Portrait of Christian Gagné

Christian Gagné

Associate Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Full Professor, Université Laval, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director of IID (Institute Intelligence and Data), Institute Intelligence and Data (IID)
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Learning to Program
Medical Machine Learning
Representation Learning
Website
Google Scholar
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Biography

Christian Gagné has been a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Université Laval since 2008.

He is the director of the Institute Intelligence and Data (IID), holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and is an associate member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Gagné is also a member of Université Laval’s Computer Vision and Systems Laboratory (LVSN), as well as its Robotics, Vision and Machine Intelligence Research Centre (CeRVIM) and its Big Data Research Centre (CRDM). He is a member of the REPARTI and UNIQUE strategic clusters of the FRQNT, the VITAM centre of the FRQS, and the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technologies (OBVIA).

Gagné’s research focuses on the development of methods for machine learning and stochastic optimization. In particular, he is interested in deep neural networks, representation learning and transfer, meta-learning and multitasking. He is also interested in optimization approaches based on probabilistic models and evolutionary algorithms, including black-box optimization and automatic programming. An important part of his work is the practical application of these techniques in fields like computer vision, microscopy, healthcare, energy and transportation.

Current Students

Frédéric Beaupré
PhD - Université Laval
Github
Catherine Bouchard
PhD - Université Laval
Github
Google Scholar
Cynthia García Ybarra
Master's Research - Université Laval
Sara Karami
PhD - Université Laval
Benjamin Léger
PhD - Université Laval
Jonas Ngnawe
PhD - Université Laval
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Fatemeh Nourilenjan Nokabadi
PhD - Université Laval
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Sabyasachi Sahoo
PhD - Université Laval
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Adam Tupper
PhD - Université Laval
adam.tupper.1@ulaval.ca
Website
Github
Google Scholar

