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Vincent Dumoulin

Alumni

Publications

The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics
Vincent Dumoulin
Otilia Stretcu
Jenny Hamer
Lauren Harrell
Rob Laber
Hugo Larochelle
Bart Van Merriënboer
Amanda Navine
Patrick Hart
Ben Williams
Timothy A. C. Lamont
Tries B. Rasak
Mars Coral Restoration Team
Sheryn Brodie
Brendan Doohan
Philip Eichinski
Paul Roe
Lin Schwarzkopf
Tom Denton
2025-05-05
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The Search for Squawk: Agile Modeling in Bioacoustics
Vincent Dumoulin
Otilia Stretcu
Jenny Hamer
Lauren Harrell
Rob Laber
Hugo Larochelle
Bart Van Merriënboer
Amanda Navine
Patrick Hart
Ben Williams
Timothy A. C. Lamont
Tries B. Rasak
Mars Coral Restoration Team
Sheryn Brodie
Brendan Doohan
Philip Eichinski
Paul Roe
Lin Schwarzkopf
Tom Denton
2025-05-05
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Capturing Individual Human Preferences with Reward Features
Andre Barreto
Vincent Dumoulin
Yiran Mao
Nicolas Perez-Nieves
Bobak Shahriari
Yann Dauphin
Doina Precup
Hugo Larochelle
Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward model that does not distinguish between people. We argu… (see more)e that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for disagreement, like in the training of large language models. We propose a method to specialise a reward model to a person or group of people. Our approach builds on the observation that individual preferences can be captured as a linear combination of a set of general reward features. We show how to learn such features and subsequently use them to quickly adapt the reward model to a specific individual, even if their preferences are not reflected in the training data. We present experiments with large language models comparing the proposed architecture with a non-adaptive reward model and also adaptive counterparts, including models that do in-context personalisation. Depending on how much disagreement there is in the training data, our model either significantly outperforms the baselines or matches their performance with a simpler architecture and more stable training.
2025-03-21
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Capturing Individual Human Preferences with Reward Features
Andr'e Barreto
Vincent Dumoulin
Yiran Mao
Nicolas Perez-Nieves
Bobak Shahriari
Yann Dauphin
Doina Precup
Hugo Larochelle
2025-03-21
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition
Eleni Triantafillou
Peter Kairouz
Fabian Pedregosa
Jamie Hayes
Meghdad Kurmanji
Kairan Zhao
Vincent Dumoulin
Julio C. S. Jacques Junior
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Jun Wan
Lisheng Sun-Hosoya
Sergio Escalera
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Peter Triantafillou
Isabelle Guyon
We present the findings of the first NeurIPS competition on unlearning, which sought to stimulate the development of novel algorithms and in… (see more)itiate discussions on formal and robust evaluation methodologies. The competition was highly successful: nearly 1,200 teams from across the world participated, and a wealth of novel, imaginative solutions with different characteristics were contributed. In this paper, we analyze top solutions and delve into discussions on benchmarking unlearning, which itself is a research problem. The evaluation methodology we developed for the competition measures forgetting quality according to a formal notion of unlearning, while incorporating model utility for a holistic evaluation. We analyze the effectiveness of different instantiations of this evaluation framework vis-a-vis the associated compute cost, and discuss implications for standardizing evaluation. We find that the ranking of leading methods remains stable under several variations of this framework, pointing to avenues for reducing the cost of evaluation. Overall, our findings indicate progress in unlearning, with top-performing competition entries surpassing existing algorithms under our evaluation framework. We analyze trade-offs made by different algorithms and strengths or weaknesses in terms of generalizability to new datasets, paving the way for advancing both benchmarking and algorithm development in this important area.
2024-06-13
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition
Eleni Triantafillou
Peter Kairouz
Fabian Pedregosa
Jamie Hayes
Meghdad Kurmanji
Kairan Zhao
Vincent Dumoulin
Julio C. S. Jacques Junior
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Jun Wan
Lisheng Sun-Hosoya
Sergio Escalera
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Peter Triantafillou
Isabelle Guyon
We present the findings of the first NeurIPS competition on unlearning, which sought to stimulate the development of novel algorithms and in… (see more)itiate discussions on formal and robust evaluation methodologies. The competition was highly successful: nearly 1,200 teams from across the world participated, and a wealth of novel, imaginative solutions with different characteristics were contributed. In this paper, we analyze top solutions and delve into discussions on benchmarking unlearning, which itself is a research problem. The evaluation methodology we developed for the competition measures forgetting quality according to a formal notion of unlearning, while incorporating model utility for a holistic evaluation. We analyze the effectiveness of different instantiations of this evaluation framework vis-a-vis the associated compute cost, and discuss implications for standardizing evaluation. We find that the ranking of leading methods remains stable under several variations of this framework, pointing to avenues for reducing the cost of evaluation. Overall, our findings indicate progress in unlearning, with top-performing competition entries surpassing existing algorithms under our evaluation framework. We analyze trade-offs made by different algorithms and strengths or weaknesses in terms of generalizability to new datasets, paving the way for advancing both benchmarking and algorithm development in this important area.
2024-06-13
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition
Eleni Triantafillou
Peter Kairouz
Fabian Pedregosa
Jamie Hayes
Meghdad Kurmanji
Kairan Zhao
Vincent Dumoulin
Julio C. S. Jacques Junior
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Jun Wan
