Pablo Piantanida

clea.chataigner@mila.quebec

Biography

I am a professor at CentraleSupélec (Université Paris-Saclay) with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and Director of the International Laboratory on Learning Systems (ILLS) which gathers McGill University, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Mila – Quebec AI Institute, France’s Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Paris-Saclay, and the École CentraleSupélec.

My research revolves around the application of advanced statistical and information-theoretic techniques to the field of machine learning. I am interested in developing rigorous techniques based on information measures and concepts for building safe and trustworthy AI systems and establishing confidence in their behavior and robustness, thereby securing their use in society. My primary areas of expertise include information theory, information geometry, learning theory, privacy, fairness, with applications to computer vision and natural language processing.

I obtained my undergraduate education at the University of Buenos Aires and pursued graduate studies in applied mathematics at Paris-Saclay University in France. Throughout my career, I have also held visiting positions at INRIA, Université de Montréal and Ecole de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), among others.

My earlier research encompassed the fields of information theory beyond distributed compression, statistical decision, universal source coding, cooperation, feedback, index coding, key generation, security, and privacy, among others.

I teach courses on machine learning, information theory and deep learning, covering topics such as statistical learning theory, information measures, statistical principles of neural networks.

Current Students

Chataigner Cléa

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Golnoosh Farnadi

Maxime Darrin

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Jackie Cheung

maxime.darrin@mila.quebec

PhD - École de technologie suprérieure

zahra.dehghani-tafti@mila.quebec

philippe.formont@mila.quebec

Philippe Formont

PhD - École de technologie suprérieure

fanny.jourdan@mila.quebec

Fanny JOURDAN

Postdoctorate - École de technologie suprérieure

Co-supervisor :

Jackie Cheung

Website

guillermo.martin@mila.quebec

Guillermo Martin de Paula

PhD - Université Paris-Saclay

Ricard Marxer

Collaborating researcher - University of Toulon

Co-supervisor :

Mirco Ravanelli

ricard.marxer@mila.quebec

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Mark Coates

chiara.roverato@mila.quebec

Matteo Sammut

PhD - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL

matteo.sammut@dauphine.eu

Amin Sghaier

Master's Research - École de technologie suprérieure

Co-supervisor :

Marco Pedersoli

amin.sghaier@mila.quebec

Nicolas Thome

Collaborating researcher - Sorbonne Université

thome.nicolas@gmail.com

Website

Publications

Is Meta-training Really Necessary for Molecular Few-Shot Learning ?

Philippe Formont

Hugo Jeannin

Ismail Ben Ayed

Few-shot learning has recently attracted significant interest in drug discovery, with a recent, fast-growing literature mostly involving con… (see more)voluted meta-learning strategies. We revisit the more straightforward fine-tuning approach for molecular data, and propose a regularized quadratic-probe loss based on the the Mahalanobis distance. We design a dedicated block-coordinate descent optimizer, which avoid the degenerate solutions of our loss. Interestingly, our simple fine-tuning approach achieves highly competitive performances in comparison to state-of-the-art methods, while being applicable to black-box settings and removing the need for specific episodic pre-training strategies. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark to assess the robustness of the competing methods to domain shifts. In this setting, our fine-tuning baseline obtains consistently better results than meta-learning methods.

2024-04-01

ArXiv (preprint)

Two-stage Multiple-Model Compression Approach for Sampled Electrical Signals

Corentin Presvôts

Michel Kieffer

Thibault Prevost

Patrick Panciatici

Zuxing Li

This paper presents a two-stage Multiple-Model Compression (MMC) approach for sampled electrical waveforms. To limit latency, the processing… (see more) is window-based, with a window length commensurate to the electrical period. For each window, the first stage compares several parametric models to get a coarse representation of the samples. The second stage then compares different residual compression techniques to minimize the norm of the reconstruction error. The allocation of the rate budget among the two stages is optimized. The proposed MMC approach provides better signal-to-noise ratios than state-of-the-art solutions on periodic and transient waveforms.

2024-03-18

Data Compression Conference (published)

COSMIC: Mutual Information for Task-Agnostic Summarization Evaluation

Maxime Darrin

Philippe Formont

Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

Assessing the quality of summarizers poses significant challenges. In response, we propose a novel task-oriented evaluation approach that as… (see more)sesses summarizers based on their capacity to produce summaries that are useful for downstream tasks, while preserving task outcomes. We theoretically establish a direct relationship between the resulting error probability of these tasks and the mutual information between source texts and generated summaries. We introduce

2024-02-28

ArXiv (preprint)

A Data-Driven Measure of Relative Uncertainty for Misclassification Detection

Eduardo Dadalto Câmara Gomes

Marco Romanelli

Georg Pichler

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

On the Stability of a non-hyperbolic nonlinear map with non-bounded set of non-isolated fixed points with applications to Machine Learning

Roberta Hansen

Matias Vera

Lautaro Estienne

LUCIANA FERRER

2024-01-04

ArXiv (preprint)

On the incompatibility of accuracy and equal opportunity

Carlos Pinzón

Catuscia Palamidessi

Frank Valencia

2023-12-31

Mach. Learn. (published)