Publications

Matching Feature Sets for Few-Shot Image Classification
Arman Afrasiyabi
Hugo Larochelle
Jean‐François Lalonde
Christian Gagné
In image classification, it is common practice to train deep networks to extract a single feature vector per input image. Few-shot classific… (see more)ation methods also mostly follow this trend. In this work, we depart from this established direction and instead propose to extract sets of feature vectors for each image. We argue that a set-based representation intrinsically builds a richer representation of images from the base classes, which can subsequently better transfer to the few-shot classes. To do so, we propose to adapt existing feature extractors to instead produce sets of feature vectors from images. Our approach, dubbed SetFeat, embeds shallow self-attention mechanisms inside existing encoder architectures. The attention modules are lightweight, and as such our method results in encoders that have approximately the same number of parameters as their original versions. During training and inference, a set-to-set matching metric is used to perform image classification. The effectiveness of our proposed architecture and metrics is demonstrated via thorough experiments on standard few-shot datasets-namely miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and CUB-in both the 1- and 5-shot scenarios. In all cases but one, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
2022-06-18
2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Tracking and predicting COVID-19 radiological trajectory on chest X-rays using deep learning
Daniel Gourdeau
Olivier Potvin
Patrick Archambault
Carl Chartrand-Lefebvre
Louis Dieumegarde
Reza Forghani
Christian Gagné
Alexandre Hains
David Hornstein
Huy Le
Simon Lemieux
Marie-Hélène Lévesque
Diego Martin
Lorne Rosenbloom
An Tang
Fabrizio Vecchio
Issac Yang
Nathalie Duchesne
Simon Duchesne
2022-04-04
Scientific Reports (published)
doi.org
Tracking and predicting COVID-19 radiological trajectory on chest X-rays using deep learning
Daniel Gourdeau
Olivier Potvin
Patrick Archambault
Carl Chartrand‐lefebvre
Louis Dieumegarde
Reza Forghani
Christian Gagné
Alexandre Hains
David Hornstein
Huy Khiem Le
Simon Lemieux
Marie‐hélène Lévesque
Diego R. Martin
Lorne Rosenbloom
An Tang
Fabrizio Vecchio
Issac Y Yang
N. Duchesne
Simon Duchesne
2022-04-04
Scientific Reports (published)
doi.org
TRACKING AND PREDICTING COVID-19 RADIOLOGICAL TRAJECTORY USING DEEP LEARNING ON CHEST X-RAYS: INITIAL ACCURACY TESTING
Simon Duchesne
Olivier Potvin
Daniel Gourdeau
Patrick Archambault
Carl Chartrand-Lefebvre
Louis Dieumegarde
Reza Forghani
Christian Gagné
Alexandre Hains
David Hornstein
Huy Le
Simon Lemieux
Marie-Hélène Lévesque
Diego Martin
Lorne Rosenbloom
An Tang
Fabrizio Vecchio
Issac Yang
Nathalie Duchesne
2022-04-04
Scientific Reports (published)
doi.org
Matching Feature Sets for Few-Shot Image Classification
Arman Afrasiyabi
Hugo Larochelle
Jean‐François Lalonde
Christian Gagné
In image classification, it is common practice to train deep networks to extract a single feature vector per input image. Few-shot classific… (see more)ation methods also mostly follow this trend. In this work, we depart from this established direction and instead propose to extract sets of feature vectors for each image. We argue that a set-based representation intrinsically builds a richer representation of images from the base classes, which can subsequently better transfer to the few-shot classes. To do so, we propose to adapt existing feature extractors to instead produce sets of feature vectors from images. Our approach, dubbed SetFeat, embeds shallow self-attention mechanisms inside existing encoder architectures. The attention modules are lightweight, and as such our method results in encoders that have approximately the same number of parameters as their original versions. During training and inference, a set-to-set matching metric is used to perform image classification. The effectiveness of our proposed architecture and metrics is demonstrated via thorough experiments on standard few-shot datasets-namely miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and CUB-in both the 1- and 5-shot scenarios. In all cases but one, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
2022-04-02
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Active Learning for Capturing Human Decision Policies in a Data Frugal Context
Loïc Grossetête
Alexandre Marois
Bénédicte Chatelais
Christian Gagné
Daniel Lafond
2022-02-02
Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (published)
doi.org
On Learning Fairness and Accuracy on Multiple Subgroups
Changjian Shui
Gezheng Xu
Qi CHEN
Jiaqi Li
Charles Ling
Tal Arbel
Boyu Wang
Christian Gagné
We propose an analysis in fair learning that preserves the utility of the data while reducing prediction disparities under the criteria of g… (see more)roup sufficiency. We focus on the scenario where the data contains multiple or even many subgroups, each with limited number of samples. As a result, we present a principled method for learning a fair predictor for all subgroups via formulating it as a bilevel objective. Specifically, the subgroup specific predictors are learned in the lower-level through a small amount of data and the fair predictor. In the upper-level, the fair predictor is updated to be close to all subgroup specific predictors. We further prove that such a bilevel objective can effectively control the group sufficiency and generalization error. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world datasets. Empirical evidence suggests the consistently improved fair predictions, as well as the comparable accuracy to the baselines.
openreview.net
On the benefits of representation regularization in invariance based domain generalization
Changjian Shui
Boyu Wang
Christian Gagné
2022-01-01
Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
On the benefits of representation regularization in invariance based domain generalization
Changjian Shui
Boyu Wang
Christian Gagné
2021-05-30
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Active Learning for Capturing Human Decision Policies in a Data Frugal Context
Loïc Grossetête
Alexandre Marois
Bénédicte Chatelais
Christian Gagné
Daniel Lafond
2021-01-01
International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (published)
doi.org
Neuronal activity remodels the F-actin based submembrane lattice in dendrites but not axons of hippocampal neurons
Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal
Anthony Bilodeau
Mado Lemieux
Marc-André Gardner
Theresa Wiesner
Gabrielle Laramée
Christian Gagné
Paul De Koninck
2020-07-20
Scientific Reports (published)
doi.org
Deep Active Learning: Unified and Principled Method for Query and Training
Changjian Shui
Fan Zhou
Christian Gagné
Boyu Wang
2020-06-03
Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
arxiv.org