Guillaume Rabusseau

Biography

I have been an assistant professor at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal (UdeM) since September 2018. I was awarded a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in March 2019. Before joining UdeM, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University, where I worked with Prakash Panangaden, Joelle Pineau and Doina Precup.

I obtained my PhD in 2016 from Aix-Marseille University (AMU) in France, where I worked in the Qarma team (Machine Learning and Multimedia) under the supervision of François Denis and Hachem Kadri. I also obtained my MSc in fundamental computer science and my BSc in computer science from AMU. I am interested in tensor methods for machine learning and in designing learning algorithms for structured data by leveraging linear and multilinear algebra (e.g., spectral methods).

Current Students

Jun Dai

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Alireza Dizaji

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Maude Lizaire

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sitao Luan

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Reihaneh Rabbany

Ewan Murphy

Collaborating researcher - INRIA

Charlotte Noxon

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Soroush Omranpour

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Reihaneh Rabbany

Michael Rizvi-Martel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pascal Tikeng Notsawo

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Reihaneh Rabbany

Website

Beheshteh Toloueirakhshan

PhD - Université de Montréal

Website

Publications

Towards a Trace-Preserving Tensor Network Representation of Quantum Channels

Siddarth Srinivasan

Sandesh M. Adhikary

Jacob Miller

Bibek Pokharel

Byron Boots

The problem of characterizing quantum channels arises in a number of contexts such as quantum process tomography and quantum error correctio… (see more)n. However, direct approaches to parameterizing and optimizing the Choi matrix representation of quantum channels face a curse of dimensionality: the number of parameters scales exponentially in the number of qubits. Recently, Torlai et al. [2020] proposed using locally puriﬁed density operators (LPDOs), a tensor network representation of Choi matrices, to overcome the unfavourable scaling in parameters. While the LPDO structure allows it to satisfy a ‘complete positivity’ (CP) constraint required of physically valid quantum channels, it makes no guarantees about a similarly required ‘trace preservation’ (TP) constraint. In practice, the TP constraint is violated, and the learned quantum channel may even be trace-increasing, which is non-physical. In this work, we present the problem of optimizing over TP LPDOs, discuss two approaches to characterizing the TP constraints on LPDOs, and outline the next steps for developing an optimization scheme.

2020-12-31

(published)

www.semanticscholar.org

Horizontal gene transfer and recombination analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genes helps discover its close relatives and shed light on its origin

Vladimir Makarenkov

Bogdan Mazoure

Pierre Legendre

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is one of the greatest global medical and social challenges that have emerged in recent history. Human corona… (see more)virus strains discovered during previous SARS outbreaks have been hypothesized to pass from bats to humans using intermediate hosts, e.g. civets for SARS-CoV and camels for MERS-CoV. The discovery of an intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 and the identification of specific mechanism of its emergence in humans are topics of primary evolutionary importance. In this study we investigate the evolutionary patterns of 11 main genes of SARS-CoV-2. Previous studies suggested that the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is highly similar to the horseshoe bat coronavirus RaTG13 for most of the genes and to some Malayan pangolin coronavirus (CoV) strains for the receptor binding (RB) domain of the spike protein. We provide a detailed list of statistically significant horizontal gene transfer and recombination events (both intergenic and intragenic) inferred for each of 11 main genes of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Our analysis reveals that two continuous regions of genes S and N of SARS-CoV-2 may result from intragenic recombination between RaTG13 and Guangdong (GD) Pangolin CoVs. Statistically significant gene transfer-recombination events between RaTG13 and GD Pangolin CoV have been identified in region [1215–1425] of gene S and region [534–727] of gene N. Moreover, some statistically significant recombination events between the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, GD Pangolin CoV and bat CoV ZC45-ZXC21 coronaviruses have been identified in genes ORF1ab, S, ORF3a, ORF7a, ORF8 and N. Furthermore, topology-based clustering of gene trees inferred for 25 CoV organisms revealed a three-way evolution of coronavirus genes, with gene phylogenies of ORF1ab, S and N forming the first cluster, gene phylogenies of ORF3a, E, M, ORF6, ORF7a, ORF7b and ORF8 forming the second cluster, and phylogeny of gene ORF10 forming the third cluster. The results of our horizontal gene transfer and recombination analysis suggest that SARS-CoV-2 could not only be a chimera virus resulting from recombination of the bat RaTG13 and Guangdong pangolin coronaviruses but also a close relative of the bat CoV ZC45 and ZXC21 strains. They also indicate that a GD pangolin may be an intermediate host of this dangerous virus.

2020-12-02

BMC Ecology and Evolution (published)

Laplacian Change Point Detection for Dynamic Graphs

2020-08-19

Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (published)

Adaptive Learning of Tensor Network Structures

Tensor Networks (TN) offer a powerful framework to efficiently represent very high-dimensional objects. TN have recently shown their potenti… (see more)al for machine learning applications and offer a unifying view of common tensor decomposition models such as Tucker, tensor train (TT) and tensor ring (TR). However, identifying the best tensor network structure from data for a given task is challenging. In this work, we leverage the TN formalism to develop a generic and efficient adaptive algorithm to jointly learn the structure and the parameters of a TN from data. Our method is based on a simple greedy approach starting from a rank one tensor and successively identifying the most promising tensor network edges for small rank increments. Our algorithm can adaptively identify TN structures with small number of parameters that effectively optimize any differentiable objective function. Experiments on tensor decomposition, tensor completion and model compression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In particular, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art evolutionary topology search [Li and Sun, 2020] for tensor decomposition of images (while being orders of magnitude faster) and finds efficient tensor network structures to compress neural networks outperforming popular TT based approaches [Novikov et al., 2015].

