sensitivity to domain shifts, such as data sampled from different hospitals or data confounded by demographic variables such as sex, race, etc, in the context of chest X-rays and skin lesion images. A key finding we show empirically is that existing visual backbones lack an appropriate prior from the architecture for reliable generalization in these settings. Taking inspiration from medical training, we propose giving deep networks a prior grounded in explicit medical knowledge communicated in natural language. To this end, we introduce Knowledge-enhanced Bottlenecks (KnoBo), a class of concept bottleneck models that incorporates knowledge priors that constrain it to reason with clinically relevant factors found in medical textbooks or PubMed. KnoBo uses retrieval-augmented language models to design an appropriate concept space paired with an automatic training procedure for recognizing the concept. We evaluate different resources of knowledge and recognition architectures on a broad range of domain shifts across 20 datasets. In our comprehensive evaluation with two imaging modalities, KnoBo outperforms fine-tuned models on confounded datasets by 32. 4% on average. Finally, evaluations reveal that PubMed is a promising resource for making medical models less sensitive to domain shift, outperforming other resources on both diversity of information and final prediction performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Generative Adversarial Model-Based Optimization via Source Critic Regularization

Michael S. Yao
Yimeng Zeng
Hamsa Bastani
Jacob Gardner
James C. Gee
Osbert Bastani

Offline model-based optimization seeks to optimize against a learned surrogate model without querying the true oracle objective function during optimization. Such tasks are commonly encountered in protein design, robotics, and clinical medicine where evaluating the oracle function is prohibitively expensive. However, inaccurate surrogate model predictions are frequently encountered along offline optimization trajectories. To address this limitation, we propose generative adversarial model-based optimization using adaptive source critic regularization (aSCR) —a task- and optimizer- agnostic framework for constraining the optimization trajectory to regions of the design space where the surrogate function is reliable. We propose a computationally tractable algorithm to dynamically adjust the strength of this constraint, and show how leveraging aSCR with standard Bayesian optimization outperforms existing methods on a suite of offline generative design tasks. Our code is available at https: //github. com/michael-s-yao/gabo.

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