Parsa Vares

Parsa Vares

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are fundamental to evidence-based research, but manual screening is an increasing bottleneck as scientific output grows. Screening features low prevalence of relevant studies and scarce, costly expert decisions. Traditional active learning (AL) systems help, yet typically rely on fixed query strategies for selecting the next unlabeled documents. These static strategies do not adapt over time and ignore the relational structure of scientific literature networks. This thesis introduces AutoDiscover, a framework that reframes AL as an online decision-making problem driven by an adaptive agent. Literature is modeled as a heterogeneous graph capturing relationships among documents, authors, and metadata. A Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (HAN) learns node representations, which a Discounted Thompson Sampling (DTS) agent uses to dynamically manage a portfolio of query strategies. With real-time human-in-the-loop labels, the agent balances exploration and exploitation under non-stationary review dynamics, where strategy utility changes over time. On the 26-dataset SYNERGY benchmark, AutoDiscover achieves higher screening efficiency than static AL baselines. Crucially, the agent mitigates cold start by bootstrapping discovery from minimal initial labels where static approaches fail. We also introduce TS-Insight, an open-source visual analytics dashboard to interpret, verify, and diagnose the agent's decisions. Together, these contributions accelerate SLR screening under scarce expert labels and low prevalence of relevant studies.

Parsa Vares, Éloi Durant, Jun Pang et al.

Thompson Sampling (TS) and its variants are powerful Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms used to balance exploration and exploitation strategies in active learning. Yet, their probabilistic nature often turns them into a "black box", hindering debugging and trust. We introduce TS-Insight, a visual analytics tool explicitly designed to shed light on the internal decision mechanisms of Thompson Sampling-based algorithms, for model developers. It comprises multiple plots, tracing for each arm the evolving posteriors, evidence counts, and sampling outcomes, enabling the verification, diagnosis, and explainability of exploration/exploitation dynamics. This tool aims at fostering trust and facilitating effective debugging and deployment in complex binary decision-making scenarios especially in sensitive domains requiring interpretable decision-making.