Mila’s AI for Climate Studio aims to bridge the gap between technology and impact to unlock the potential of AI in tackling the climate crisis rapidly and on a massive scale.
The program recently published its first policy brief, titled "Policy Considerations at the Intersection of Quantum Technologies and Artificial Intelligence," authored by Padmapriya Mohan.
Hugo Larochelle appointed Scientific Director of Mila
An adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal and former head of Google's AI lab in Montréal, Hugo Larochelle is a pioneer in deep learning and one of Canada’s most respected researchers.
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This paper introduces JaxPruner, an open-source JAX-based pruning and sparse training library for machine learning research. JaxPruner aims … (see more)to accelerate research on sparse neural networks by providing concise implementations of popular pruning and sparse training algorithms with minimal memory and latency overhead. Algorithms implemented in JaxPruner use a common API and work seamlessly with the popular optimization library Optax, which, in turn, enables easy integration with existing JAX based libraries. We demonstrate this ease of integration by providing examples in four different codebases: Scenic, t5x, Dopamine and FedJAX and provide baseline experiments on popular benchmarks.
State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long… (see more) sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous signals, SSMs have shown superior performance on a plethora of tasks, in vision and audio; however, SSMs still lag Transformer performance in Language Modeling tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid layer named Block-State Transformer (BST), that internally combines an SSM sublayer for long-range contextualization, and a Block Transformer sublayer for short-term representation of sequences. We study three different, and completely parallelizable, variants that integrate SSMs and block-wise attention. We show that our model outperforms similar Transformer-based architectures on language modeling perplexity and generalizes to longer sequences. In addition, the Block-State Transformer demonstrates more than tenfold increase in speed at the layer level compared to the Block-Recurrent Transformer when model parallelization is employed.
Recent work on Graph Neural Networks has demonstrated that self-supervised pretraining can further enhance performance on downstream graph, … (see more)link, and node classification tasks. However, the efficacy of pretraining tasks has not been fully investigated for downstream large knowledge graph completion tasks. Using a contextualized knowledge graph embedding approach, we investigate five different pretraining signals, constructed using several graph algorithms and no external data, as well as their combination. We leverage the versatility of our Transformer-based model to explore graph structure generation pretraining tasks (i.e. path and k-hop neighborhood generation), typically inapplicable to most graph embedding methods. We further propose a new path-finding algorithm guided by information gain and find that it is the best-performing pretraining task across three downstream knowledge graph completion datasets. While using our new path-finding algorithm as a pretraining signal provides 2-3% MRR improvements, we show that pretraining on all signals together gives the best knowledge graph completion results. In a multitask setting that combines all pretraining tasks, our method surpasses the latest and strong performing knowledge graph embedding methods on all metrics for FB15K-237, on MRR and Hit@1 for WN18RRand on MRR and hit@10 for JF17K (a knowledge hypergraph dataset).
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MT… (see more)L must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We propose a novel Transformer based Hypernetwork Adapter consisting of a new conditional attention mechanism as well as a set of task-conditioned modules that facilitate weight sharing. Through this construction, we achieve more efficient parameter sharing and mitigate forgetting by keeping half of the weights of a pretrained model fixed. We also use a new multi-task data sampling strategy to mitigate the negative effects of data imbalance across tasks. Using this approach, we are able to surpass single task fine-tuning methods while being parameter and data efficient (using around 66% of the data). Compared to other BERT Large methods on GLUE, our 8-task model surpasses other Adapter methods by 2.8% and our 24-task model outperforms by 0.7-1.0% models that use MTL and single task fine-tuning. We show that a larger variant of our single multi-task model approach performs competitively across 26 NLP tasks and yields state-of-the-art results on a number of test and development sets.