Portrait of Marc-Alexandre Côté

Marc-Alexandre Côté

Associate Industry Member
Microsoft Research
Research Topics
Deep Learning
LLM Agent
Reasoning
Reinforcement Learning

Publications

Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari
State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent ag… (see more)ents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state variables. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods. The code associated with this work is available at this https URL
Z-Forcing: Training Stochastic Recurrent Networks
Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks… (see more) (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in natural sequential data such as speech. We unify successful ideas from recently proposed architectures into a stochastic recurrent model: each step in the sequence is associated with a latent variable that is used to condition the recurrent dynamics for future steps. Training is performed with amortized variational inference where the approximate posterior is augmented with a RNN that runs backward through the sequence. In addition to maximizing the variational lower bound, we ease training of the latent variables by adding an auxiliary cost which forces them to reconstruct the state of the backward recurrent network. This provides the latent variables with a task-independent objective that enhances the performance of the overall model. We found this strategy to perform better than alternative approaches such as KL annealing. Although being conceptually simple, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard speech benchmarks such as TIMIT and Blizzard and competitive performance on sequential MNIST. Finally, we apply our model to language modeling on the IMDB dataset where the auxiliary cost helps in learning interpretable latent variables. Source Code: this https URL
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Paul F. Christiano
Myriam Côté
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
M'elanie Ducoffe
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Ian G Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
R. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
J. Bergstra
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Paul F. Christiano
Myriam Côté
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
M'elanie Ducoffe
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Ian J. Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
S'ebastien Jean
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric P. Larsen
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
R. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Joseph P. Turian
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.