Aaron Courville

alan.milligan@mila.quebec

Alan Alan

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Anirudh Buvanesh

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Laurent Charlin

anirudb1102@gmail.com

sarvjeet-singh.ghotra@mila.quebec

Juan Duque

PhD - Université de Montréal

juan.duque@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

udaykaran.kapur@mila.quebec

Arian Hosseini

PhD - Université de Montréal

Uday Kapur

PhD - Université de Montréal

Amr Khalifa

PhD - Université de Montréal

amr-khalifa.alshaykh@mila.quebec

andjela.mladenovic@mila.quebec

Zhixuan Lin

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pablo Samuel Castro

waltermayor@gmail.com

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Gauthier Gidel

mohammed.muqeeth@mila.quebec

Muqeeth Mohammed

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Rishabh Agarwal

morgane.moss@mila.quebec

Andrei Nicolicioiu

PhD - Université de Montréal

andrei.nicolicioiu@gmail.com

michell.payanoperez@mila.quebec

Michael Noukhovitch

PhD - Université de Montréal

Johan Samir Obando Ceron

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pablo Samuel Castro

johan.ceron@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

Dereck Piché

PhD - Université de Montréal

pichedereck@gmail.com

khaled.rouissi@mila.quebec

Khaled Rouissi

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Esra'a Saleh

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Glen Berseth

esraa.saleh@mila.quebec

Vedant Shah

PhD - Université de Montréal

vedant.shah@mila.quebec

colin.yiyang-lu@mila.quebec

Yusong Wu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Anna (Cheng-Zhi) Huang

wu.yusong@mila.quebec

Colin Yiyang Lu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sujin yun

PhD - Université de Montréal

sujin.yun@mila.quebec

xiaofeng.zhang@mila.quebec

Xiaofeng Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Publications

VideoNavQA: Bridging the Gap between Visual and Embodied Question Answering

Cătălina Cangea

Eugene Belilovsky

Pietro Lio

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is a recently proposed task, where an agent is placed in a rich 3D environment and must act based solely o… (see more)n its egocentric input to answer a given question. The desired outcome is that the agent learns to combine capabilities such as scene understanding, navigation and language understanding in order to perform complex reasoning in the visual world. However, initial advancements combining standard vision and language methods with imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms have shown EQA might be too complex and challenging for these techniques. In order to investigate the feasibility of EQA-type tasks, we build the VideoNavQA dataset that contains pairs of questions and videos generated in the House3D environment. The goal of this dataset is to assess question-answering performance from nearly-ideal navigation paths, while considering a much more complete variety of questions than current instantiations of the EQA task. We investigate several models, adapted from popular VQA methods, on this new benchmark. This establishes an initial understanding of how well VQA-style methods can perform within this novel EQA paradigm.

2019-10-02

Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (published)

{COMPANYNAME}11K: An Unsupervised Representation Learning Dataset for Arrhythmia Subtype Discovery

Guillaume Androz

Pierre Fecteau

2019-09-24

(published)

openreview.net

Selfish Emergent Communication

Michael Noukhovitch

Travis LaCroix

2019-09-24

(published)

openreview.net

Benchmarking Bonus-Based Exploration Methods on the Arcade Learning Environment

Adrien Ali Taiga

William Fedus

Marlos C. Machado

Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We st… (see more)udy the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do so by fixing the learning algorithm used and focusing only on the impact of the different exploration bonuses in the agent's performance. We use Rainbow, the state-of-the-art algorithm for value-based agents, and focus on some of the bonuses proposed in the last few years. We consider the impact these algorithms have on performance within the popular game Montezuma's Revenge which has gathered a lot of interest from the exploration community, across the the set of seven games identified by Bellemare et al. (2016) as challenging for exploration, and easier games where exploration is not an issue. We find that, in our setting, recently developed bonuses do not provide significantly improved performance on Montezuma's Revenge or hard exploration games. We also find that existing bonus-based methods may negatively impact performance on games in which exploration is not an issue and may even perform worse than

2019-08-05

ArXiv (preprint)

Adversarial Computation of Optimal Transport Maps

Jacob Leygonie

Jennifer She

Amjad Almahairi

Sai Rajeswar

Computing optimal transport maps between high-dimensional and continuous distributions is a challenging problem in optimal transport (OT). G… (see more)enerative adversarial networks (GANs) are powerful generative models which have been successfully applied to learn maps across high-dimensional domains. However, little is known about the nature of the map learned with a GAN objective. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial model in which the discriminator's objective is the

