Simon Lacoste-Julien

Biography

Simon Lacoste-Julien is an associate professor at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal. He is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and heads (part time) the SAIT AI Lab Montréal.

Lacoste-Julien‘s research interests are machine learning and applied mathematics, along with their applications to computer vision and natural language processing. He completed a BSc in mathematics, physics and computer science at McGill University, a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley and a postdoc at the University of Cambridge.

After spending several years as a researcher at INRIA and the École normale supérieure in Paris, he returned to his home city of Montréal in 2016 to answer Yoshua Bengio’s call to help grow the Montréal AI ecosystem.

Current Students

Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

Aristide Baratin

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

PhD - Université de Montréal

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung

Simon Dufort-Labbé

PhD - Université de Montréal

Marwa El Halabi

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

PhD - Université de Montréal

Yash Goyal

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

Meraj Hashemizadeh

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Fahimeh HosseiniNoohdani

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Pedram Khorsandi

PhD - Université de Montréal

Boris Knyazev

Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung - SAIT

Lucas Maes

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Juan Ramirez

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Independent visiting researcher - Univeristy of Tübingen

Theo Saulus

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Damien Scieur

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

Motahareh Sohrabi

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Helen Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Yan Zhang

Independent visiting researcher - Samsung SAIT

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

Blog Posts

March 18, 2024

Sébastien Lachapelle

Divyat Mahajan

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Read the article

Publications

Promoting Exploration in Memory-Augmented Adam using Critical Momenta

Pranshu Malviya

Goncalo Mordido

Aristide Baratin

Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh

Adaptive gradient-based optimizers, notably Adam, have left their mark in training large-scale deep learning models, offering fast convergen… (see more)ce and robustness to hyperparameter settings. However, they often struggle with generalization, attributed to their tendency to converge to sharp minima in the loss landscape. To address this, we propose a new memory-augmented version of Adam that encourages exploration towards flatter minima by incorporating a buffer of critical momentum terms during training. This buffer prompts the optimizer to overshoot beyond narrow minima, promoting exploration. Through comprehensive analysis in simple settings, we illustrate the efficacy of our approach in increasing exploration and bias towards flatter minima. We empirically demonstrate that it can improve model performance for image classification on ImageNet and CIFAR10/100, language modelling on Penn Treebank, and online learning tasks on TinyImageNet and 5-dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/CMOptimizer.

2024-06-08

TMLR (accepted)

Weight-Sharing Regularization

Weight-sharing is ubiquitous in deep learning. Motivated by this, we propose a "weight-sharing regularization" penalty on the weights …

2024-04-17

Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (published)

Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

PopulAtion Parameter Averaging (PAPA)

Emy Gervais

Kilian Fatras

Yang Zhang

2024-04-04

TMLR (accepted)

Balancing Act: Constraining Disparate Impact in Sparse Models

Jose Gallego-Posada

Model pruning is a popular approach to enable the deployment of large deep learning models on edge devices with restricted computational or … (see more)storage capacities. Although sparse models achieve performance comparable to that of their dense counterparts at the level of the entire dataset, they exhibit high accuracy drops for some data sub-groups. Existing methods to mitigate this disparate impact induced by pruning (i) rely on surrogate metrics that address the problem indirectly and have limited interpretability; or (ii) scale poorly with the number of protected sub-groups in terms of computational cost. We propose a constrained optimization approach that directly addresses the disparate impact of pruning: our formulation bounds the accuracy change between the dense and sparse models, for each sub-group. This choice of constraints provides an interpretable success criterion to determine if a pruned model achieves acceptable disparity levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique scales reliably to problems involving large models and hundreds of protected sub-groups.

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Nonparametric Partial Disentanglement via Mechanism Sparsity: Sparse Actions, Interventions and Sparse Temporal Dependencies

Sébastien Lachapelle

Pau Rodríguez

Yash Sharma

Katie Everett

Rémi Le Priol

Alexandre Lacoste

2024-01-09

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and ``out-of-support'' image generation in representation learning. We show that b… (see more)oth are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.

