Irina Rish

Biography

Irina Rish is a full professor at the Université de Montréal (UdeM), where she leads the Autonomous AI Lab, and a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

In addition to holding a Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) and a CIFAR Chair, she leads the U.S. Department of Energy’s INCITE project on Scalable Foundation Models on Summit & Frontier supercomputers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. She co-founded and serves as CSO of Nolano.ai.

Rish’s current research interests include neural scaling laws and emergent behaviors (capabilities and alignment) in foundation models, as well as continual learning, out-of-distribution generalization and robustness.

Before joining UdeM in 2019, she was a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where she worked on various projects at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, and led the Neuro-AI challenge. She was awarded the IBM Eminence & Excellence Award and IBM Outstanding Innovation Award (2018), IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (2017) and IBM Research Accomplishment Award (2009).

She holds 64 patents and has published 120 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books and a monograph on sparse modeling.

Current Students

George Adamopoulos

Research Intern

Ivan Anokhin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Rifat Arefin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Arjun Ashok

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Blake Richards

Mohammad Javad Darvishi Bayazi

Amin Darabi

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Karim Jerbi

Wagner Drew

Master's Research - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

Mirco Ravanelli

Mojtaba Faramarzi

PhD - Université de Montréal

Nadhir Hassen

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Master's Research

Nizar Islah

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Eilif Benjamin Muller

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher

Zafir Khalid

Master's Research - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Neeraj Kumar

Professional Master's - Université de Montréal

Gwen Legate

PhD - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

David Lemay

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

amin.mansouri@mila.quebec

Jonathan Lim

Collaborating researcher

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni

PhD - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Diganta Misra

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Timothy Nest

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Eilif Benjamin Muller

Mohammad Pezeshki

Collaborating researcher

Co-supervisor :

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Pouya Bashivan

Mahta Ramezanian

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Dumas

Roland Riachi

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Matthew Riemer

PhD - Université de Montréal

Alexis Roger

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Blake Richards

Zahra Sheikhbahaee

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Guillaume Dumas

Vaibhav Singh

PhD - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

Gopeshh Subbaraj

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Daria Yasafova

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Publications

Continual Pre-training of MoEs: How robust is your router?

Benjamin Thérien

Charles-Étienne Joseph

Zain Sarwar

Ashwinee Panda

Anirban Das

Shi-Xiong Zhang

Stephen Rawls

Sambit Sahu

2025-03-06

ArXiv (preprint)

Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training

Vaibhav Singh

Paul Janson

Paria Mehrbod

Adam Ibrahim

Benjamin Thérien

The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. Whi… (see more)le self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting meaningful representations from vast amounts of unlabeled data, existing methods still struggle to adapt to the non-stationary, non-IID nature of real-world data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Recent works have adopted a repeated cosine annealing schedule for large-scale continual pre-training; however, these schedules (1) inherently cause forgetting during the re-warming phase and (2) have not been systematically compared to existing continual SSL methods. In this work, we systematically compare the widely used cosine schedule with the recently proposed infinite learning rate schedule and empirically find the latter to be a more effective alternative. Our extensive empirical evaluation across diverse image and language datasets demonstrates that the infinite learning rate schedule consistently enhances continual pre-training performance compared to a repeated cosine decay without being restricted to a fixed iteration budget. For instance, in a small-scale MAE pre-training setup, it outperforms several strong baselines from the literature. We then scale up our experiments to larger MAE pre-training and autoregressive language model pre-training. Our results show that the infinite learning rate schedule remains effective at scale, surpassing repeated cosine decay for both MAE pre-training and zero-shot LM benchmarks.

2025-03-04

ArXiv (preprint)

Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training

Vaibhav Singh

Paul Janson

Paria Mehrbod

Adam Ibrahim

Benjamin Thérien

2025-03-04

ArXiv (preprint)

Maxwell's Demon at Work: Efficient Pruning by Leveraging Saturation of Neurons

Simon Dufort-Labbé

Pierluca D'Oro

Evgenii Nikishin

Razvan Pascanu

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Aristide Baratin

2025-02-13

TMLR (accepted)

Enabling Realtime Reinforcement Learning at Scale with Staggered Asynchronous Inference

