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

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Ioannis Mitliagkas

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

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Gwen Legate

PhD - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

Eugene Belilovsky

David Lemay

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Jonathan Lim

Collaborating researcher

amin.mansouri@mila.quebec

Baihan Lin

Independent visiting researcher - Mt. Sinai

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher

Andrei Mircea

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

Vaibhav Singh

PhD - Concordia University

Principal supervisor :

Eugene Belilovsky

Gopeshh Subbaraj

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Publications

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

Guillaume Dumas

This study investigates the application of human psychometric assessments to large language models (LLMs) to examine their consistency and m… (see more)alleability in exhibiting personality traits. We administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) to various LLMs across different model sizes and persona prompts. Our results reveal substantial variability in responses due to question order shuffling, challenging the notion of a stable LLM "personality." Larger models demonstrated more consistent responses, while persona prompts significantly influenced trait scores. Notably, the assistant persona led to more predictable scaling, with larger models exhibiting more socially desirable and less variable traits. In contrast, non-conventional personas displayed unpredictable behaviors, sometimes extending personality trait scores beyond the typical human range. These findings have important implications for understanding LLM behavior under different conditions and reflect on the consequences of scaling.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

Guillaume Dumas

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

RedPajama: an Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models

Maurice Weber

Daniel Y Fu

Quentin Gregory Anthony

Yonatan Oren

Shane Adams

Anton Alexandrov

Xiaozhong Lyu

Huu Nguyen

Xiaozhe Yao

Virginia Adams

Ben Athiwaratkun

Rahul Chalamala

Kezhen Chen

Max Ryabinin

Tri Dao

Percy Liang

Christopher Re

Ce Zhang

2024-09-26

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track (spotlight)

Using Unity to Help Solve Reinforcement Learning

Connor Brennan

Andrew Robert Williams

Omar G. Younis

Vedant Vyas

Daria Yasafova

Leveraging the depth and flexibility of XLand as well as the rapid prototyping features of the Unity engine, we present the United Unity Uni… (see more)verse — an open-source toolkit designed to accelerate the creation of innovative reinforcement learning environments. This toolkit includes a robust implementation of XLand 2.0 complemented by a user-friendly interface which allows users to modify the details of procedurally generated terrains and task rules with ease. Additionally, we provide a curated selection of terrains and rule sets, accompanied by implementations of reinforcement learning baselines to facilitate quick experimentation with novel architectural designs for adaptive agents. Furthermore, we illustrate how the United Unity Universe serves as a high-level language that enables researchers to develop diverse and endlessly variable 3D environments within a unified framework. This functionality establishes the United Unity Universe (U3) as an essential tool for advancing the field of reinforcement learning, especially in the development of adaptive and generalizable learning systems.

2024-09-26

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track (poster)

When Machines Outshine Humans in Object Recognition, Benchmarking Dilemma

Mohammad Javad Darvishi Bayazi

Md Rifat Arefin

Jocelyn Faubert

2024-09-15

Journal of Vision (published)

Knowledge Distillation in Federated Learning: A Practical Guide

Alessio Mora

Irene Tenison

Paolo Bellavista

2024-08-01

Proceedings of the Thirty-ThirdInternational Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Spectra: A Comprehensive Study of Ternary, Quantized, and FP16 Language Models

Ayush Kaushal

Tejas Pandey

Tejas Vaidhya

Aaryan Bhagat

2024-07-17

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Spectra: Surprising Effectiveness of Pretraining Ternary Language Models at Scale

Ayush Kaushal

Tejas Pandey

Tejas Vaidhya

Aaryan Bhagat

2024-07-17

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Spectra: Surprising Effectiveness of Pretraining Ternary Language Models at Scale

Ayush Kaushal

Tejas Pandey

Tejas Vaidhya

Arnab Kumar Mondal

Aaryan Bhagat

2024-07-17

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

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

Eugene Belilovsky

2024-07-08

TMLR (accepted)

Unsupervised Concept Discovery Mitigates Spurious Correlations

Md Rifat Arefin

Yan Zhang

Aristide Baratin

Francesco Locatello

Dianbo Liu

Kenji Kawaguchi

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

LORD: Low Rank Decomposition Of Monolingual Code LLMs For One-Shot Compression

Ayush Kaushal

Tejas Vaidhya

Low Rank Decomposition of matrix - splitting a large matrix into a product of two smaller matrix offers a means for compression that reduces… (see more) the parameters of a model without sparsification, and hence delivering more speedup on modern hardware. Moreover, unlike quantization, the compressed linear layers remain fully differentiable and all the parameters trainable, while being able to leverage the existing highly efficient kernels over floating point matrices. We study the potential to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) for monolingual Code generation via Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) and observe that ranks for the linear layers in these models can be reduced by upto 39.58% with less than 1% increase in perplexity. We then use Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) to compress StarCoder 16B to 13.2B parameter with no drop and to 12.3B with minimal drop in HumanEval Pass@1 score, in less than 10 minutes on a single A100. The compressed models speeds up inference by up to 22.35% with just a single line of change in code over huggingface's implementation with pytorch backend. Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) models remain compatible with state of the art near-lossless quantization method such as SpQR, which allows leveraging further compression gains of quantization. Lastly, QLoRA over Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) model further reduces memory requirements by as much as 21.2% over vanilla QLoRA while offering similar gains from parameter efficient fine tuning. Our work shows Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) as a promising new paradigm for LLM compression.

2024-07-03

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/FM-Wild (poster)