Hugo Larochelle appointed Scientific Director of Mila
An adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal and former head of Google's AI lab in Montréal, Hugo Larochelle is a pioneer in deep learning and one of Canada’s most respected researchers.
Mila’s AI for Climate Studio aims to bridge the gap between technology and impact to unlock the potential of AI in tackling the climate crisis rapidly and on a massive scale.
The program recently published its first policy brief, titled "Policy Considerations at the Intersection of Quantum Technologies and Artificial Intelligence," authored by Padmapriya Mohan.
We use cookies to analyze the browsing and usage of our website and to personalize your experience. You can disable these technologies at any time, but this may limit certain functionalities of the site. Read our Privacy Policy for more information.
Setting cookies
You can enable and disable the types of cookies you wish to accept. However certain choices you make could affect the services offered on our sites (e.g. suggestions, personalised ads, etc.).
Essential cookies
These cookies are necessary for the operation of the site and cannot be deactivated. (Still active)
Analytics cookies
Do you accept the use of cookies to measure the audience of our sites?
Multimedia Player
Do you accept the use of cookies to display and allow you to watch the video content hosted by our partners (YouTube, etc.)?
Publications
Are LLMs Breaking MT Metrics? Results of the WMT24 Metrics Shared Task
Entropy and mutual information in neural networks provide rich information on the learning process, but they have proven difficult to comput… (see more)e reliably in high dimensions. Indeed, in noisy and high-dimensional data, traditional estimates in ambient dimensions approach a fixed entropy and are prohibitively hard to compute. To address these issues, we leverage data geometry to access the underlying manifold and reliably compute these information-theoretic measures. Specifically, we define diffusion spectral entropy (DSE) in neural representations of a dataset as well as diffusion spectral mutual information (DSMI) between different variables representing data. First, we show that they form noise-resistant measures of intrinsic dimensionality and relationship strength in high-dimensional simulated data that outperform classic Shannon entropy, nonparametric estimation, and mutual information neural estimation (MINE). We then study the evolution of representations in classification networks with supervised learning, self-supervision, or overfitting. We observe that (1) DSE of neural representations increases during training; (2) DSMI with the class label increases during generalizable learning but stays stagnant during overfitting; (3) DSMI with the input signal shows differing trends: on MNIST it increases, while on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 it decreases. Finally, we show that DSE can be used to guide better network initialization and that DSMI can be used to predict downstream classification accuracy across 962 models on ImageNet.
We study the problem of building reasoning agents that are able to generalize in an effective manner. Towards this goal, we propose an end-t… (see more)o-end approach for building model-based reinforcement learning agents that dynamically focus their reasoning to the relevant aspects of the environment: after automatically identifying the distinct aspects of the environment, these agents dynamically filter out the relevant ones and then pass them to their simulator to perform partial reasoning. Unlike existing approaches, our approach works with pixel-based inputs and it allows for interpreting the focal points of the agent. Our quantitative analyses show that the proposed approach allows for effective generalization in high-dimensional domains with raw observational inputs. We also perform ablation analyses to validate our design choices. Finally, we demonstrate through qualitative analyses that our approach actually allows for building agents that focus their reasoning on the relevant aspects of the environment.
Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have notably advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of vi… (see more)sual and linguistic data. However, their performance has been typically assessed on general scene understanding - recognizing objects, attributes, and actions - rather than cultural comprehension. This study introduces CulturalVQA, a visual question-answering benchmark aimed at assessing VLM's geo-diverse cultural understanding. We curate a collection of 2,378 image-question pairs with 1-5 answers per question representing cultures from 11 countries across 5 continents. The questions probe understanding of various facets of culture such as clothing, food, drinks, rituals, and traditions. Benchmarking VLMs on CulturalVQA, including GPT-4V and Gemini, reveals disparity in their level of cultural understanding across regions, with strong cultural understanding capabilities for North America while significantly lower performance for Africa. We observe disparity in their performance across cultural facets too, with clothing, rituals, and traditions seeing higher performances than food and drink. These disparities help us identify areas where VLMs lack cultural understanding and demonstrate the potential of CulturalVQA as a comprehensive evaluation set for gauging VLM progress in understanding diverse cultures.
Recovering function names from stripped binaries is a crucial and time-consuming task for software reverse engineering’ particularly in en… (see more)hancing network reliability, resilience, and security. This paper tackles the challenge of recovering function names in stripped binaries, a fundamental step in reverse engineering. The absence of syntactic information and the possibility of different code producing identical behavior complicate this task. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel model, the Bidirectional Encoder Transformer for Assembly Code (BETAC), leveraging a transformer-based architecture known for effectively processing sequential data. BETAC utilizes self-attention mechanisms and feed-forward networks to discern complex relationships within assembly code for precise function name prediction. We evaluated BETAC against various existing encoder and decoder models in diverse binary datasets, including benign and malicious codes in multiple formats. Our model demonstrated superior performance over previous techniques in certain metrics and showed resilience against code obfuscation.