Aaron Courville

alan.milligan@mila.quebec

Alan Alan

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Anirudh Buvanesh

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Laurent Charlin

anirudb1102@gmail.com

sarvjeet-singh.ghotra@mila.quebec

Juan Duque

Doctorat - UdeM

juan.duque@mila.quebec

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Uday Kapur

Doctorat - UdeM

udaykaran.kapur@mila.quebec

Amr Khalifa

Doctorat - UdeM

amr-khalifa.alshaykh@mila.quebec

andjela.mladenovic@mila.quebec

Zhixuan Lin

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Pablo Samuel Castro

waltermayor@gmail.com

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Gauthier Gidel

mohammed.muqeeth@mila.quebec

Muqeeth Mohammed

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Rishabh Agarwal

morgane.moss@mila.quebec

Andrei Nicolicioiu

Doctorat - UdeM

andrei.nicolicioiu@gmail.com

Doctorat - UdeM

Johan Samir Obando Ceron

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Pablo Samuel Castro

johan.ceron@mila.quebec

Doctorat - UdeM

michell.payanoperez@mila.quebec

Dereck Piché

Doctorat - UdeM

pichedereck@gmail.com

khaled.rouissi@mila.quebec

Khaled Rouissi

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Esra'a Saleh

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Glen Berseth

esraa.saleh@mila.quebec

Vedant Shah

Doctorat - UdeM

vedant.shah@mila.quebec

colin.yiyang-lu@mila.quebec

Yusong Wu

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Anna (Cheng-Zhi) Huang

wu.yusong@mila.quebec

Colin Yiyang Lu

Doctorat - UdeM

Sujin yun

Doctorat - UdeM

sujin.yun@mila.quebec

xiaofeng.zhang@mila.quebec

Xiaofeng Zhang

Doctorat - UdeM

Publications

A Variational Perspective on Diffusion-Based Generative Models and Score Matching

Chin-wei Huang

Jae Hyun Lim

Discrete-time diffusion-based generative models and score matching methods have shown promising results in modeling high-dimensional image d… (voir plus)ata. Recently, Song et al. (2021) show that diffusion processes that transform data into noise can be reversed via learning the score function, i.e. the gradient of the log-density of the perturbed data. They propose to plug the learned score function into an inverse formula to define a generative diffusion process. Despite the empirical success, a theoretical underpinning of this procedure is still lacking. In this work, we approach the (continuous-time) generative diffusion directly and derive a variational framework for likelihood estimation, which includes continuous-time normalizing flows as a special case, and can be seen as an infinitely deep variational autoencoder. Under this framework, we show that minimizing the score-matching loss is equivalent to maximizing a lower bound of the likelihood of the plug-in reverse SDE proposed by Song et al. (2021), bridging the theoretical gap.

2021-11-08

NeurIPS.cc/2021/Conference (spotlight)

Generative Compositional Augmentations for Scene Graph Prediction

Boris Knyazev

Harm de Vries

Cătălina Cangea

Graham W. Taylor

Eugene Belilovsky

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image in the form of a scene graph is useful in many applications at the intersection of v… (voir plus)ision and language. We consider a challenging problem of compositional generalization that emerges in this task due to a long tail data distribution. Current scene graph generation models are trained on a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions, e.g. . However, test images might contain zero- and few-shot compositions of objects and relationships, e.g. . Despite each of the object categories and the predicate (e.g. 'on') being frequent in the training data, the models often fail to properly understand such unseen or rare compositions. To improve generalization, it is natural to attempt increasing the diversity of the training distribution. However, in the graph domain this is non-trivial. To that end, we propose a method to synthesize rare yet plausible scene graphs by perturbing real ones. We then propose and empirically study a model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) that allows us to generate visual features of perturbed scene graphs and learn from them in a joint fashion. When evaluated on the Visual Genome dataset, our approach yields marginal, but consistent improvements in zero- and few-shot metrics. We analyze the limitations of our approach indicating promising directions for future research.

2021-09-30

2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publié)

arxiv.org

StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling

Yikang Shen

Yi Tay

Che Zheng

Dara Bahri

Donald Metzler

There are two major classes of natural language grammar -- the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and t… (voir plus)he constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While previous unsupervised parsing methods mostly focus on only inducing one class of grammars, we introduce a novel model, StructFormer, that can simultaneously induce dependency and constituency structure. To achieve this, we propose a new parsing framework that can jointly generate a constituency tree and dependency graph. Then we integrate the induced dependency relations into the transformer, in a differentiable manner, through a novel dependency-constrained self-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model can achieve strong results on unsupervised constituency parsing, unsupervised dependency parsing, and masked language modeling at the same time.

2021-07-31

Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) (publié)

Can Subnetwork Structure be the Key to Out-of-Distribution Generalization?

