Portrait of Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Affiliate Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Assistant Professor, University of Calgary, Deparment of Electrical and Software Engineering
Adjunct Professor, École de technologie suprérieure, School of Computer Science
Adjunct Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Medical Machine Learning
Multimodal Learning
Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement Learning
Representation Learning
Website
Google Scholar
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Biography

I am an Assistant Professor at the Schulich School of Engineering's Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary. I am also an adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Engineering and Information Technology of ÉTS and an adjunct professor at the Computer School of McGill. Before joining ÉTS, I was a postdoctoral fellow working with Professor Doina Precup at McGill/Mila. Before my postdoc, I was a researcher at Microsoft Research Montréal.

I received my Ph.D. from Polytechnique Montréal/Mila in 2016 under the supervision of Professor Chris Pal. During my Ph.D. studies, I worked on computer vision and deep learning applied to emotion recognition, object tracking and knowledge distillation.

Current Students

Aamer Abdul Rahman
Master's Research - École de technologie suprérieure
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Pranav Agarwal
PhD - École de technologie suprérieure
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Ivan Anokhin
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Irina Rish
Github
Google Scholar
Rambod Azimi
Collaborating researcher - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
David Meger
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Aayush Bajaj
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Meghana Bhange
Master's Research - École de technologie suprérieure
Principal supervisor :
Ulrich Aivodji
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Charles Bricout
Master's Research - École de technologie suprérieure
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Patrik Kenfack
PhD - École de technologie suprérieure
Principal supervisor :
Ulrich Aivodji
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Somjit Nath
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Website
Google Scholar
Rishav Rishav
Master's Research - École de technologie suprérieure
Google Scholar
Priyesh Vijayan
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Zihan Wang
Master's Research - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Narges Armanfard
Website
Google Scholar

Publications

ChatPainter: Improving Text to Image Generation using Dialogue
Shikhar Sharma
Dendi Suhubdy
Vincent Michalski
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Yoshua Bengio
Synthesizing realistic images from text descriptions on a dataset like Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO), where each image can c… (see more)ontain several objects, is a challenging task. Prior work has used text captions to generate images. However, captions might not be informative enough to capture the entire image and insufficient for the model to be able to understand which objects in the images correspond to which words in the captions. We show that adding a dialogue that further describes the scene leads to significant improvement in the inception score and in the quality of generated images on the MS COCO dataset.
2018-01-01
ICLR (Workshop) (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
FigureQA: An Annotated Figure Dataset for Visual Reasoning
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Adam Atkinson
Vincent Michalski
Ákos Kádár
Adam Trischler
Yoshua Bengio
We introduce FigureQA, a visual reasoning corpus of over one million question-answer pairs grounded in over 100,000 images. The images are s… (see more)ynthetic, scientific-style figures from five classes: line plots, dot-line plots, vertical and horizontal bar graphs, and pie charts. We formulate our reasoning task by generating questions from 15 templates; questions concern various relationships between plot elements and examine characteristics like the maximum, the minimum, area-under-the-curve, smoothness, and intersection. To resolve, such questions often require reference to multiple plot elements and synthesis of information distributed spatially throughout a figure. To facilitate the training of machine learning systems, the corpus also includes side data that can be used to formulate auxiliary objectives. In particular, we provide the numerical data used to generate each figure as well as bounding-box annotations for all plot elements. We study the proposed visual reasoning task by training several models, including the recently proposed Relation Network as a strong baseline. Preliminary results indicate that the task poses a significant machine learning challenge. We envision FigureQA as a first step towards developing models that can intuitively recognize patterns from visual representations of data.
2018-01-01
ICLR.cc/2018/Conference (Invite to Workshop Track)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations
Raymond Li
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Hannes Schulz
Vincent Michalski
Laurent Charlin
Chris Pal
There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendat… (see more)ion is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale data set consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a data set consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior.
arxiv.org
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Guillaume Alain
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Dzmitry Bahdanau
Nicolas Ballas
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
Yoshua Bengio
Arnaud Bergeron
J. Bergstra
Valentin Bisson
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Nicolas Bouchard
Nicolas Boulanger-Lewandowski
Xavier Bouthillier
Alexandre De Brébisson
Olivier Breuleux … (see 92 more)
pierre luc carrier
Kyunghyun Cho
Jan Chorowski
Paul F. Christiano
Tim Cooijmans
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Myriam Côté
Aaron Courville
Yann Dauphin
Olivier Delalleau
Julien Demouth
Guillaume Desjardins
Sander Dieleman
Laurent Dinh
M'elanie Ducoffe
Vincent Dumoulin
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Dumitru Erhan
Ziye Fan
Orhan Firat
Mathieu Germain
Xavier Glorot
Ian J. Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Caglar Gulcehre
Philippe Hamel
Iban Harlouchet
Jean-philippe Heng
Balázs Hidasi
Sina Honari
Arjun Jain
S'ebastien Jean
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Alex Lamb
Pascal Lamblin
Eric P. Larsen
César Laurent
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
Simon Lemieux
Nicholas Léonard
Zhouhan Lin
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
Olivier Mastropietro
R. McGibbon
Roland Memisevic
Bart van Merriënboer
Vincent Michalski
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Chris Pal
Razvan Pascanu
Mohammad Pezeshki
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Adriana Romero Soriano
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
François Savard
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Dmitriy Serdyuk
Samira Shabanian
Etienne Simon
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Jakub Sygnowski
Jérémie Tanguay
Gijs van Tulder
Joseph P. Turian
Sebastian Urban
Pascal Vincent
Francesco Visin
Harm de Vries
David Warde-Farley
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Kelvin Xu
Lijun Xue
Li Yao
Saizheng Zhang
Ying Zhang
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.
2016-05-09
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Guillaume Alain
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Dzmitry Bahdanau
Nicolas Ballas
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
Yoshua Bengio
Arnaud Bergeron
James Bergstra
Valentin Bisson
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Nicolas Bouchard
Nicolas Boulanger-Lewandowski
Xavier Bouthillier
Alexandre De Brébisson
Olivier Breuleux … (see 92 more)
pierre luc carrier
Kyunghyun Cho
Jan Chorowski
Paul F. Christiano
Tim Cooijmans
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Myriam Côté
Aaron Courville
Yann Dauphin
Olivier Delalleau
Julien Demouth
Guillaume Desjardins
Sander Dieleman
Laurent Dinh
M'elanie Ducoffe
Vincent Dumoulin
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Dumitru Erhan
Ziye Fan
Orhan Firat
Mathieu Germain
Xavier Glorot
Ian G Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Caglar Gulcehre
Philippe Hamel
Iban Harlouchet
Jean-philippe Heng
Balázs Hidasi
Sina Honari
Arjun Jain
Sébastien Jean
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Alex Lamb
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
César Laurent
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
Simon Lemieux
Nicholas Léonard
Zhouhan Lin
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
Olivier Mastropietro
R. McGibbon
Roland Memisevic
Bart van Merriënboer
Vincent Michalski
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Chris Pal
Razvan Pascanu
Mohammad Pezeshki
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Adriana Romero Soriano
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
François Savard
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Dmitriy Serdyuk
Samira Shabanian
Etienne Simon
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Jakub Sygnowski
Jérémie Tanguay
Gijs van Tulder
Joseph Turian
Sebastian Urban
Pascal Vincent
Francesco Visin
Harm de Vries
David Warde-Farley
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Kelvin Xu
Lijun Xue
Li Yao
Saizheng Zhang
Ying Zhang
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.
2016-05-09
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org