Yashar Hezaveh

Google Scholar

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 :

Google Scholar

Misha Barth

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Antoine Bourdin

Research Intern - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Etienne Collin

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

contact@etiennecollin.com

Franco Del Balso

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Noé Dia

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Dhvani Doshi

Master's Research - McGill University

Andreas Filipp

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

andreas.filipp@umontreal.ca

Jenna Karcheski

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Stephanie Lee

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Ronan Legin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pablo Lemos

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Parker Levesque

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Hasti Nafisi

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Guy Wolf

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 :

Publications

Strong gravitational lensing as a probe of dark matter

Simona Vegetti

Simon Birrer

Giulia Despali

C. Fassnacht

Daniel A. Gilman

J. McKean

D. Powell

Conor M. O'riordan

Vernardos

Dark matter structures within strong gravitational lens galaxies and along their line of sight leave a gravitational imprint on the multiple… (see more) images of lensed sources. Strong gravitational lensing provides, therefore, a key test of different dark matter models in a way that is independent of the baryonic content of matter structures on subgalactic scales. In this chapter, we describe how galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing observations are sensitive to the physical nature of dark matter. We provide a historical perspective of the field, and review its current status. We discuss the challenges and advances in terms of data, treatment of systematic errors and theoretical predictions, that will enable one to deliver a stringent and robust test of different dark matter models in the near future. With the advent of the next generation of sky surveys, the number of known strong gravitational lens systems is expected to increase by several orders of magnitude. Coupled with high-resolution follow-up observations, these data will provide a key opportunity to constrain the properties of dark matter with strong gravitational lensing.

2024-07-30

Space Science Reviews (published)

Tackling the Problem of Distributional Shifts: Correcting Misspecified, High-Dimensional Data-Driven Priors for Inverse Problems

Gabriel Missael Barco

Alexandre Adam

Connor Stone

Bayesian inference for inverse problems hinges critically on the choice of priors. In the absence of specific prior information, population-… (see more)level distributions can serve as effective priors for parameters of interest. With the advent of machine learning, the use of data-driven population-level distributions (encoded, e.g., in a trained deep neural network) as priors is emerging as an appealing alternative to simple parametric priors in a variety of inverse problems. However, in many astrophysical applications, it is often difficult or even impossible to acquire independent and identically distributed samples from the underlying data-generating process of interest to train these models. In these cases, corrupted data or a surrogate, e.g. a simulator, is often used to produce training samples, meaning that there is a risk of obtaining misspecified priors. This, in turn, can bias the inferred posteriors in ways that are difficult to quantify, which limits the potential applicability of these models in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose addressing this issue by iteratively updating the population-level distributions by retraining the model with posterior samples from different sets of observations and showcase the potential of this method on the problem of background image reconstruction in strong gravitational lensing when score-based models are used as data-driven priors. We show that starting from a misspecified prior distribution, the updated distribution becomes progressively closer to the underlying population-level distribution, and the resulting posterior samples exhibit reduced bias after several updates.

2024-07-24

ArXiv (preprint)

Improving Gradient-Guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference

Pablo Lemos

Nikolay Malkin

Will Handley

Yoshua Bengio

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling (GGNS) algorithm, combining the state of the art in differentiable … (see more)programming, Hamiltonian slice sampling, clustering, mode separation, dynamic nested sampling, and parallelization. This unique combination allows GGNS to scale well with dimensionality and perform competitively on a variety of synthetic and real-world problems. We also show the potential of combining nested sampling with generative flow networks to obtain large amounts of high-quality samples from the posterior distribution. This combination leads to faster mode discovery and more accurate estimates of the partition function.

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

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

2024-06-21

ArXiv (preprint)

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

Mario Pasquato

Gaia Carenini

Nicolas Mekhaël

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

2024-02-06

ArXiv (preprint)

On Diffusion Modeling for Anomaly Detection

Victor Livernoche

Vineet Jain

Siamak Ravanbakhsh

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)