Portrait of Eugene Belilovsky is unavailable

Eugene Belilovsky

Associate Academic Member
Assistant Professor, Concordia University, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Adjunct Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Distributed Systems
Optimization

Biography

Eugene Belilovsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University.

He is also an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and an adjunct professor at Université de Montréal.

Belilovsky’s research specialties lie in computer vision and deep learning. His current interests include continual learning and few-shot learning, along with applications of these aspects at the intersection of computer vision and language processing.

Current Students

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

Publications

PETRA: Parallel End-to-end Training with Reversible Architectures
Stephane Rivaud
Louis Fournier
Thomas Pumir
Michael Eickenberg
Edouard Oyallon
Reversible architectures have been shown to be capable of performing on par with their non-reversible architectures, being applied in deep l… (see more)earning for memory savings and generative modeling. In this work, we show how reversible architectures can solve challenges in parallelizing deep model training. We introduce PETRA, a novel alternative to backpropagation for parallelizing gradient computations. PETRA facilitates effective model parallelism by enabling stages (i.e., a set of layers) to compute independently on different devices, while only needing to communicate activations and gradients between each other. By decoupling the forward and backward passes and keeping a single updated version of the parameters, the need for weight stashing is also removed. We develop a custom autograd-like training framework for PETRA, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on CIFAR-10, ImageNet32, and ImageNet, achieving competitive accuracies comparable to backpropagation using ResNet-18, ResNet-34, and ResNet-50 models.
ACCO: Accumulate While You Communicate for Communication-Overlapped Sharded LLM Training
Adel Nabli
Louis Fournier
Pierre ERBACHER
Louis Serrano
Edouard Oyallon
ACCO: Accumulate While You Communicate for Communication-Overlapped Sharded LLM Training
Adel Nabli
Louis Fournier
Pierre ERBACHER
Louis Serrano
Edouard Oyallon
Training LLMs relies on distributed implementations using multiple GPUs to compute gradients in parallel with sharded optimizers. However, s… (see more)ynchronizing gradients in data parallel setups introduces communication overhead that grows with the number of workers, limiting parallelization efficiency. Local optimization algorithms reduce communications but incur high memory costs as they prevent optimizer state sharding, hindering scalability. To address this, we propose \textbf{AC}cumulate while \textbf{CO}mmunicate (\acco), a memory-efficient optimization algorithm for distributed LLM training. By synchronizing delayed gradients while computing new ones, \acco~reduces GPU idle time and supports heterogeneous hardware. To mitigate the convergence issues caused by delayed updates, we introduce a novel technique ensuring training dynamics align with standard distributed optimization. Compared to ZeRO-1, our approach is significantly faster and scales effectively across heterogeneous hardware.
ACCO: Accumulate while you Communicate, Hiding Communications in Distributed LLM Training
Adel Nabli
Louis Fournier
Pierre ERBACHER
Louis Serrano
Edouard Oyallon
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on distributed implementations, employing multiple GPUs to compute stochastic gradients… (see more) on model replicas in parallel. However, synchronizing gradients in data parallel settings induces a communication overhead increasing with the number of distributed workers, which can impede the efficiency gains of parallelization. To address this challenge, optimization algorithms reducing inter-worker communication have emerged, such as local optimization methods used in Federated Learning. While effective in minimizing communication overhead, these methods incur significant memory costs, hindering scalability: in addition to extra momentum variables, if communications are only allowed between multiple local optimization steps, then the optimizer's states cannot be sharded among workers. In response, we propose
From Feature Visualization to Visual Circuits: Effect of Adversarial Model Manipulation
G'eraldin Nanfack
Michael Eickenberg
Understanding the inner working functionality of large-scale deep neural networks is challenging yet crucial in several high-stakes applicat… (see more)ions. Mechanistic inter- pretability is an emergent field that tackles this challenge, often by identifying human-understandable subgraphs in deep neural networks known as circuits. In vision-pretrained models, these subgraphs are usually interpreted by visualizing their node features through a popular technique called feature visualization. Recent works have analyzed the stability of different feature visualization types under the adversarial model manipulation framework. This paper starts by addressing limitations in existing works by proposing a novel attack called ProxPulse that simultaneously manipulates the two types of feature visualizations. Surprisingly, when analyzing these attacks under the umbrella of visual circuits, we find that visual circuits show some robustness to ProxPulse. We, therefore, introduce a new attack based on ProxPulse that unveils the manipulability of visual circuits, shedding light on their lack of robustness. The effectiveness of these attacks is validated using pre-trained AlexNet and ResNet-50 models on ImageNet.
