Aaron Courville

Reza Bayat

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pascal Vincent

Anirudh Buvanesh

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Laurent Charlin

anirudb1102@gmail.com

Razvan Ciuca

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Juan Duque

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Arian Hosseini

PhD - Université de Montréal

Amr Khalifa

PhD - Université de Montréal

andrei.nicolicioiu@gmail.com

Samuel Lavoie

PhD - Université de Montréal

Zhixuan Lin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ahmed Masry

Collaborating researcher - N/A

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Rishabh Agarwal

Andrei Nicolicioiu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Evgenii Nikishin

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Michell Mercedes Payano Perez

Johan Samir Obando Ceron

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Dereck Piché

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

pichedereck@gmail.com

Esra'a Saleh

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Glen Berseth

Vedant Shah

PhD - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Anna (Cheng-Zhi) Huang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Yusong Wu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Anna (Cheng-Zhi) Huang

sujin yun

PhD - Université de Montréal

Xiaofeng Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Dinghuai Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Yoshua Bengio

Hattie Zhou

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Hugo Larochelle

Publications

Learning Task Decomposition with Ordered Memory Policy Network

Yuchen Lu

Yikang Shen

Siyuan Zhou

Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Chuang Gan

Many complex real-world tasks are composed of several levels of sub-tasks. Humans leverage these hierarchical structures to accelerate the l… (see more)earning process and achieve better generalization. In this work, we study the inductive bias and propose Ordered Memory Policy Network (OMPN) to discover subtask hierarchy by learning from demonstration. The discovered subtask hierarchy could be used to perform task decomposition, recovering the subtask boundaries in an unstruc-tured demonstration. Experiments on Craft and Dial demonstrate that our modelcan achieve higher task decomposition performance under both unsupervised and weakly supervised settings, comparing with strong baselines. OMPN can also bedirectly applied to partially observable environments and still achieve higher task decomposition performance. Our visualization further confirms that the subtask hierarchy can emerge in our model.

2021-01-01

ICLR (published)

Neural Approximate Sufficient Statistics for Implicit Models

Yanzhi Chen

Dinghuai Zhang

Michael U. Gutmann

Zhanxing Zhu

We consider the fundamental problem of how to automatically construct summary statistics for implicit generative models where the evaluation… (see more) of likelihood function is intractable but sampling / simulating data from the model is possible. The idea is to frame the task of constructing sufficient statistics as learning mutual information maximizing representation of the data. This representation is computed by a deep neural network trained by a joint statistic-posterior learning strategy. We apply our approach to both traditional approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and recent neural likelihood approaches, boosting their performance on a range of tasks.

2021-01-01

ICLR (published)

Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Max Schwarzer

Nitarshan Rajkumar

Ankesh Anand

Philip Bachman

Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder w… (see more)hich is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning representations which capture diverse aspects of the underlying MDP, we employ a combination of latent dynamics modelling and unsupervised goal-conditioned RL. When limited to 100k steps of interaction on Atari games (equivalent to two hours of human experience), our approach significantly surpasses prior work combining offline representation pretraining with task-specific finetuning, and compares favourably with other pretraining methods that require orders of magnitude more data. Our approach shows particular promise when combined with larger models as well as more diverse, task-aligned observational data -- approaching human-level performance and data-efficiency on Atari in our best setting.

Systematic generalisation with group invariant predictions

Faruk Ahmed

Yoshua Bengio

Harm van Seijen

We consider situations where the presence of dominant simpler correlations with the target variable in a training set can cause an SGD-train… (see more)ed neural network to be less reliant on more persistently correlating complex features. When the non-persistent, simpler correlations correspond to non-semantic background factors, a neural network trained on this data can exhibit dramatic failure upon encountering systematic distributional shift, where the correlating background features are recombined with different objects. We perform an empirical study on three synthetic datasets, showing that group invariance methods across inferred partitionings of the training set can lead to significant improvements at such test-time situations. We also suggest a simple invariance penalty, showing with experiments on our setups that it can perform better than alternatives. We find that even without assuming access to any systematically shifted validation sets, one can still find improvements over an ERM-trained reference model.

2021-01-01

ICLR (published)

Unifying Likelihood-free Inference with Black-box Sequence Design and Beyond

Dinghuai Zhang

Jie Fu

Yoshua Bengio

2021-01-01

arXiv.org (preprint)

dblp.uni-trier.de

A Variational Perspective on Diffusion-Based Generative Models and Score Matching

Chin-Wei Huang

Jae Hyun Lim

Discrete-time diffusion-based generative models and score matching methods have shown promising results in modeling high-dimensional image d… (see more)ata. Recently, Song et al. (2021) show that diffusion processes that transform data into noise can be reversed via learning the score function, i.e. the gradient of the log-density of the perturbed data. They propose to plug the learned score function into an inverse formula to define a generative diffusion process. Despite the empirical success, a theoretical underpinning of this procedure is still lacking. In this work, we approach the (continuous-time) generative diffusion directly and derive a variational framework for likelihood estimation, which includes continuous-time normalizing flows as a special case, and can be seen as an infinitely deep variational autoencoder. Under this framework, we show that minimizing the score-matching loss is equivalent to maximizing a lower bound of the likelihood of the plug-in reverse SDE proposed by Song et al. (2021), bridging the theoretical gap.

Bijective-Contrastive Estimation

Jae Hyun Lim

Chin-Wei Huang

Chris Pal

In this work, we propose Bijective-Contrastive Estimation (BCE), a classification-based learning criterion for energy-based models. We gener… (see more)ate a collection of contrasting distributions using bijections, and solve all the classification problems between the original data distribution and the distributions induced by the bijections using a classifier parameterized by an energy model. We show that if the classification objective is minimized, the energy function will uniquely recover the data density up to a normalizing constant. This has the benefit of not having to explicitly specify a contrasting distribution, like noise contrastive estimation. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the proposed method works well on 2D synthetic datasets. We discuss the difficulty in high dimensional cases, and propose potential directions to explore for future work.

2020-12-21

approximateinference.org/AABI/2021/Symposium (accepted)

AR-DAE: Towards Unbiased Neural Entropy Gradient Estimation

Jae Hyun Lim

Chris Pal

Chin-Wei Huang

2020-11-21

Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

arxiv.org

Countering Language Drift with Seeded Iterated Learning

Yuchen Lu

Soumye Singhal

Florian Strub

Olivier Pietquin