Yashar Hezaveh

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Biography

Yashar Hezaveh is an associate academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and director of the Montréal Institute for Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning (Ciela). He is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Université de Montréal and the Canada Research Chair in Astrophysical Data Analysis and Machine Learning. In addition, Hezaveh is an associate member of McGill University’s Trottier Space Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute in New York and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He was previously a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute (2018–2019) and a NASA Hubble Fellow at Stanford University (2013–2018).

Hezaveh is a world leader in the analysis of astrophysical data using deep learning. His current research focuses primarily on Bayesian inference in AI, the goal being to learn about the distribution of dark matter in strongly lensed galaxies using data from large cosmological surveys. His research is supported by the Schmidt Futures Foundation and the Simons Foundation.

Current Students

Missael Barco

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

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Misha Barth

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhvani Doshi

Master's Research - McGill University

Andreas Filipp

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

andreas.filipp@umontreal.ca

Ronan Legin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pablo Lemos

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Nicolas Payot

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Sacha Perry-Fagant

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Nolan Smyth

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Zach Sumners

Master's Research - McGill University

Yitian Sun

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Wassim Tenachi

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

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Publications

Neural Ratio Estimators Meet Distributional Shift and Mode Misspecification: A Cautionary Tale from Strong Gravitational Lensing

Andreas Filipp

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the field of astrophysics in applying Neural Ratio Estimators (NREs) to large-scale i… (see more)nference problems where both amortization and marginalization over a large number of nuisance parameters are needed. Here, in order to assess the true potential of this method to produce unbiased inference on real data, we investigate the robustness of NREs to distribution shifts and model misspecification in the specific scientific application of the measurement of dark matter population-level parameters using strong gravitational lensing. We investigate the behaviour of a trained NRE for test data presenting distributional shifts inside the bounds of training, as well as out of distribution, both in the linear and non-linear parameters of this problem. While our results show that NREs perform when tested perfectly in distribution, we find that they exhibit significant biases and drawbacks when confronted with slight deviations from the examples seen in the training distribution. This indicates the necessity for caution when applying NREs to real astrophysical data, where underlying distributions are not perfectly known and models do not perfectly reconstruct the true underlying distributions.

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)

Inpainting Galaxy Counts onto N-Body Simulations over Multiple Cosmologies and Astrophysics

Antoine Bourdin

Ronan Legin

Matthew Ho

Alexandre Adam

2024-06-16

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/AI4Science (poster)

Variable Star Light Curves in Koopman Space

Nicolas Mekhaël

Mario Pasquato

Gaia Carenini

Vittorio F. Braga

Piero Trevisan

Giuseppe Bono

2024-06-16

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/AI4Science (spotlight)

TEMPLATES: Characterization of a Merger in the Dusty Lensing SPT0418-47 System

Jared Cathey

Anthony H. Gonzalez

Sidney Lower

Kedar A. Phadke

Justin Spilker

Manuel Aravena

Matthew Bayliss

Jack E. Birkin

Simon Birrer

Scott Chapman

Håkon Dahle

Christopher C. Hayward

Ryley Hill

Taylor A. Hutchison

Keunho J. Kim

Guillaume Mahler

Daniel P. Marrone

Desika Narayanan

Alexander Navarre … (see 7 more)

Cassie Reuter

Jane R Rigby

Keren Sharon

Manuel Solimano

Nikolaus Sulzenauer

Joaquin Vieira

David Vizgan

2024-05-13

The Astrophysical Journal (published)

Interpretable Machine Learning for Finding Intermediate-mass Black Holes

Mario Pasquato

Piero Trevisan

Abbas Askar

Pablo Lemos

Gaia Carenini

Michela Mapelli

2024-04-09

The Astrophysical Journal (published)

Searching for Strong Gravitational Lenses

Cameron Lemon

Frederic Courbin

Anupreeta More

Paul Schechter

Raoul Cañameras

Ludovic Delchambre

Calvin Leung

Yiping Shu

Chiara Spiniello

Jonas Klüter

Richard G. McMahon

2024-02-21

Space Science Reviews (published)

PQMass: Probabilistic Assessment of the Quality of Generative Models using Probability Mass Estimation

Pablo Lemos

Sammy N. Sharief

Nikolay Malkin

We propose a comprehensive sample-based method for assessing the quality of generative models. The proposed approach enables the estimation … (see more)of the probability that two sets of samples are drawn from the same distribution, providing a statistically rigorous method for assessing the performance of a single generative model or the comparison of multiple competing models trained on the same dataset. This comparison can be conducted by dividing the space into non-overlapping regions and comparing the number of data samples in each region. The method only requires samples from the generative model and the test data. It is capable of functioning directly on high-dimensional data, obviating the need for dimensionality reduction. Significantly, the proposed method does not depend on assumptions regarding the density of the true distribution, and it does not rely on training or fitting any auxiliary models. Instead, it focuses on approximating the integral of the density (probability mass) across various sub-regions within the data space.

