Vincent Michalski

Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations

Raymond Li

Hannes Schulz

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 dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset 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.

2017-12-31

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018) (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot

Iulian V. Serban

Mathieu Germain

Michael Pieper

Nan Rosemary Ke

Sai Mudumba

Alexandre De Brébisson

Jose M. R. Sotelo

We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon … (see more)Alexa Prize competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language generation and retrieval models, including template-based models, bag-of-words models, sequence-to-sequence neural network and latent variable neural network models. By applying reinforcement learning to crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it performed significantly better than many competing systems. Due to its machine learning architecture, the system is likely to improve with additional data.

2017-09-06

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

RATM: Recurrent Attentive Tracking Model

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Vincent Michalski

Roland Memisevic

Christopher Pal

Vincent Michalski

We present an attention-based modular neural framework for computer vision. The framework uses a soft attention mechanism allowing models to… (see more) be trained with gradient descent. It consists of three modules: a recurrent attention module controlling where to look in an image or video frame, a feature-extraction module providing a representation of what is seen, and an objective module formalizing why the model learns its attentive behavior. The attention module allows the model to focus computation on task-related information in the input. We apply the framework to several object tracking tasks and explore various design choices. We experiment with three data sets, bouncing ball, moving digits and the real-world KTH data set. The proposed Recurrent Attentive Tracking Model performs well on all three tasks and can generalize to related but previously unseen sequences from a challenging tracking data set.

2017-04-11

cv-foundation.org/CVPR/2017/BNMW (unknown)

doi.org

openreview.net

Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions

Rami Al-Rfou

Guillaume Alain

Amjad Almahairi

Christof Angermueller

Dzmitry Bahdanau

Nicolas Ballas

Frédéric Bastien

Justin Bayer

Anatoly Belikov

Alexander Belopolsky

Josh Bleecher Snyder

Nicolas Boulanger-Lewandowski

Xavier Bouthillier

Alexandre De Brébisson

Olivier Breuleux … (see 92 more)

Pierre-Luc Carrier

Paul Christiano

Myriam Côté

Yann N. Dauphin

Julien Demouth

Sander Dieleman

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Ziye Fan

Mathieu Germain

Matt Graham

Balázs Hidasi

Arjun Jain

Kai Jia

Mikhail Korobov

Vivek Kulkarni

Alex Lamb

Pascal Lamblin

Eric Larsen

César Laurent

Sean Lee

Simon Lefrancois

Simon Lemieux

Nicholas Léonard

Zhouhan Lin

Jesse A. Livezey

Cory Lorenz

Jeremiah Lowin

Qianli Ma

Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Robert T. McGibbon

Mehdi Mirza

Alberto Orlandi

Christopher Pal

Razvan Pascanu

Mohammad Pezeshki

Colin Raffel

Daniel Renshaw

Matthew Rocklin

Adriana Romero

Markus Roth

Peter Sadowski

John Salvatier

François Savard

Jan Schlüter

John Schulman

Gabriel Schwartz

Iulian Vlad Serban

Dmitriy Serdyuk

Samira Shabanian

Etienne Simon

Sigurd Spieckermann

S. Ramana Subramanyam

Gijs van Tulder

Sebastian Urban

Dustin J. Webb

Matthew 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.

2015-12-31

arXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

TRAIL: Responsible AI for Professionals and Leaders

Mila Ventures Founder in Residence

AI Advantage: Productivity in Public Service

Vincent Michalski

Publications

TRAIL: Responsible AI for Professionals and Leaders

Mila Ventures Founder in Residence

AI Advantage: Productivity in Public Service

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Vincent Michalski

Publications