2023-09-20

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Conference (oral)

Can We Scale Transformers to Predict Parameters of Diverse ImageNet Models?

Boris Knyazev

Doha Hwang

Pretraining a neural network on a large dataset is becoming a cornerstone in machine learning that is within the reach of only a few communi… (see more)ties with large-resources. We aim at an ambitious goal of democratizing pretraining. Towards that goal, we train and release a single neural network that can predict high quality ImageNet parameters of other neural networks. By using predicted parameters for initialization we are able to boost training of diverse ImageNet models available in PyTorch. When transferred to other datasets, models initialized with predicted parameters also converge faster and reach competitive final performance.

2023-07-02

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

CrossSplit: Mitigating Label Noise Memorization through Data Splitting

Jihye Kim

Aristide Baratin

Yan Zhang

We approach the problem of improving robustness of deep learning algorithms in the presence of label noise. Building upon existing label cor… (see more)rection and co-teaching methods, we propose a novel training procedure to mitigate the memorization of noisy labels, called CrossSplit, which uses a pair of neural networks trained on two disjoint parts of the labelled dataset. CrossSplit combines two main ingredients: (i) Cross-split label correction. The idea is that, since the model trained on one part of the data cannot memorize example-label pairs from the other part, the training labels presented to each network can be smoothly adjusted by using the predictions of its peer network; (ii) Cross-split semi-supervised training. A network trained on one part of the data also uses the unlabeled inputs of the other part. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and mini-WebVision datasets demonstrate that our method can outperform the current state-of-the-art in a wide range of noise ratios.

2023-07-02

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Unlocking Slot Attention by Changing Optimal Transport Costs

Yan Zhang

David W. Zhang

Gertjan J. Burghouts

Cees G. M. Snoek

Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to ha… (see more)ndle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose MESH (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.

2023-07-02

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors

Vitória Barin-Pacela

Kartik Ahuja

Pascal Vincent

Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from the observed distribution solely, and is formalized through the … (see more)theory of identifiability. The identifiability of independent latent factors is proven to be impossible in the unsupervised i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear map from factors to observations. In this work, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to recover quantized latent factors under a generic nonlinear diffeomorphism. We only assume that the latent factors have independent discontinuities in their density, without requiring the factors to be statistically independent. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized factor identifiability, and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of the quantized factors.

2023-06-18

ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)

A Survey of Self-Supervised and Few-Shot Object Detection

Gabriel Huang

Issam Hadj Laradji

David Vázquez

Pau Rodríguez

Labeling data is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation, which require … (see more)dense labeling of the image. While few-shot object detection is about training a model on novel (unseen) object classes with little data, it still requires prior training on many labeled examples of base (seen) classes. On the other hand, self-supervised methods aim at learning representations from unlabeled data which transfer well to downstream tasks such as object detection. Combining few-shot and self-supervised object detection is a promising research direction. In this survey, we review and characterize the most recent approaches on few-shot and self-supervised object detection. Then, we give our main takeaways and discuss future research directions. Project page: https://gabrielhuang.github.io/fsod-survey/.

2023-03-31

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (published)

arxiv.org

Synergies between Disentanglement and Sparsity: Generalization and Identifiability in Multi-Task Learning

Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding … (see more)is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse base-predictors improve generalization. In the context of multi-task learning, we prove a new identifiability result that provides conditions under which maximally sparse base-predictors yield disentangled representations. Motivated by this theoretical result, we propose a practical approach to learn disentangled representations based on a sparsity-promoting bi-level optimization problem. Finally, we explore a meta-learning version of this algorithm based on group Lasso multiclass SVM base-predictors, for which we derive a tractable dual formulation. It obtains competitive results on standard few-shot classification benchmarks, while each task is using only a fraction of the learned representations.

2022-12-31

ICML (published)