Lisheng Sun-Hosoya
Sergio Escalera
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Peter Triantafillou
Isabelle Guyon
We present the findings of the first NeurIPS competition on unlearning, which sought to stimulate the development of novel algorithms and in… (see more)itiate discussions on formal and robust evaluation methodologies. The competition was highly successful: nearly 1,200 teams from across the world participated, and a wealth of novel, imaginative solutions with different characteristics were contributed. In this paper, we analyze top solutions and delve into discussions on benchmarking unlearning, which itself is a research problem. The evaluation methodology we developed for the competition measures forgetting quality according to a formal notion of unlearning, while incorporating model utility for a holistic evaluation. We analyze the effectiveness of different instantiations of this evaluation framework vis-a-vis the associated compute cost, and discuss implications for standardizing evaluation. We find that the ranking of leading methods remains stable under several variations of this framework, pointing to avenues for reducing the cost of evaluation. Overall, our findings indicate progress in unlearning, with top-performing competition entries surpassing existing algorithms under our evaluation framework. We analyze trade-offs made by different algorithms and strengths or weaknesses in terms of generalizability to new datasets, paving the way for advancing both benchmarking and algorithm development in this important area.
2024-06-13
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Data Selection for Transfer Unlearning
Nazanin Mohammadi Sepahvand
Vincent Dumoulin
Eleni Triantafillou
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
2024-05-16
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A density estimation perspective on learning from pairwise human preferences
Vincent Dumoulin
Daniel D. Johnson
Pablo Samuel Castro
Hugo Larochelle
Yann Dauphin
Learning from human feedback (LHF) -- and in particular learning from pairwise preferences -- has recently become a crucial ingredient in tr… (see more)aining large language models (LLMs), and has been the subject of much research. Most recent works frame it as a reinforcement learning problem, where a reward function is learned from pairwise preference data and the LLM is treated as a policy which is adapted to maximize the rewards, often under additional regularization constraints. We propose an alternative interpretation which centers on the generative process for pairwise preferences and treats LHF as a density estimation problem. We provide theoretical and empirical results showing that for a family of generative processes defined via preference behavior distribution equations, training a reward function on pairwise preferences effectively models an annotator's implicit preference distribution. Finally, we discuss and present findings on"annotator misspecification"-- failure cases where wrong modeling assumptions are made about annotator behavior, resulting in poorly-adapted models -- suggesting that approaches that learn from pairwise human preferences could have trouble learning from a population of annotators with diverse viewpoints.
2024-02-27
TMLR (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Head2Toe: Utilizing Intermediate Representations for Better Transfer Learning
Utku Evci
Vincent Dumoulin
Hugo Larochelle
Michael Curtis Mozer
2022-06-28
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
arxiv.org
Impact of Aliasing on Generalization in Deep Convolutional Networks
Cristina Vasconcelos
Hugo Larochelle
Vincent Dumoulin
Rob Romijnders
Nicolas Le Roux
Ross Goroshin
We investigate the impact of aliasing on generalization in Deep Convolutional Networks and show that data augmentation schemes alone are una… (see more)ble to prevent it due to structural limitations in widely used architectures. Drawing insights from frequency analysis theory, we take a closer look at ResNet and EfficientNet architectures and review the trade-off between aliasing and information loss in each of their major components. We show how to mitigate aliasing by inserting non-trainable low-pass filters at key locations, particularly where networks lack the capacity to learn them. These simple architectural changes lead to substantial improvements in generalization on i.i.d. and even more on out-of-distribution conditions, such as image classification under natural corruptions on ImageNet-C [11] and few-shot learning on Meta-Dataset [26]. State-of-the art results are achieved on both datasets without introducing additional trainable parameters and using the default hyper-parameters of open source codebases.
2021-10-10
2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Comparing Transfer and Meta Learning Approaches on a Unified Few-Shot Classification Benchmark
Vincent Dumoulin
Neil Houlsby
Utku Evci
Xiaohua Zhai
Ross Goroshin
Sylvain Gelly
Hugo Larochelle
Meta and transfer learning are two successful families of approaches to few-shot learning. Despite highly related goals, state-of-the-art ad… (see more)vances in each family are measured largely in isolation of each other. As a result of diverging evaluation norms, a direct or thorough comparison of different approaches is challenging. To bridge this gap, we perform a cross-family study of the best transfer and meta learners on both a large-scale meta-learning benchmark (Meta-Dataset, MD), and a transfer learning benchmark (Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark, VTAB). We find that, on average, large-scale transfer methods (Big Transfer, BiT) outperform competing approaches on MD, even when trained only on ImageNet. In contrast, meta-learning approaches struggle to compete on VTAB when trained and validated on MD. However, BiT is not without limitations, and pushing for scale does not improve performance on highly out-of-distribution MD tasks. In performing this study, we reveal a number of discrepancies in evaluation norms and study some of these in light of the performance gap. We hope that this work facilitates sharing of insights from each community, and accelerates progress on few-shot learning.
2021-04-06
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org