Matthew D Riemer

Gopeshh Subbaraj

Glen Berseth

Realtime environments change even as agents perform action inference and learning, thus requiring high interaction frequencies to effectivel… (see more)y minimize regret. However, recent advances in machine learning involve larger neural networks with longer inference times, raising questions about their applicability in realtime systems where reaction time is crucial. We present an analysis of lower bounds on regret in realtime reinforcement learning (RL) environments to show that minimizing long-term regret is generally impossible within the typical sequential interaction and learning paradigm, but often becomes possible when sufficient asynchronous compute is available. We propose novel algorithms for staggering asynchronous inference processes to ensure that actions are taken at consistent time intervals, and demonstrate that use of models with high action inference times is only constrained by the environment's effective stochasticity over the inference horizon, and not by action frequency. Our analysis shows that the number of inference processes needed scales linearly with increasing inference times while enabling use of models that are multiple orders of magnitude larger than existing approaches when learning from a realtime simulation of Game Boy games such as Pokémon and Tetris.

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Handling Delay in Real-Time Reinforcement Learning

Ivan Anokhin

Rishav

Matthew D Riemer

Stephen Chung

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Real-time reinforcement learning (RL) introduces several challenges. First, policies are constrained to a fixed number of actions per second… (see more) due to hardware limitations. Second, the environment may change while the network is still computing an action, leading to observational delay. The first issue can partly be addressed with pipelining, leading to higher throughput and potentially better policies. However, the second issue remains: if each neuron operates in parallel with an execution time of

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Non-Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Successor Feature Matching

Arnav Kumar Jain

Harley Wiltzer

Jesse Farebrother

Glen Berseth

Sanjiban Choudhury

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Seq-VCR: Preventing Collapse in Intermediate Transformer Representations for Enhanced Reasoning

Md Rifat Arefin

Gopeshh Subbaraj

Nicolas Gontier

Yann LeCun

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

Chris Pal

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Artificial Neural Networks for Magnetoencephalography: A review of an emerging field

Arthur Dehgan

Hamza Abdelhedi

Vanessa Hadid

Karim Jerbi

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a cutting-edge neuroimaging technique that measures the intricate brain dynamics underlying cognitive proces… (see more)ses with an unparalleled combination of high temporal and spatial precision. MEG data analytics has always relied on advanced signal processing and mathematical and statistical tools for various tasks ranging from data cleaning to probing the signals' rich dynamics and estimating the neural sources underlying the surface-level recordings. Like in most domains, the surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the increased use of Machine Learning (ML) methods for MEG data classification. More recently, an emerging trend in this field is using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to address many MEG-related tasks. This review provides a comprehensive overview of how ANNs are being used with MEG data from three vantage points: First, we review work that employs ANNs for MEG signal classification, i.e., for brain decoding. Second, we report on work that has used ANNs as putative models of information processing in the human brain. Finally, we examine studies that use ANNs as techniques to tackle methodological questions in MEG, including artifact correction and source estimation. Furthermore, we assess the current strengths and limitations of using ANNs with MEG and discuss future challenges and opportunities in this field. Finally, by establishing a detailed portrait of the field and providing practical recommendations for the future, this review seeks to provide a helpful reference for both seasoned MEG researchers and newcomers to the field who are interested in using ANNs to enhance the exploration of the complex dynamics of the human brain with MEG.

2025-01-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Artificial Neural Networks for Magnetoencephalography: A review of an emerging field

Arthur Dehgan

Hamza Abdelhedi

Vanessa Hadid

Karim Jerbi

2025-01-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Robin: a Suite of Multi-Scale Vision-Language Models and the CHIRP Evaluation Benchmark

Alexis Roger

Prateek Humane

Daniel Z Kaplan

Kshitij Gupta

Qi Sun

George Adamopoulos

Jonathan Siu Chi Lim

Quentin Gregory Anthony

Edwin Fennell

The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the past several years calls for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation methods and ben… (see more)chmarks. This work analyzes existing VLM evaluation techniques, including automated metrics, AI-based assessments, and human evaluations across diverse tasks. We first introduce Robin - a novel suite of VLMs that we built by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Encoders (VEs) at multiple scales, and use Robin to identify shortcomings of current evaluation approaches across scales. Next, to overcome the identified limitations, we introduce CHIRP - a new long form response benchmark we developed for more robust and complete VLM evaluation. We provide open access to the Robin training code, model suite, and CHIRP benchmark to promote reproducibility and advance VLM research.

2025-01-16

ArXiv (preprint)

Enabling Realtime Reinforcement Learning at Scale with Staggered Asynchronous Inference

Matthew Riemer

Gopeshh Raaj Subbaraj

Glen Berseth

2024-12-18

ArXiv (preprint)