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
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Learning Silicon Dopant Transitions in Graphene using Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy
Joshua Greaves
Kevin Roccapriore
Ekin Dogus Cubuk
Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel
Sergei Kalinin
Igor Mordatch
We introduce a machine learning approach to determine the transition rates of silicon atoms on a single layer of carbon atoms, when stimulat… (voir plus)ed by the electron beam of a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). Our method is data-centric, leveraging data collected on a STEM. The data samples are processed and filtered to produce symbolic representations, which we use to train a neural network to predict transition rates. These rates are then applied to guide a single silicon atom throughout the lattice to pre-determined target destinations. We present empirical analyses that demonstrate the efficacy and generality of our approach.
Sparse Universal Transformer
Zhenfang Chen
Chuang Gan
The Universal Transformer (UT) is a variant of the Transformer that shares parameters across its layers and is Turing-complete under certain… (voir plus) assumptions. Empirical evidence also shows that UTs have better compositional generalization than Vanilla Transformers (VTs) in formal language tasks. The parameter-sharing also affords it better parameter efficiency than VTs. Despite its many advantages, most state-of-the-art NLP systems use VTs as their backbone model instead of UTs. This is mainly because scaling UT parameters is more compute and memory intensive than scaling up a VT. This paper proposes the Sparse Universal Transformer (SUT), which leverages Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) to reduce UT's computation complexity while retaining its parameter efficiency and generalization ability. Experiments show that SUT combines the best of both worlds, achieving strong generalization results on formal language tasks (Logical inference and CFQ) and impressive parameter and computation efficiency on standard natural language benchmarks like WMT'14.
Bigger, Better, Faster: Human-level Atari with human-level efficiency
Johan Obando-Ceron
Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel
We introduce a value-based RL agent, which we call BBF, that achieves super-human performance in the Atari 100K benchmark. BBF relies on sca… (voir plus)ling the neural networks used for value estimation, as well as a number of other design choices that enable this scaling in a sample-efficient manner. We conduct extensive analyses of these design choices and provide insights for future work. We end with a discussion about updating the goalposts for sample-efficient RL research on the ALE. We make our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/bigger_better_faster.
Mastering the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark from Pixels
Sai Rajeswar
Tim Verbelen
Bart Dhoedt
Alexandre Lacoste
Controlling artificial agents from visual sensory data is an arduous task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can succeed but require la… (voir plus)rge amounts of interactions between the agent and the environment. To alleviate the issue, unsupervised RL proposes to employ self-supervised interaction and learning, for adapting faster to future tasks. Yet, as shown in the Unsupervised RL Benchmark (URLB; Laskin et al. 2021), whether current unsupervised strategies can improve generalization capabilities is still unclear, especially in visual control settings. In this work, we study the URLB and propose a new method to solve it, using unsupervised model-based RL, for pre-training the agent, and a task-aware fine-tuning strategy combined with a new proposed hybrid planner, Dyna-MPC, to adapt the agent for downstream tasks. On URLB, our method obtains 93.59% overall normalized performance, surpassing previous baselines by a staggering margin. The approach is empirically evaluated through a large-scale empirical study, which we use to validate our design choices and analyze our models. We also show robust performance on the Real-Word RL benchmark, hinting at resiliency to environment perturbations during adaptation. Project website: https://masteringurlb.github.io/
Discovering the Electron Beam Induced Transition Rates for Silicon Dopants in Graphene with Deep Neural Networks in the STEM
Kevin M Roccapriore
Joshua Greaves
Colton Bishop
Maxim Ziatdinov
Igor Mordatch
Ekin D Cubuk
Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel
Sergei V Kalinin
Journal Article Discovering the Electron Beam Induced Transition Rates for Silicon Dopants in Graphene with Deep Neural Networks in the STEM… (voir plus) Get access Kevin M Roccapriore, Kevin M Roccapriore Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Max Schwarzer, Max Schwarzer Mila - Québec AI Institute, Montréal, QC, CanadaDepartment of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, CanadaGoogle Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joshua Greaves, Joshua Greaves Google Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jesse Farebrother, Jesse Farebrother Mila - Québec AI Institute, Montréal, QC, CanadaGoogle Research, Brain TeamSchool of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Rishabh Agarwal, Rishabh Agarwal Mila - Québec AI Institute, Montréal, QC, CanadaDepartment of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, CanadaGoogle Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Colton Bishop, Colton Bishop Google Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Maxim Ziatdinov, Maxim Ziatdinov Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United StatesComputational Sciences and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Igor Mordatch, Igor Mordatch Google Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ekin D Cubuk, Ekin D Cubuk Google Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Aaron Courville, Aaron Courville Mila - Québec AI Institute, Montréal, QC, CanadaDepartment of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ... Show more Pablo Samuel Castro, Pablo Samuel Castro Google Research, Brain Team Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Marc G Bellemare, Marc G Bellemare Mila - Québec AI Institute, Montréal, QC, CanadaGoogle Research, Brain TeamSchool of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sergei V Kalinin Sergei V Kalinin Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN, United States Corresponding author: sergei2@utk.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Microscopy and Microanalysis, Volume 29, Issue Supplement_1, 1 August 2023, Pages 1932–1933, https://doi.org/10.1093/micmic/ozad067.1000 Published: 22 July 2023
Meta-Value Learning: a General Framework for Learning with Learning Awareness
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.
Learning with Learning Awareness using Meta-Values
Investigating Multi-Task Pretraining and Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel
Google Brain
Latent State Marginalization as a Low-Cost Approach for Improving Exploration
Qinqing Zheng
Ricky T. Q. Chen
While the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- often touted for its exploration and robustness capabilities -- … (voir plus)is usually motivated from a probabilistic perspective, the use of deep probabilistic models has not gained much traction in practice due to their inherent complexity. In this work, we propose the adoption of latent variable policies within the MaxEnt framework, which we show can provably approximate any policy distribution, and additionally, naturally emerges under the use of world models with a latent belief state. We discuss why latent variable policies are difficult to train, how naive approaches can fail, then subsequently introduce a series of improvements centered around low-cost marginalization of the latent state, allowing us to make full use of the latent state at minimal additional cost. We instantiate our method under the actor-critic framework, marginalizing both the actor and critic. The resulting algorithm, referred to as Stochastic Marginal Actor-Critic (SMAC), is simple yet effective. We experimentally validate our method on continuous control tasks, showing that effective marginalization can lead to better exploration and more robust training. Our implementation is open sourced at https://github.com/zdhNarsil/Stochastic-Marginal-Actor-Critic.
Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Breaking the Replay Ratio Barrier
Simplicial Embeddings in Self-Supervised Learning and Downstream Classification
Simplicial Embeddings (SEM) are representations learned through self-supervised learning (SSL), wherein a representation is projected into …