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

Publications

Deep Learning Vector Quantization
. While deep neural nets (DNN’s) achieve impressive performance on image recognition tasks, previous studies have reported that DNN’s gi… (see more)ve high confidence predictions for unrecognizable images. Motivated by the observation that such fooling examples might be caused by the extrapolating nature of the log-softmax, we propose to combine neural networks with Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ). Our proposed method, called Deep LVQ (DLVQ), achieves comparable performance on MNIST while being more robust against fooling and adversarial examples.
Former NASA chief unveils $ 100 million neural chip maker KnuEdge
C. Strasser
Dean Takahashi
Tim Klinger
Gerald Tesauro
Kartik Talamadupula
Bowen Zhou
Medium, Moore Data, Carly Strasser from June 07, 2016 Open access to research articles has been in the news quite a bit lately (see the SciH… (see more)ub controversy, the preprints in biology discussion, and the European Union’s recent announcement). The Data-Driven Discovery team at the Moore Foundation has also been discussing open access, particularly as it relates to the publications generated by our #MooreData researchers. Our grantee population is fairly progressive when it comes to open science, and many of the outputs that they generate are already publicly available (including proposals, software, workflows, and publications). It is therefore easy for us to imagine that they would embrace a policy that mandates open access for research articles that they produce. That said, we are always open to discussions!
Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks
The Teacher Forcing algorithm trains recurrent networks by supplying observed sequence values as inputs during training and using the networ… (see more)k’s own one-step-ahead predictions to do multi-step sampling. We introduce the Professor Forcing algorithm, which uses adversarial domain adaptation to encourage the dynamics of the recurrent network to be the same when training the network and when sampling from the network over multiple time steps. We apply Professor Forcing to language modeling, vocal synthesis on raw waveforms, handwriting generation, and image generation. Empirically we find that Professor Forcing acts as a regularizer, improving test likelihood on character level Penn Treebank and sequential MNIST. We also find that the model qualitatively improves samples, especially when sampling for a large number of time steps. This is supported by human evaluation of sample quality. Trade-offs between Professor Forcing and Scheduled Sampling are discussed. We produce T-SNEs showing that Professor Forcing successfully makes the dynamics of the network during training and sampling more similar.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-Rfou
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermueller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin Bayer
Anatoly Belikov
Alexander Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Pierre-Luc Carrier
Paul Christiano
Myriam Côté
Yann N. Dauphin
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Matt Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
Sean Lee
Simon Lefrancois
Jesse A. Livezey
Cory Lorenz
Jeremiah Lowin
Qianli Ma
Robert T. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Christopher Pal
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew Rocklin
Adriana Romero
Markus Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian Vlad Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Ramana Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
Matthew Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations
We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain thei… (see more)r previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden units, gradient information and state information are more readily propagated through time, as in feedforward stochastic depth networks. We perform an empirical investigation of various RNN regularizers, and find that zoneout gives significant performance improvements across tasks. We achieve competitive results with relatively simple models in character- and word-level language modelling on the Penn Treebank and Text8 datasets, and combining with recurrent batch normalization yields state-of-the-art results on permuted sequential MNIST.
Task Loss Estimation for Sequence Prediction
Describing Multimedia Content Using Attention-Based Encoder-Decoder Networks
Whereas deep neural networks were first mostly used for classification tasks, they are rapidly expanding in the realm of structured output p… (see more)roblems, where the observed target is composed of multiple random variables that have a rich joint distribution, given the input. In this paper we focus on the case where the input also has a rich structure and the input and output structures are somehow related. We describe systems that learn to attend to different places in the input, for each element of the output, for a variety of tasks: machine translation, image caption generation, video clip description, and speech recognition. All these systems are based on a shared set of building blocks: gated recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks, along with trained attention mechanisms. We report on experimental results with these systems, showing impressively good performance and the advantage of the attention mechanism.
Generative Adversarial Nets
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very popular frameworks for generating high-quality data, and are immensely used in both the acad… (see more)emia and industry in many domains. Arguably, their most substantial impact has been in the area of computer vision, where they achieve state-of-the-art image generation. This chapter gives an introduction to GANs, by discussing their principle mechanism and presenting some of their inherent problems during training and evaluation. We focus on these three issues: (1) mode collapse, (2) vanishing gradients, and (3) generation of low-quality images. We then list some architecture-variant and loss-variant GANs that remedy the above challenges. Lastly, we present two utilization examples of GANs for real-world applications: Data augmentation and face images generation.