Portrait de Aaron Courville

Aaron Courville

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur titulaire, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Communication efficace dans un jeu de somme générale
Modèles génératifs
Systèmes multi-agents
Théorie des jeux
Traitement du langage naturel
Vision par ordinateur

Biographie

Aaron Courville est professeur au Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal et Directeur scientifique à IVADO. Il a obtenu son doctorat au Robotics Institute de l'Université Carnegie Mellon.

Il est l'un des premiers contributeurs à l'apprentissage profond, membre fondateur de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Avec Ian Goodfellow et Yoshua Bengio, il a coécrit le manuel de référence sur l'apprentissage profond.

Ses recherches actuelles portent sur le développement de modèles et de méthodes d'apprentissage profond. Il s'intéresse particulièrement à l'apprentissage par renforcement, à l'apprentissage par renforcement multi-agents, aux modèles génératifs profonds et au raisonnement.

Aaron Courville est titulaire d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR et d'une Chaire de recherche du Canada (CRC) en généralisation systématique. Ses recherches ont été soutenues en partie par Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Meta, Sony (bourse de recherche) et Google (bourse de recherche ciblée).

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM

Publications

Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations
We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain thei… (voir plus)r previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden units, gradient information and state information are more readily propagated through time, as in feedforward stochastic depth networks. We perform an empirical investigation of various RNN regularizers, and find that zoneout gives significant performance improvements across tasks. We achieve competitive results with relatively simple models in character- and word-level language modelling on the Penn Treebank and Text8 datasets, and combining with recurrent batch normalization yields state-of-the-art results on permuted sequential MNIST.
Task Loss Estimation for Sequence Prediction
Describing Multimedia Content Using Attention-Based Encoder-Decoder Networks
Whereas deep neural networks were first mostly used for classification tasks, they are rapidly expanding in the realm of structured output p… (voir plus)roblems, where the observed target is composed of multiple random variables that have a rich joint distribution, given the input. In this paper we focus on the case where the input also has a rich structure and the input and output structures are somehow related. We describe systems that learn to attend to different places in the input, for each element of the output, for a variety of tasks: machine translation, image caption generation, video clip description, and speech recognition. All these systems are based on a shared set of building blocks: gated recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks, along with trained attention mechanisms. We report on experimental results with these systems, showing impressively good performance and the advantage of the attention mechanism.
Generative Adversarial Nets
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very popular frameworks for generating high-quality data, and are immensely used in both the acad… (voir plus)emia and industry in many domains. Arguably, their most substantial impact has been in the area of computer vision, where they achieve state-of-the-art image generation. This chapter gives an introduction to GANs, by discussing their principle mechanism and presenting some of their inherent problems during training and evaluation. We focus on these three issues: (1) mode collapse, (2) vanishing gradients, and (3) generation of low-quality images. We then list some architecture-variant and loss-variant GANs that remedy the above challenges. Lastly, we present two utilization examples of GANs for real-world applications: Data augmentation and face images generation.