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.
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.
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
Neighbor Auto-Grouping Graph Neural Networks for Handover Parameter Configuration in Cellular Network
We propose a new first-order optimization algorithm — AcceleratedGradient-OptimisticGradient (AG-OG) Descent Ascent—for separable convex… (see more)-concave minimax optimization. The main idea of our algorithm is to carefully leverage the structure of the minimax problem, performing Nesterov acceleration on the individual component and optimistic gradient on the coupling component. Equipped with proper restarting, we show that AG-OG achieves the optimal convergence rate (up to a constant) for a variety of settings, including bilinearly coupled strongly convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-SC-SC), bilinearly coupled convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-C-SC), and bilinear games. We also extend our algorithm to the stochastic setting and achieve the optimal convergence rate in both bi-SC-SC and bi-C-SC settings. AG-OG is the first single-call algorithm with optimal convergence rates in both deterministic and stochastic settings for bilinearly coupled minimax optimization problems.
We propose a new first-order optimization algorithm --- AcceleratedGradient-OptimisticGradient (AG-OG) Descent Ascent---for separable convex… (see more)-concave minimax optimization. The main idea of our algorithm is to carefully leverage the structure of the minimax problem, performing Nesterov acceleration on the individual component and optimistic gradient on the coupling component. Equipped with proper restarting, we show that AG-OG achieves the optimal convergence rate (up to a constant) for a variety of settings, including bilinearly coupled strongly convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-SC-SC), bilinearly coupled convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-C-SC), and bilinear games. We also extend our algorithm to the stochastic setting and achieve the optimal convergence rate in both bi-SC-SC and bi-C-SC settings. AG-OG is the first single-call algorithm with optimal convergence rates in both deterministic and stochastic settings for bilinearly coupled minimax optimization problems.
Recent promising results have generated a surge of interest in continuous optimization methods for causal discovery from observational data.… (see more) However, there are theoretical limitations on the identifiability of underlying structures obtained solely from observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, provides richer information about the underlying data-generating process. Nevertheless, extending and applying methods designed for observational data to include interventions is a challenging problem. To address this issue, we propose a general framework based on neural networks to develop models that incorporate both observational and interventional data. Notably, our method can handle the challenging and realistic scenario where the identity of the intervened upon variable is unknown. We evaluate our proposed approach in the context of graph recovery, both de novo and from a partially-known edge set. Our method achieves strong benchmark results on various structure learning tasks, including structure recovery of synthetic graphs as well as standard graphs from the Bayesian Network Repository
. Neural activity tends to reside on manifolds whose dimension is much lower than the dimension of the whole neural state space. Experiments… (see more) using brain-computer interfaces with microelectrode arrays implanted in the motor cortex of nonhuman primates tested the hypothesis that external perturbations should produce different adaptation strategies depending on how “aligned” the perturbation is with respect to a pre-existing intrinsic manifold. On the one hand, perturbations within the manifold (WM) evoked fast reassociations of existing patterns for rapid adaptation. On the other hand, perturbations outside the manifold (OM) triggered the slow emergence of new neural patterns underlying a much slower—and, without adequate training protocols, inconsistent or virtually impossible—adaptation. This suggests that the time scale and the overall difficulty of the brain to adapt depend fundamentally on the structure of neural activity. Here, we used a simplified static Gaussian model to show that gradient-descent learning could explain the differences between adaptation to WM and OM perturbations. For small learning rates, we found that the adaptation speeds were different but the model eventually adapted to both perturbations. Moreover, sufficiently large learning rates could entirely prohibit adaptation to OM perturbations while preserving adaptation to WM perturbations, in agreement with experiments. Adopting an incremental training protocol, as has been done in experiments, permitted a swift recovery of a full adaptation in the cases where OM perturbations were previously impossible to relearn. Finally, we also found that gradient descent was compatible with the reassociation mechanism on short adaptation time scales. Since gradient descent has many biologically plausible variants, our findings thus establish gradient-based learning as a plausible mechanism for adaptation under network-level constraints, with a central role for the learning rate.
