Eugene Belilovsky

Paul Janson

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Charles-Etienne Joseph

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Zafir Khalid

Master's Research - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Irina Rish

Website

Gwen Legate

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Melika Minaei Bidgoli

Research Intern - Concordia University University

Abhinav Moudgil

PhD - Concordia University

Website

Google Scholar

Adel Nabli

PhD - Concordia University

Google Scholar

Geraldin Nanfack

Postdoctorate - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

geraldin.nanfack@mila.quebec

Website

Google Scholar

Albert Orozco Camacho

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Irina Rish

Benjamin Therien

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Master's Research - Concordia University

AmirHossein Zamani

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Congshu Zou

Master's Research - Concordia University

Publications

Revisiting Learnable Affines for Batch Norm in Few-Shot Transfer Learning

Moslem Yazdanpanah

Aamer Abdul Rahman

Muawiz Chaudhary

Christian Desrosiers

Mohammad Havaei

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Batch normalization is a staple of computer vision models, including those employed in few-shot learning. Batch nor-malization layers in con… (see more)volutional neural networks are composed of a normalization step, followed by a shift and scale of these normalized features applied via the per-channel trainable affine parameters

2022-06-18

2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (published)

Local Learning with Neuron Groups

Adeetya Patel

Michael Eickenberg

2022-04-21

ICLR.cc/2022/Workshop/Cells2Societies (poster)

openreview.net

CLIP-Mesh: Generating textured meshes from text using pretrained image-text models

Nasir M. Khalid

Tianhao Xie

Tiberiu S. Popa

We present a technique for zero-shot generation of a 3D model using only a target text prompt. Without any 3D supervision our method deforms… (see more) the control shape of a limit subdivided surface along with its texture map and normal map to obtain a 3D asset that corresponds to the input text prompt and can be easily deployed into games or modeling applications. We rely only on a pre-trained CLIP model that compares the input text prompt with differentiably rendered images of our 3D model. While previous works have focused on stylization or required training of generative models we perform optimization on mesh parameters directly to generate shape, texture or both. To constrain the optimization to produce plausible meshes and textures we introduce a number of techniques using image augmentations and the use of a pretrained prior that generates CLIP image embeddings given a text embedding.

2022-03-24

ArXiv (preprint)

Probing Representation Forgetting in Supervised and Unsupervised Continual Learning

MohammadReza Davari

Nader Asadi

Sudhir Mudur

Rahaf Aljundi

Continual Learning (CL) research typically focuses on tackling the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. Catastrophic fo… (see more)rgetting is associated with an abrupt loss of knowledge previously learned by a model when the task, or more broadly the data distribution, being trained on changes. In supervised learning problems this forgetting, resulting from a change in the model's representation, is typically measured or observed by evaluating the decrease in old task performance. However, a model's representation can change without losing knowledge about prior tasks. In this work we consider the concept of representation forgetting, observed by using the difference in performance of an optimal linear classifier before and after a new task is introduced. Using this tool we revisit a number of standard continual learning benchmarks and observe that, through this lens, model representations trained without any explicit control for forgetting often experience small representation forgetting and can sometimes be comparable to methods which explicitly control for forgetting, especially in longer task sequences. We also show that representation forgetting can lead to new insights on the effect of model capacity and loss function used in continual learning. Based on our results, we show that a simple yet competitive approach is to learn representations continually with standard supervised contrastive learning while constructing prototypes of class samples when queried on old samples.11The code to reproduce our results is publicly available at: https://github.com/rezazzr/Probing-Representation-Forgetting

2022-03-24

ArXiv (preprint)

New Insights on Reducing Abrupt Representation Change in Online Continual Learning

Lucas Caccia

Rahaf Aljundi

Nader Asadi

Tinne Tuytelaars

Joelle Pineau

In the online continual learning paradigm, agents must learn from a changing distribution while respecting memory and compute constraints. E… (see more)xperience Replay (ER), where a small subset of past data is stored and replayed alongside new data, has emerged as a simple and effective learning strategy. In this work, we focus on the change in representations of observed data that arises when previously unobserved classes appear in the incoming data stream, and new classes must be distinguished from previous ones. We shed new light on this question by showing that applying ER causes the newly added classes’ representations to overlap significantly with the previous classes, leading to highly disruptive parameter updates. Based on this empirical analysis, we propose a new method which mitigates this issue by shielding the learned representations from drastic adaptation to accommodate new classes. We show that using an asymmetric update rule pushes new classes to adapt to the older ones (rather than the reverse), which is more effective especially at task boundaries, where much of the forgetting typically occurs. Empirical results show significant gains over strong baselines on standard continual learning benchmarks.

2022-01-28

ICLR.cc/2022/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Parametric Scattering Networks

Shanel Gauthier

Benjamin Th'erien

Laurent Alséne-Racicot

Irina Rish

Michael Eickenberg

The wavelet scattering transform creates geometric in-variants and deformation stability. In multiple signal do-mains, it has been shown to … (see more)yield more discriminative rep-resentations compared to other non-learned representations and to outperform learned representations in certain tasks, particularly on limited labeled data and highly structured signals. The wavelet filters used in the scattering trans-form are typically selected to create a tight frame via a pa-rameterized mother wavelet. In this work, we investigate whether this standard wavelet filterbank construction is op-timal. Focusing on Morlet wavelets, we propose to learn the scales, orientations, and aspect ratios of the filters to produce problem-specific parameterizations of the scattering transform. We show that our learned versions of the scattering transform yield significant performance gains in small-sample classification settings over the standard scat-tering transform. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that traditional filterbank constructions may not always be necessary for scattering transforms to extract effective rep-resentations.

2021-07-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval

Rahaf Aljundi

Lucas Caccia

Massimo Caccia

Min Lin

Laurent Charlin

Tinne Tuytelaars

Continual learning, the setting where a learning agent is faced with a never ending stream of data, continues to be a great challenge for mo… (see more)dern machine learning systems. In particular the online or "single-pass through the data" setting has gained attention recently as a natural setting that is difficult to tackle. Methods based on replay, either generative or from a stored memory, have been shown to be effective approaches for continual learning, matching or exceeding the state of the art in a number of standard benchmarks. These approaches typically rely on randomly selecting samples from the replay memory or from a generative model, which is suboptimal. In this work, we consider a controlled sampling of memories for replay. We retrieve the samples which are most interfered, i.e. whose prediction will be most negatively impacted by the foreseen parameters update. We show a formulation for this sampling criterion in both the generative replay and the experience replay setting, producing consistent gains in performance and greatly reduced forgetting. We release an implementation of our method at this https URL.

2019-08-11

ArXiv (preprint)

Learning Optimizers for Local SGD

Charles-Étienne Joseph

Benjamin Thérien

Abhinav Moudgil

Boris Knyazev