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
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Doctorat - UdeM
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Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
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Doctorat - UdeM
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Publications

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 …
SUNMASK: Mask Enhanced Control in Step Unrolled Denoising Autoencoders
Generative Augmented Flow Networks
The Generative Flow Network is a probabilistic framework where an agent learns a stochastic policy for object generation, such that the prob… (voir plus)ability of generating an object is proportional to a given reward function. Its effectiveness has been shown in discovering high-quality and diverse solutions, compared to reward-maximizing reinforcement learning-based methods. Nonetheless, GFlowNets only learn from rewards of the terminal states, which can limit its applicability. Indeed, intermediate rewards play a critical role in learning, for example from intrinsic motivation to provide intermediate feedback even in particularly challenging sparse reward tasks. Inspired by this, we propose Generative Augmented Flow Networks (GAFlowNets), a novel learning framework to incorporate intermediate rewards into GFlowNets. We specify intermediate rewards by intrinsic motivation to tackle the exploration problem in sparse reward environments. GAFlowNets can leverage edge-based and state-based intrinsic rewards in a joint way to improve exploration. Based on extensive experiments on the GridWorld task, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GAFlowNet in terms of convergence, performance, and diversity of solutions. We further show that GAFlowNet is scalable to a more complex and large-scale molecule generation domain, where it achieves consistent and significant performance improvement.
Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision for Stylized Opinion Summarization
Reinald Kim
Mirella Lapata. 2020
Un-611
David M. Krueger
Maxinder S. Kan-620
Somnath Basu
Roy Chowdhury
Chao Zhao
Tanya Goyal
Junyi Jiacheng Xu
Jessy Li
Ivor W. Tsang
James T. Kwok
Neil Houlsby
Andrei Giurgiu
Stanisław Jastrzębski … (voir 22 de plus)
Bruna Morrone
Quentin de Laroussilhe
Mona Gesmundo
Attariyan Sylvain
Gelly
Thomas Wolf
Lysandre Debut
Julien Victor Sanh
Clement Chaumond
Anthony Delangue
Pier-339 Moi
Tim ric Cistac
R´emi Rault
Morgan Louf
Funtow-900 Joe
Sam Davison
Patrick Shleifer
Von Platen
Clara Ma
Yacine Jernite
Julien Plu
Canwen Xu
Opinion summarization research has primar-001 ily focused on generating summaries reflect-002 ing important opinions from customer reviews 0… (voir plus)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
Unleashing The Potential of Data Sharing in Ensemble Deep Reinforcement Learning
This work studies a crucial but often overlooked element of ensemble methods in deep reinforcement learning: data sharing between ensemble m… (voir plus)embers. We show that data sharing enables peer learning, a powerful learning process in which individual agents learn from each other's experience to significantly improve their performance. When given access to the experience of other ensemble members, even the worst agent can match or outperform the previously best agent, triggering a virtuous circle. However, we show that peer learning can be unstable when the agents' ability to learn is impaired due to overtraining on early data. We thus employ the recently proposed solution of periodic resets and show that it ensures effective peer learning. We perform extensive experiments on continuous control tasks from both dense states and pixels to demonstrate the strong effect of peer learning and its interaction with resets.
On the Compositional Generalization Gap of In-Context Learning
Pretrained large generative language models have shown great performance on many tasks, but exhibit low compositional generalization abiliti… (voir plus)es. Scaling such models has been shown to improve their performance on various NLP tasks even just by conditioning them on a few examples to solve the task without any fine-tuning (also known as in-context learning). In this work, we look at the gap between the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of such models in semantic parsing tasks with in-context learning. In the ID settings, the demonstrations are from the same split (test or train) that the model is being evaluated on, and in the OOD settings, they are from the other split. We look at how the relative generalization gap of in-context learning evolves as models are scaled up. We evaluate four model families, OPT, BLOOM, CodeGen and Codex on three semantic parsing datasets, CFQ, SCAN and GeoQuery with different number of exemplars, and observe a trend of decreasing relative generalization gap as models are scaled up.
Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress
Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL sy… (voir plus)stems, when applied to large-scale settings, rarely operate tabula rasa. Such large-scale systems undergo multiple design or algorithmic changes during their development cycle and use ad hoc approaches for incorporating these changes without re-training from scratch, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the inefficiency of deep RL typically excludes researchers without access to industrial-scale resources from tackling computationally-demanding problems. To address these issues, we present reincarnating RL as an alternative workflow or class of problem settings, where prior computational work (e.g., learned policies) is reused or transferred between design iterations of an RL agent, or from one RL agent to another. As a step towards enabling reincarnating RL from any agent to any other agent, we focus on the specific setting of efficiently transferring an existing sub-optimal policy to a standalone value-based RL agent. We find that existing approaches fail in this setting and propose a simple algorithm to address their limitations. Equipped with this algorithm, we demonstrate reincarnating RL's gains over tabula rasa RL on Atari 2600 games, a challenging locomotion task, and the real-world problem of navigating stratospheric balloons. Overall, this work argues for an alternative approach to RL research, which we believe could significantly improve real-world RL adoption and help democratize it further. Open-sourced code and trained agents at https://agarwl.github.io/reincarnating_rl.
Riemannian Diffusion Models
Diffusion models are recent state-of-the-art methods for image generation and likelihood estimation. In this work, we generalize continuous-… (voir plus)time diffusion models to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds and derive a variational framework for likelihood estimation. Computationally, we propose new methods for computing the Riemannian divergence which is needed in the likelihood estimation. Moreover, in generalizing the Euclidean case, we prove that maximizing this variational lower-bound is equivalent to Riemannian score matching. Empirically, we demonstrate the expressive power of Riemannian diffusion models on a wide spectrum of smooth manifolds, such as spheres, tori, hyperboloids, and orthogonal groups. Our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art likelihoods on all benchmarks.
Teaching Algorithmic Reasoning via In-context Learning
Azade Nova
Behnam Neyshabur
Hanie Sedghi
Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning: Reusing Prior Computation to Accelerate Progress
Invariant representation driven neural classifier for anti-QCD jet tagging
We leverage representation learning and the inductive bias in neural-net-based Standard Model jet classification tasks, to detect non-QCD si… (voir plus)gnal jets. In establishing the framework for classification-based anomaly detection in jet physics, we demonstrate that, with a \emph{well-calibrated} and \emph{powerful enough feature extractor}, a well-trained \emph{mass-decorrelated} supervised Standard Model neural jet classifier can serve as a strong generic anti-QCD jet tagger for effectively reducing the QCD background. Imposing \emph{data-augmented} mass-invariance (and thus decoupling the dominant factor) not only facilitates background estimation, but also induces more substructure-aware representation learning. We are able to reach excellent tagging efficiencies for all the test signals considered. In the best case, we reach a background rejection rate of 51 and a significance improvement factor of 3.6 at 50 \% signal acceptance, with the jet mass decorrelated. This study indicates that supervised Standard Model jet classifiers have great potential in general new physics searches.
Cascaded Video Generation for Videos In-the-Wild
Videos can be created by first outlining a global view of the scene and then adding local details. Inspired by this idea we propose a cascad… (voir plus)ed model for video generation which follows a coarse to fine approach. First our model generates a low resolution video, establishing the global scene structure, which is then refined by subsequent cascade levels operating at larger resolutions. We train each cascade level sequentially on partial views of the videos, which reduces the computational complexity of our model and makes it scalable to high-resolution videos with many frames. We empirically validate our approach on UCF101 and Kinetics-600, for which our model is competitive with the state-of-the-art. We further demonstrate the scaling capabilities of our model and train a three-level model on the BDD100K dataset which generates 256x256 pixels videos with 48 frames.