Portrait of Doina Precup

Doina Precup

Core Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Associate Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Research Team Leader, Google DeepMind

Biography

Doina Precup combines teaching at McGill University with fundamental research on reinforcement learning, in particular AI applications in areas of significant social impact, such as health care. She is interested in machine decision-making in situations where uncertainty is high.

In addition to heading the Montreal office of Google DeepMind, Precup is a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Her areas of speciality are artificial intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning, reasoning and planning under uncertainty, and applications.

Current Students

Master's Research - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Research Intern - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
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Master's Research - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
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Research Intern - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
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Collaborating researcher - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
PhD - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
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Collaborating researcher - McGill University
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PhD - McGill University
Undergraduate - McGill University
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
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PhD - McGill University
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Publications

Code as Reward: Empowering Reinforcement Learning with VLMs
David Venuto
Mohammad Sami Nur Islam
Martin Klissarov
Sherry Yang
Ankit Anand
Mixtures of Experts Unlock Parameter Scaling for Deep RL
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Ghada Sokar
Timon Willi
Clare Lyle
Jesse Farebrother
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
The recent rapid progress in (self) supervised learning models is in large part predicted by empirical scaling laws: a model's performance s… (see more)cales proportionally to its size. Analogous scaling laws remain elusive for reinforcement learning domains, however, where increasing the parameter count of a model often hurts its final performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that incorporating Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) modules, and in particular Soft MoEs (Puigcerver et al., 2023), into value-based networks results in more parameter-scalable models, evidenced by substantial performance increases across a variety of training regimes and model sizes. This work thus provides strong empirical evidence towards developing scaling laws for reinforcement learning.
Nash Learning from Human Feedback
Remi Munos
Michal Valko
Daniele Calandriello
Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar
Mark Rowland
Zhaohan Daniel Guo
Yunhao Tang
Matthieu Geist
Thomas Mesnard
Côme Fiegel
Andrea Michi
Marco Selvi
Sertan Girgin
Nikola Momchev
Olivier Bachem
Daniel J Mankowitz
Bilal Piot
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human pref… (see more)erences. Traditionally, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from pairwise human feedback, i.e., expressed as preferences between pairs of text generations. Subsequently, the LLM's policy is fine-tuned to maximize the reward through a reinforcement learning algorithm. In this study, we introduce an alternative pipeline for the fine-tuning of LLMs using pairwise human feedback. Our approach entails the initial learning of a pairwise preference model, which is conditioned on two inputs (instead of a single input in the case of a reward model) given a prompt, followed by the pursuit of a policy that consistently generates responses preferred over those generated by any competing policy, thus defining the Nash equilibrium of this preference model. We term this approach Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF). In the context of a tabular policy representation, we present a novel algorithmic solution, Nash-MD, founded on the principles of mirror descent. This algorithm produces a sequence of policies, with the last iteration converging to the regularized Nash equilibrium. Additionally, we explore parametric representations of policies and introduce gradient descent algorithms for deep-learning architectures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by presenting experimental results on a text summarization task. We believe NLHF offers a compelling avenue for fine-tuning LLMs and enhancing the alignment of LLMs with human preferences.
Discrete Probabilistic Inference as Control in Multi-path Environments
Tristan Deleu
Padideh Nouri
Nikolay Malkin
We consider the problem of sampling from a discrete and structured distribution as a sequential decision problem, where the objective is to … (see more)find a stochastic policy such that objects are sampled at the end of this sequential process proportionally to some predefined reward. While we could use maximum entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) to solve this problem for some distributions, it has been shown that in general, the distribution over states induced by the optimal policy may be biased in cases where there are multiple ways to generate the same object. To address this issue, Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) learn a stochastic policy that samples objects proportionally to their reward by approximately enforcing a conservation of flows across the whole Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this paper, we extend recent methods correcting the reward in order to guarantee that the marginal distribution induced by the optimal MaxEnt RL policy is proportional to the original reward, regardless of the structure of the underlying MDP. We also prove that some flow-matching objectives found in the GFlowNet literature are in fact equivalent to well-established MaxEnt RL algorithms with a corrected reward. Finally, we study empirically the performance of multiple MaxEnt RL and GFlowNet algorithms on multiple problems involving sampling from discrete distributions.
Conditions on Preference Relations that Guarantee the Existence of Optimal Policies
Jonathan Colaco Carr
On learning history-based policies for controlling Markov decision processes
Gandharv Patil
On the Privacy of Selection Mechanisms with Gaussian Noise
Jonathan Lebensold
Borja Balle
Report Noisy Max and Above Threshold are two classical differentially private (DP) selection mechanisms. Their output is obtained by adding … (see more)noise to a sequence of low-sensitivity queries and reporting the identity of the query whose (noisy) answer satisfies a certain condition. Pure DP guarantees for these mechanisms are easy to obtain when Laplace noise is added to the queries. On the other hand, when instantiated using Gaussian noise, standard analyses only yield approximate DP guarantees despite the fact that the outputs of these mechanisms lie in a discrete space. In this work, we revisit the analysis of Report Noisy Max and Above Threshold with Gaussian noise and show that, under the additional assumption that the underlying queries are bounded, it is possible to provide pure ex-ante DP bounds for Report Noisy Max and pure ex-post DP bounds for Above Threshold. The resulting bounds are tight and depend on closed-form expressions that can be numerically evaluated using standard methods. Empirically we find these lead to tighter privacy accounting in the high privacy, low data regime. Further, we propose a simple privacy filter for composing pure ex-post DP guarantees, and use it to derive a fully adaptive Gaussian Sparse Vector Technique mechanism. Finally, we provide experiments on mobility and energy consumption datasets demonstrating that our Sparse Vector Technique is practically competitive with previous approaches and requires less hyper-parameter tuning.
Offline Multitask Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning
Haque Ishfaq
Thanh Nguyen-Tang
Songtao Feng
Raman Arora
Mengdi Wang
Ming Yin 0003
Training Matters: Unlocking Potentials of Deeper Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
Sitao Luan
Mingde Zhao
Xiao-Wen Chang
When Do We Need Graph Neural Networks for Node Classification?
Sitao Luan
Chenqing Hua
Qincheng Lu
Jiaqi Zhu
Xiao-Wen Chang
Mixtures of Experts Unlock Parameter Scaling for Deep RL
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Ghada Sokar
Timon Willi
Clare Lyle
Jesse Farebrother
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
On the Privacy of Selection Mechanisms with Gaussian Noise
Jonathan Lebensold
Borja Balle