2020-08-11

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net

On Overfitting and Asymptotic Bias in Batch Reinforcement Learning with Partial Observability (Extended Abstract)

Vincent François-Lavet

Joelle Pineau

Damien Ernst

Raphael Fonteneau

When an agent has limited information on its environment, the suboptimality of an RL algorithm can be decomposed into the sum of two terms: … (see more)a term related to an asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and a term due to overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data). In the context of reinforcement learning with partial observability, this paper provides an analysis of the tradeoff between these two error sources. In particular, our theoretical analysis formally characterizes how a smaller state representation increases the asymptotic bias while decreasing the risk of overfitting.

2020-06-30

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

RandomNet: Towards Fully Automatic Neural Architecture Design for Multimodal Learning

Stefano Alletto

Shenyang Huang

Vincent François-Lavet

Yohei Nakata

Almost all neural architecture search methods are evaluated in terms of performance (i.e. test accuracy) of the model structures that it fin… (see more)ds. Should it be the only metric for a good autoML approach? To examine aspects beyond performance, we propose a set of criteria aimed at evaluating the core of autoML problem: the amount of human intervention required to deploy these methods into real world scenarios. Based on our proposed evaluation checklist, we study the effectiveness of a random search strategy for fully automated multimodal neural architecture search. Compared to traditional methods that rely on manually crafted feature extractors, our method selects each modality from a large search space with minimal human supervision. We show that our proposed random search strategy performs close to the state of the art on the AV-MNIST dataset while meeting the desirable characteristics for a fully automated design process.

2020-03-01

ArXiv (preprint)

Representation of Reinforcement Learning Policies in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces

Thang Doan

We propose a general framework for policy representation for reinforcement learning tasks. This framework involves finding a low-dimensional… (see more) embedding of the policy on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The usage of RKHS based methods allows us to derive strong theoretical guarantees on the expected return of the reconstructed policy. Such guarantees are typically lacking in black-box models, but are very desirable in tasks requiring stability. We conduct several experiments on classic RL domains. The results confirm that the policies can be robustly embedded in a low-dimensional space while the embedded policy incurs almost no decrease in return.

2020-02-06

(published)

Efficient Planning under Partial Observability with Unnormalized Q Functions and Spectral Learning

2019-12-31

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Tensor Networks for Probabilistic Sequence Modeling

Jacob Miller

John Terilla

Tensor networks are a powerful modeling framework developed for computational many-body physics, which have only recently been applied withi… (see more)n machine learning. In this work we utilize a uniform matrix product state (u-MPS) model for probabilistic modeling of sequence data. We first show that u-MPS enable sequence-level parallelism, with length-n sequences able to be evaluated in depth O(log n). We then introduce a novel generative algorithm giving trained u-MPS the ability to efficiently sample from a wide variety of conditional distributions, each one defined by a regular expression. Special cases of this algorithm correspond to autoregressive and fill-in-the-blank sampling, but more complex regular expressions permit the generation of richly structured data in a manner that has no direct analogue in neural generative models. Experiments on sequence modeling with synthetic and real text data show u-MPS outperforming a variety of baselines and effectively generalizing their predictions in the presence of limited data.

2019-12-31

arXiv (preprint)

proceedings.mlr.press

Tensorized Random Projections

Beheshteh T. Rakhshan

2019-12-31

AISTATS (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Neural Architecture Search for Class-incremental Learning

Shenyang Huang

Vincent François-Lavet

In class-incremental learning, a model learns continuously from a sequential data stream in which new classes occur. Existing methods often … (see more)rely on static architectures that are manually crafted. These methods can be prone to capacity saturation because a neural network's ability to generalize to new concepts is limited by its fixed capacity. To understand how to expand a continual learner, we focus on the neural architecture design problem in the context of class-incremental learning: at each time step, the learner must optimize its performance on all classes observed so far by selecting the most competitive neural architecture. To tackle this problem, we propose Continual Neural Architecture Search (CNAS): an autoML approach that takes advantage of the sequential nature of class-incremental learning to efficiently and adaptively identify strong architectures in a continual learning setting. We employ a task network to perform the classification task and a reinforcement learning agent as the meta-controller for architecture search. In addition, we apply network transformations to transfer weights from previous learning step and to reduce the size of the architecture search space, thus saving a large amount of computational resources. We evaluate CNAS on the CIFAR-100 dataset under varied incremental learning scenarios with limited computational power (1 GPU). Experimental results demonstrate that CNAS outperforms architectures that are optimized for the entire dataset. In addition, CNAS is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than naively using existing autoML methods.

2019-09-13

ArXiv (preprint)

Recognizable series on graphs and hypergraphs

Raphaël Bailly

François Denis

2019-08-31

Journal of Computer and System Sciences (published)