2019-06-23

arXiv (preprint)

Investigating Biases in Textual Entailment Datasets

The ability to understand logical relationships between sentences is an important task in language understanding. To aid in progress for thi… (see more)s task, researchers have collected datasets for machine learning and evaluation of current systems. However, like in the crowdsourced Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, some biases in the data inevitably occur. In our experiments, we find that performing classification on just the hypotheses on the SNLI dataset yields an accuracy of 64%. We analyze the bias extent in the SNLI and the MultiNLI dataset, discuss its implication, and propose a simple method to reduce the biases in the datasets.

2019-06-22

ArXiv (preprint)

Note on the bias and variance of variational inference

Chin-wei Huang

In this note, we study the relationship between the variational gap and the variance of the (log) likelihood ratio. We show that the gap can… (see more) be upper bounded by some form of dispersion measure of the likelihood ratio, which suggests the bias of variational inference can be reduced by making the distribution of the likelihood ratio more concentrated, such as via averaging and variance reduction.

2019-06-08

ArXiv (preprint)

Hierarchical Importance Weighted Autoencoders

Chin-wei Huang

Kris Sankaran

Eeshan Dhekane

Alexandre Lacoste

Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We be… (see more)lieve a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce a hierarchical structure to induce correlation. The hope is that the proposals would coordinate to make up for the error made by one another to reduce the variance of the importance estimator. Theoretically, we analyze the condition under which convergence of the estimator variance can be connected to convergence of the lower bound. Empirically, we confirm that maximization of the lower bound does implicitly minimize variance. Further analysis shows that this is a result of negative correlation induced by the proposed hierarchical meta sampling scheme, and performance of inference also improves when the number of samples increases.

2019-05-23

International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Manifold Mixup: Better Representations by Interpolating Hidden States

Amir Najafi

David Lopez-Paz

Deep neural networks excel at learning the training data, but often provide incorrect and confident predictions when evaluated on slightly d… (see more)ifferent test examples. This includes distribution shifts, outliers, and adversarial examples. To address these issues, we propose Manifold Mixup, a simple regularizer that encourages neural networks to predict less confidently on interpolations of hidden representations. Manifold Mixup leverages semantic interpolations as additional training signal, obtaining neural networks with smoother decision boundaries at multiple levels of representation. As a result, neural networks trained with Manifold Mixup learn class-representations with fewer directions of variance. We prove theory on why this flattening happens under ideal conditions, validate it on practical situations, and connect it to previous works on information theory and generalization. In spite of incurring no significant computation and being implemented in a few lines of code, Manifold Mixup improves strong baselines in supervised learning, robustness to single-step adversarial attacks, and test log-likelihood.

2019-05-23

International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Representation Mixing for TTS Synthesis

Recent character and phoneme-based parametric TTS systems using deep learning have shown strong performance in natural speech generation. Ho… (see more)wever, the choice between character or phoneme input can create serious limitations for practical deployment, as direct control of pronunciation is crucial in certain cases. We demonstrate a simple method for combining multiple types of linguistic information in a single encoder, named representation mixing, enabling flexible choice between character, phoneme, or mixed representations during inference. Experiments and user studies on a public audiobook corpus show the efficacy of our approach.

2019-05-11

ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (published)

Brief Report: Ordered Neurons: Integrating Tree Structures into Recurrent Neural Networks

Yikeng Shen

Shawn Tan

Alessandro Sordoni

2019-05-05

(published)

www.semanticscholar.org

Maximum Entropy Generators for Energy-Based Models

Maximum likelihood estimation of energy-based models is a challenging problem due to the intractability of the log-likelihood gradient. In t… (see more)his work, we propose learning both the energy function and an amortized approximate sampling mechanism using a neural generator network, which provides an efficient approximation of the log-likelihood gradient. The resulting objective requires maximizing entropy of the generated samples, which we perform using recently proposed nonparametric mutual information estimators. Finally, to stabilize the resulting adversarial game, we use a zero-centered gradient penalty derived as a necessary condition from the score matching literature. The proposed technique can generate sharp images with Inception and FID scores competitive with recent GAN techniques, does not suffer from mode collapse, and is competitive with state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques.

2019-01-23

ArXiv (preprint)