Portrait of Aaron Courville

Aaron Courville

Core Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Full Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Efficient Communication in General Sum Game
Game Theory
Generative Models
Multi-Agent Systems
Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement Learning
Representation Learning

Biography

Aaron Courville is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal and Scientific Director of IVADO. He has a PhD from the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Courville was an early contributor to deep learning: he is a founding member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. Together with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio, he co-wrote the seminal textbook on deep learning.

His current research focuses on the development of deep learning models and methods. He is particularly interested in reinforcement learning, multi-agent reinforcement learning, deep generative models and reasoning.

Courville holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Canada Research Chair in Systematic Generalization. His research has been supported by Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Meta, Sony (Research Award) and Google (Focused Research Award).

Current Students

PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal

Publications

Ordered Neurons: Integrating Tree Structures into Recurrent Neural Networks
Natural language is hierarchically structured: smaller units (e.g., phrases) are nested within larger units (e.g., clauses). When a larger c… (see more)onstituent ends, all of the smaller constituents that are nested within it must also be closed. While the standard LSTM architecture allows different neurons to track information at different time scales, it does not have an explicit bias towards modeling a hierarchy of constituents. This paper proposes to add such an inductive bias by ordering the neurons; a vector of master input and forget gates ensures that when a given neuron is updated, all the neurons that follow it in the ordering are also updated. Our novel recurrent architecture, ordered neurons LSTM (ON-LSTM), achieves good performance on four different tasks: language modeling, unsupervised parsing, targeted syntactic evaluation, and logical inference.
No Press Diplomacy: Modeling Multi-Agent Gameplay
Yuchen Lu
Steven Bocco
Max O. Smith
Jonathan K. Kummerfeld
Satinder Singh
Diplomacy is a seven-player non-stochastic, non-cooperative game, where agents acquire resources through a mix of teamwork and betrayal. Rel… (see more)iance on trust and coordination makes Diplomacy the first non-cooperative multi-agent benchmark for complex sequential social dilemmas in a rich environment. In this work, we focus on training an agent that learns to play the No Press version of Diplomacy where there is no dedicated communication channel between players. We present DipNet, a neural-network-based policy model for No Press Diplomacy. The model was trained on a new dataset of more than 150,000 human games. Our model is trained by supervised learning (SL) from expert trajectories, which is then used to initialize a reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained through self-play. Both the SL and RL agents demonstrate state-of-the-art No Press performance by beating popular rule-based bots.
Systematic Generalization: What Is Required and Can It Be Learned?
On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks
Nasim Rahaman
Felix Draxler
Fred A. Hamprecht
Neural networks are known to be a class of highly expressive functions able to fit even random input-output mappings with …
Towards Jumpy Planning
Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful paradigm for learning complex tasks but suffers from high sample inefficiency as well a… (see more)s ignorance of the environment dynamics. On the other hand, a model-based RL agent learns dynamical causal models of the environment and uses them to plan. However, using a model at the scale of time-steps (usually tens of milliseconds) is mostly unfeasible in practice due to compounding prediction errors and computational requirements for making vast numbers of model queries during the planning process. We propose to use a modelbased planner together with a goal-conditioned policy trained with model-free learning. We use a model-based planner that operates at higher levels of abstraction i.e., decision states and use modelfree RL between the decision states. We validate our approach in terms of transfer and generalization performance and show that it leads to improvement over model-based planner that jumps to states that are fixed timesteps ahead.
Planning in Dynamic Environments with Conditional Autoregressive Models
We demonstrate the use of conditional autoregressive generative models (van den Oord et al., 2016a) over a discrete latent space (van den Oo… (see more)rd et al., 2017b) for forward planning with MCTS. In order to test this method, we introduce a new environment featuring varying difficulty levels, along with moving goals and obstacles. The combination of high-quality frame generation and classical planning approaches nearly matches true environment performance for our task, demonstrating the usefulness of this method for model-based planning in dynamic environments.
Harmonic Recomposition using Conditional Autoregressive Modeling
We demonstrate a conditional autoregressive pipeline for efficient music recomposition, based on methods presented in van den Oord et al.(20… (see more)17). Recomposition (Casal & Casey, 2010) focuses on reworking existing musical pieces, adhering to structure at a high level while also re-imagining other aspects of the work. This can involve reuse of pre-existing themes or parts of the original piece, while also requiring the flexibility to generate new content at different levels of granularity. Applying the aforementioned modeling pipeline to recomposition, we show diverse and structured generation conditioned on chord sequence annotations.
Blindfold Baselines for Embodied QA
We explore blindfold (question-only) baselines for Embodied Question Answering. The EmbodiedQA task requires an agent to answer a question b… (see more)y intelligently navigating in a simulated environment, gathering necessary visual information only through first-person vision before finally answering. Consequently, a blindfold baseline which ignores the environment and visual information is a degenerate solution, yet we show through our experiments on the EQAv1 dataset that a simple question-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art results on the EmbodiedQA task in all cases except when the agent is spawned extremely close to the object.
Sim-to-Real Transfer with Neural-Augmented Robot Simulation
Despite the recent successes of deep reinforcement learning, teaching complex motor skills to a physical robot remains a hard problem. While… (see more) learning directly on a real system is usually impractical, doing so in simulation has proven to be fast and safe. Nevertheless, because of the "reality gap," policies trained in simulation often perform poorly when deployed on a real system. In this work, we introduce a method for training a recurrent neural network on the differences between simulated and real robot trajectories and then using this model to augment the simulator. This Neural-Augmented Simulation (NAS) can be used to learn control policies that transfer significantly better to real environments than policies learned on existing simulators. We demonstrate the potential of our approach through a set of experiments on the Mujoco simulator with added backlash and the Poppy Ergo Jr robot. NAS allows us to learn policies that are competitive with ones that would have been learned directly on the real robot.
Deep Learning. Das umfassende Handbuch
Visual Reasoning with Multi-hop Feature Modulation
Mathieu Seurin
Jérémie Mary
P. Preux
Olivier Pietquin
Convergence Properties of Deep Neural Networks on Separable Data
Remi Tachet des Combes
Samira Shabanian
While a lot of progress has been made in recent years, the dynamics of learning in deep nonlinear neural networks remain to this day largely… (see more) misunderstood. In this work, we study the case of binary classification and prove various properties of learning in such networks under strong assumptions such as linear separability of the data. Extending existing results from the linear case, we confirm empirical observations by proving that the classification error also follows a sigmoidal shape in nonlinear architectures. We show that given proper initialization, learning expounds parallel independent modes and that certain regions of parameter space might lead to failed training. We also demonstrate that input norm and features’ frequency in the dataset lead to distinct convergence speeds which might shed some light on the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks. We provide a comparison between the dynamics of learning with cross-entropy and hinge losses, which could prove useful to understand recent progress in the training of generative adversarial networks. Finally, we identify a phenomenon that we baptize gradient starvation where the most frequent features in a dataset prevent the learning of other less frequent but equally informative features.