Preserving Privacy in GANs Against Membership Inference Attack

Mohammadhadi Shateri

Francisco Messina

Fabrice Labeau

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used for generating synthetic data for cases where there is a limited size real-worl… (see more)d dataset or when data holders are unwilling to share their data samples. Recent works showed that GANs, due to overfitting and memorization, might leak information regarding their training data samples. This makes GANs vulnerable to Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). Several defense strategies have been proposed in the literature to mitigate this privacy issue. Unfortunately, defense strategies based on differential privacy are proven to reduce extensively the quality of the synthetic data points. On the other hand, more recent frameworks such as PrivGAN and PAR-GAN are not suitable for small-size training datasets. In the present work, the overfitting in GANs is studied in terms of the discriminator, and a more general measure of overfitting based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient is defined. Then, inspired by Fano's inequality, our first defense mechanism against MIAs is proposed. This framework, which requires only a simple modification in the loss function of GANs, is referred to as the maximum entropy GAN or MEGAN and significantly improves the robustness of GANs to MIAs. As a second defense strategy, a more heuristic model based on minimizing the information leaked from generated samples about the training data points is presented. This approach is referred to as mutual information minimization GAN (MIMGAN) and uses a variational representation of the mutual information to minimize the information that a synthetic sample might leak about the whole training data set. Applying the proposed frameworks to some commonly used data sets against state-of-the-art MIAs reveals that the proposed methods can reduce the accuracy of the adversaries to the level of random guessing accuracy with a small reduction in the quality of the synthetic data samples.

2023-12-12

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (unknown)

Rainproof: An Umbrella To Shield Text Generators From Out-Of-Distribution Data

Maxime Darrin

Pierre Colombo

Implementing effective control mechanisms to ensure the proper functioning and security of deployed NLP models, from translation to chatbots… (see more), is essential. A key ingredient to ensure safe system behaviour is Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection, which aims to detect whether an input sample is statistically far from the training distribution. Although OOD detection is a widely covered topic in classification tasks, most methods rely on hidden features output by the encoder. In this work, we focus on leveraging soft-probabilities in a black-box framework, i.e. we can access the soft-predictions but not the internal states of the model. Our contributions include: (i) RAINPROOF a Relative informAItioN Projection OOD detection framework; and (ii) a more operational evaluation setting for OOD detection. Surprisingly, we find that OOD detection is not necessarily aligned with task-specific measures. The OOD detector may filter out samples well processed by the model and keep samples that are not, leading to weaker performance. Our results show that RAINPROOF provides OOD detection methods more aligned with task-specific performance metrics than traditional OOD detectors.

2023-11-30

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)

Toward Stronger Textual Attack Detectors

Pierre Colombo

Marine Picot

Nathan Noiry

Guillaume Staerman

The landscape of available textual adversarial attacks keeps growing, posing severe threats and raising concerns regarding the deep NLP syst… (see more)em's integrity. However, the crucial problem of defending against malicious attacks has only drawn the attention of the NLP community. The latter is nonetheless instrumental in developing robust and trustworthy systems. This paper makes two important contributions in this line of search: (i) we introduce LAROUSSE, a new framework to detect textual adversarial attacks and (ii) we introduce STAKEOUT, a new benchmark composed of nine popular attack methods, three datasets, and two pre-trained models. LAROUSSE is ready-to-use in production as it is unsupervised, hyperparameter-free, and non-differentiable, protecting it against gradient-based methods. Our new benchmark STAKEOUT allows for a robust evaluation framework: we conduct extensive numerical experiments which demonstrate that LAROUSSE outperforms previous methods, and which allows to identify interesting factors of detection rate variations.

2023-11-30

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (published)

Transductive Learning for Textual Few-Shot Classification in API-based Embedding Models

Pierre Colombo

Victor Pellegrain

Malik Boudiaf

Victor Storchan

Myriam Tami

Ismail Ben Ayed

C'eline Hudelot

Proprietary and closed APIs are becoming increasingly common to process natural language, and are impacting the practical applications of na… (see more)tural language processing, including few-shot classification. Few-shot classification involves training a model to perform a new classification task with a handful of labeled data. This paper presents three contributions. First, we introduce a scenario where the embedding of a pre-trained model is served through a gated API with compute-cost and data-privacy constraints. Second, we propose a transductive inference, a learning paradigm that has been overlooked by the NLP community. Transductive inference, unlike traditional inductive learning, leverages the statistics of unlabeled data. We also introduce a new parameter-free transductive regularizer based on the Fisher-Rao loss, which can be used on top of the gated API embeddings. This method fully utilizes unlabeled data, does not share any label with the third-party API provider and could serve as a baseline for future research. Third, we propose an improved experimental setting and compile a benchmark of eight datasets involving multiclass classification in four different languages, with up to 151 classes. We evaluate our methods using eight backbone models, along with an episodic evaluation over 1,000 episodes, which demonstrate the superiority of transductive inference over the standard inductive setting.

2023-11-30

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)

openreview.net

A Novel Information-Theoretic Objective to Disentangle Representations for Fair Classification

Pierre Colombo

Nathan Noiry

Guillaume Staerman

2023-10-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Fundamental Limits of Membership Inference Attacks on Machine Learning Models

Eric Aubinais

Elisabeth Gassiat

Membership inference attacks (MIA) can reveal whether a particular data point was part of the training dataset, potentially exposing sensiti… (see more)ve information about individuals. This article provides theoretical guarantees by exploring the fundamental statistical limitations associated with MIAs on machine learning models. More precisely, we first derive the statistical quantity that governs the effectiveness and success of such attacks. We then deduce that in a very general regression setting with overfitting algorithms, attacks may have a high probability of success. Finally, we investigate several situations for which we provide bounds on this quantity of interest. Our results enable us to deduce the accuracy of potential attacks based on the number of samples and other structural parameters of learning models. In certain instances, these parameters can be directly estimated from the dataset.

2023-10-19

ArXiv (preprint)