2024-02-06

ArXiv (preprint)

On Diffusion Modeling for Anomaly Detection

Known for their impressive performance in generative modeling, diffusion models are attractive candidates for density-based anomaly detectio… (see more)n. This paper investigates different variations of diffusion modeling for unsupervised and semi-supervised anomaly detection. In particular, we find that Denoising Diffusion Probability Models (DDPM) are performant on anomaly detection benchmarks yet computationally expensive. By simplifying DDPM in application to anomaly detection, we are naturally led to an alternative approach called Diffusion Time Estimation (DTE). DTE estimates the distribution over diffusion time for a given input and uses the mode or mean of this distribution as the anomaly score. We derive an analytical form for this density and leverage a deep neural network to improve inference efficiency. Through empirical evaluations on the ADBench benchmark, we demonstrate that all diffusion-based anomaly detection methods perform competitively for both semi-supervised and unsupervised settings. Notably, DTE achieves orders of magnitude faster inference time than DDPM, while outperforming it on this benchmark. These results establish diffusion-based anomaly detection as a scalable alternative to traditional methods and recent deep-learning techniques for standard unsupervised and semi-supervised anomaly detection settings.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

Caustics: A Python Package for Accelerated Strong Gravitational Lensing Simulations

Connor Stone

Alexandre Adam

Adam Coogan

M. J. Yantovski-Barth

Andreas Filipp

Landung Setiawan

Cordero Core

Ronan Legin

Charles Wilson

Gabriel Missael Barco

2024-01-01

J. Open Source Softw. (published)

Extended Lyman-alpha emission towards the SPT2349-56 protocluster at $z=4.3$

Yordanka Apostolovski

Manuel Aravena

Timo Anguita

Matthieu Béthermin

James R. Burgoyne

Scott Chapman

C. Breuck

Anthony R Gonzalez

Max Gronke

Lucia Guaita

Ryley Hill

Sreevani Jarugula

E. Johnston

M. Malkan

Desika Narayanan

Cassie Reuter

Manuel Solimano

Justin Spilker

Nikolaus Sulzenauer … (see 3 more)

Joaquin Vieira

David Vizgan

Axel Weiß

Deep spectroscopic surveys with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed that some of the brightest infrared so… (see more)urces in the sky correspond to concentrations of submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at high redshift. Among these, the SPT2349-56 protocluster system is amongst the most extreme examples given its high source density and integrated star formation rate. We conducted a deep Lyman-alpha line emission survey around SPT2349-56 using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in order to characterize this uniquely dense environment. Taking advantage of the deep three-dimensional nature of this survey, we performed a sensitive search for Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) toward the core and northern extension of the protocluster, which correspond to the brightest infrared regions in this field. Using a smoothed narrowband image extracted from the MUSE datacube around the protocluster redshift, we searched for possible extended structures. We identify only three LAEs at

2023-12-20

Astronomy & Astrophysics (published)

Improving Gradient-guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference

Will Handley

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling algorithm, …

2023-12-06

ArXiv (preprint)

Active learning meets fractal decision boundaries: a cautionary tale from the Sitnikov three-body problem

Nicolas Payot

Mario Pasquato

Alessandro A. Trani

Chaotic systems such as the gravitational N-body problem are ubiquitous in astronomy. Machine learning (ML) is increasingly deployed to pred… (see more)ict the evolution of such systems, e.g. with the goal of speeding up simulations. Strategies such as active Learning (AL) are a natural choice to optimize ML training. Here we showcase an AL failure when predicting the stability of the Sitnikov three-body problem, the simplest case of N-body problem displaying chaotic behavior. We link this failure to the fractal nature of our classification problem's decision boundary. This is a potential pitfall in optimizing large sets of N-body simulations via AL in the context of star cluster physics, galactic dynamics, or cosmology.

2023-11-29

ArXiv (preprint)