μLO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers
Benjamin Thérien
Charles-Étienne Joseph
Boris Knyazev
Edouard Oyallon
μLO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers
Benjamin Thérien
Charles-Étienne Joseph
Boris Knyazev
Edouard Oyallon
Harmony in Diversity: Merging Neural Networks with Canonical Correlation Analysis
Stefan Horoi
Albert Manuel Orozco Camacho
Ensembling multiple models enhances predictive performance by utilizing the varied learned features of the different models but incurs signi… (see more)ficant computational and storage costs. Model fusion, which combines parameters from multiple models into one, aims to mitigate these costs but faces practical challenges due to the complex, non-convex nature of neural network loss landscapes, where learned minima are often separated by high loss barriers. Recent works have explored using permutations to align network features, reducing the loss barrier in parameter space. However, permutations are restrictive since they assume a one-to-one mapping between the different models' neurons exists. We propose a new model merging algorithm, CCA Merge, which is based on Canonical Correlation Analysis and aims to maximize the correlations between linear combinations of the model features. We show that our method of aligning models leads to better performances than past methods when averaging models trained on the same, or differing data splits. We also extend this analysis into the harder many models setting where more than 2 models are merged, and we find that CCA Merge works significantly better in this setting than past methods.
Adversarial Attacks on the Interpretation of Neuron Activation Maximization
G'eraldin Nanfack
Alexander Fulleringer
Jonathan Marty
Michael Eickenberg
Feature visualization is one of the most popular techniques used to interpret the internal behavior of individual units of trained deep neur… (see more)al networks. Based on activation maximization, they consist of finding synthetic or natural inputs that maximize neuron activations. This paper introduces an optimization framework that aims to deceive feature visualization through adversarial model manipulation. It consists of finetuning a pre-trained model with a specifically introduced loss that aims to maintain model performance, while also significantly changing feature visualization. We provide evidence of the success of this manipulation on several pre-trained models for the classification task with ImageNet.
Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models
Adam Ibrahim
Benjamin Thérien
Kshitij Gupta
Mats Leon Richter
Quentin Anthony
Timothee LESORT
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes ava… (see more)ilable. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant compute compared to re-training. However, the distribution shift induced by new data typically results in degraded performance on previous data or poor adaptation to the new data. In this work, we show that a simple and scalable combination of learning rate (LR) re-warming, LR re-decaying, and replay of previous data is sufficient to match the performance of fully re-training from scratch on all available data, as measured by the final loss and the average score on several language model (LM) evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we show this for a weak but realistic distribution shift between two commonly used LLM pre-training datasets (English
Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models
Adam Ibrahim
Benjamin Thérien
Kshitij Gupta
Mats Leon Richter
Quentin Gregory Anthony
Timothee LESORT
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes ava… (see more)ilable. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant compute compared to re-training. However, the distribution shift induced by new data typically results in degraded performance on previous data or poor adaptation to the new data. In this work, we show that a simple and scalable combination of learning rate (LR) re-warming, LR re-decaying, and replay of previous data is sufficient to match the performance of fully re-training from scratch on all available data, as measured by the final loss and the average score on several language model (LM) evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we show this for a weak but realistic distribution shift between two commonly used LLM pre-training datasets (English
Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models
Adam Ibrahim
Benjamin Thérien
Kshitij Gupta
Mats Leon Richter
Quentin Gregory Anthony
Timothee LESORT
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes ava… (see more)ilable. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant compute compared to re-training. However, the distribution shift induced by new data typically results in degraded performance on previous data or poor adaptation to the new data. In this work, we show that a simple and scalable combination of learning rate (LR) re-warming, LR re-decaying, and replay of previous data is sufficient to match the performance of fully re-training from scratch on all available data, as measured by the final loss and the average score on several language model (LM) evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we show this for a weak but realistic distribution shift between two commonly used LLM pre-training datasets (English