NEURAL MANIFOLDS AND GRADIENT-BASED ADAPTATION IN NEURAL-INTERFACE TASKS
. Neural activity tends to reside on manifolds whose dimension is much lower than the dimension of the whole neural state space. Experiments… (see more) using brain-computer interfaces with microelectrode arrays implanted in the motor cortex of nonhuman primates tested the hypothesis that external perturbations should produce different adaptation strategies depending on how “aligned” the perturbation is with respect to a pre-existing intrinsic manifold. On the one hand, perturbations within the manifold (WM) evoked fast reassociations of existing patterns for rapid adaptation. On the other hand, perturbations outside the manifold (OM) triggered the slow emergence of new neural patterns underlying a much slower—and, without adequate training protocols, inconsistent or virtually impossible—adaptation. This suggests that the time scale and the overall difficulty of the brain to adapt depend fundamentally on the structure of neural activity. Here, we used a simplified static Gaussian model to show that gradient-descent learning could explain the differences between adaptation to WM and OM perturbations. For small learning rates, we found that the adaptation speeds were different but the model eventually adapted to both perturbations. Moreover, sufficiently large learning rates could entirely prohibit adaptation to OM perturbations while preserving adaptation to WM perturbations, in agreement with experiments. Adopting an incremental training protocol, as has been done in experiments, permitted a swift recovery of a full adaptation in the cases where OM perturbations were previously impossible to relearn. Finally, we also found that gradient descent was compatible with the reassociation mechanism on short adaptation time scales. Since gradient descent has many biologically plausible variants, our findings thus establish gradient-based learning as a plausible mechanism for adaptation under network-level constraints, with a central role for the learning rate.
(1) N (x; θ) = Ll+1 ○ σl ○Ll ○ σl−1 ○ . . . ○ σ1 ○L1. The symbol Lk denotes the k’s affine operator of the form Lk(x) = … (see more)Akx + bk, while σk denotes a nonlinear function called an activation function. The activation functions are chosen by the user. The matrices Ak and shift vectors (or bias vectors) bk are encoded into the argument θ: θ = {Ak, bk} l+1 k=1. The term training neural network means finding {Ak, bk} l+1 k=1 such that N (x; θ) satisfies certain conditions. These conditions are described by the loss function chosen by the user. For example, one might want the neural network to assume certain values fj at certain points xj , j = 1, . . . ,N . These points x are called the training data. In this case, a common choice of the loss function is the least squares error:
Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision for Stylized Opinion Summarization
Opinion summarization research has primar-001 ily focused on generating summaries reflect-002 ing important opinions from customer reviews 0… (see more)03 without paying much attention to the writing 004 style. In this paper, we propose the stylized 005 opinion summarization task, which aims to 006 generate a summary of customer reviews in 007 the desired (e.g., professional) writing style. 008 To tackle the difficulty in collecting customer 009 and professional review pairs, we develop a 010 non-parallel training framework, Noisy Pair-011 ing and Partial Supervision ( NAPA ), which 012 trains a stylized opinion summarization sys-013 tem from non-parallel customer and profes-014 sional review sets. We create a benchmark P RO - 015 S UM by collecting customer and professional 016 reviews from Yelp and Michelin. Experimental 017 results on P RO S UM and FewSum demonstrate 018 that our non-parallel training framework con-019 sistently improves both automatic and human 020 evaluations, successfully building a stylized 021 opinion summarization model that can gener-022 ate professionally-written summaries from cus-023 tomer reviews. 024
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in va… (see more)rious settings. In this work we show that perturbing only the affine normalization parameters (typically comprising 0.1% of the total parameters) in the adversarial step of SAM can outperform perturbing all of the parameters.This finding generalizes to different SAM variants and both ResNet (Batch Normalization) and Vision Transformer (Layer Normalization) architectures. We consider alternative sparse perturbation approaches and find that these do not achieve similar performance enhancement at such extreme sparsity levels, showing that this behaviour is unique to the normalization layers. Although our findings reaffirm the effectiveness of SAM in improving generalization performance, they cast doubt on whether this is solely caused by reduced sharpness.
We consider online optimization problems with time-varying linear equality constraints. In this framework, an agent makes sequential decisio… (see more)ns using only prior information. At every round, the agent suffers an environment-determined loss and must satisfy time-varying constraints. Both the loss functions and the constraints can be chosen adversarially. We propose the Online Projected Equality-constrained Newton Method (OPEN-M) to tackle this family of problems. We obtain sublinear dynamic regret and constraint violation bounds for OPEN-M under mild conditions. Namely, smoothness of the loss function and boundedness of the inverse Hessian at the optimum are required, but not convexity. Finally, we show OPEN-M outperforms state-of-the-art online constrained optimization algorithms in a numerical network flow application.
Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the de-facto standard in real-world machine translation applications. However, NMT models can un… (see more)predictably produce severely pathological translations, known as hallucinations, that seriously undermine user trust. It becomes thus crucial to implement effective preventive strategies to guarantee their proper functioning. In this paper, we address the problem of hallucination detection in NMT by following a simple intuition: as hallucinations are detached from the source content, they exhibit encoder-decoder attention patterns that are statistically different from those of good quality translations. We frame this problem with an optimal transport formulation and propose a fully unsupervised, plug-in detector that can be used with any attention-based NMT model. Experimental results show that our detector not only outperforms all previous model-based detectors, but is also competitive with detectors that employ external models trained on millions of samples for related tasks such as quality estimation and cross-lingual sentence similarity.