Dinghuai Zhang

Kartik Ahuja

Yilun Xu

Yisen Wang

Can models with particular structure avoid being biased towards spurious correlation in out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization? Peters et … (voir plus)al. (2016) provides a positive answer for linear cases. In this paper, we use a functional modular probing method to analyze deep model structures under OOD setting. We demonstrate that even in biased models (which focus on spurious correlation) there still exist unbiased functional subnetworks. Furthermore, we articulate and demonstrate the functional lottery ticket hypothesis: full network contains a subnetwork that can achieve better OOD performance. We then propose Modular Risk Minimization to solve the subnetwork selection problem. Our algorithm learns the subnetwork structure from a given dataset, and can be combined with any other OOD regularization methods. Experiments on various OOD generalization tasks corroborate the effectiveness of our method.

2021-07-19

International Conference on Machine Learning (Oral)

proceedings.mlr.press

Continuous Coordination As a Realistic Scenario for Lifelong Learning

Hadi Nekoei

Akilesh Badrinaaraayanan

Sarath Chandar

Current deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are still highly task-specific and lack the ability to generalize to new environments. L… (voir plus)ifelong learning (LLL), however, aims at solving multiple tasks sequentially by efficiently transferring and using knowledge between tasks. Despite a surge of interest in lifelong RL in recent years, the lack of a realistic testbed makes robust evaluation of LLL algorithms difficult. Multi-agent RL (MARL), on the other hand, can be seen as a natural scenario for lifelong RL due to its inherent non-stationarity, since the agents' policies change over time. In this work, we introduce a multi-agent lifelong learning testbed that supports both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our setup is based on Hanabi -- a partially-observable, fully cooperative multi-agent game that has been shown to be challenging for zero-shot coordination. Its large strategy space makes it a desirable environment for lifelong RL tasks. We evaluate several recent MARL methods, and benchmark state-of-the-art LLL algorithms in limited memory and computation regimes to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses. This continual learning paradigm also provides us with a pragmatic way of going beyond centralized training which is the most commonly used training protocol in MARL. We empirically show that the agents trained in our setup are able to coordinate well with unseen agents, without any additional assumptions made by previous works. The code and all pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/Lifelong-Hanabi.

2021-07-19

International Conference on Machine Learning (Spotlight)

proceedings.mlr.press

Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation

David Krueger

Ethan Caballero

Joern-Henrik Jacobsen

Rémi Le Priol

Distributional shift is one of the major obstacles when transferring machine learning prediction systems from the lab to the real world. To … (voir plus)tackle this problem, we assume that variation across training domains is representative of the variation we might encounter at test time, but also that shifts at test time may be more extreme in magnitude. In particular, we show that reducing differences in risk across training domains can reduce a model's sensitivity to a wide range of extreme distributional shifts, including the challenging setting where the input contains both causal and anti-causal elements. We motivate this approach, Risk Extrapolation (REx), as a form of robust optimization over a perturbation set of extrapolated domains (MM-REx), and propose a penalty on the variance of training risks (V-REx) as a simpler variant. We prove that variants of REx can recover the causal mechanisms of the targets, while also providing some robustness to changes in the input distribution ("covariate shift"). By appropriately trading-off robustness to causally induced distributional shifts and covariate shift, REx is able to outperform alternative methods such as Invariant Risk Minimization in situations where these types of shift co-occur.

2021-07-19

International Conference on Machine Learning (Oral)

proceedings.mlr.press

Hierarchical Video Generation for Complex Data

Lluis Castrejon

Nicolas Ballas

2021-06-03

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Explicitly Modeling Syntax in Language Models with Incremental Parsing and a Dynamic Oracle

Syntax is fundamental to our thinking about language. Failing to capture the structure of input language could lead to generalization proble… (voir plus)ms and over-parametrization. In the present work, we propose a new syntax-aware language model: Syntactic Ordered Memory (SOM). The model explicitly models the structure with an incremental parser and maintains the conditional probability setting of a standard language model (left-to-right). To train the incremental parser and avoid exposure bias, we also propose a novel dynamic oracle, so that SOM is more robust to wrong parsing decisions. Experiments show that SOM can achieve strong results in language modeling, incremental parsing and syntactic generalization tests, while using fewer parameters than other models.

2021-05-31

Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (publié)

arxiv.org

Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Self-Predictive Representations

Max Schwarzer

Ankesh Anand

Rishab Goel

R Devon Hjelm

Philip Bachman

While deep reinforcement learning excels at solving tasks where large amounts of data can be collected through virtually unlimited interacti… (voir plus)on with the environment, learning from limited interaction remains a key challenge. We posit that an agent can learn more efficiently if we augment reward maximization with self-supervised objectives based on structure in its visual input and sequential interaction with the environment. Our method, Self-Predictive Representations(SPR), trains an agent to predict its own latent state representations multiple steps into the future. We compute target representations for future states using an encoder which is an exponential moving average of the agent's parameters and we make predictions using a learned transition model. On its own, this future prediction objective outperforms prior methods for sample-efficient deep RL from pixels. We further improve performance by adding data augmentation to the future prediction loss, which forces the agent's representations to be consistent across multiple views of an observation. Our full self-supervised objective, which combines future prediction and data augmentation, achieves a median human-normalized score of 0.415 on Atari in a setting limited to 100k steps of environment interaction, which represents a 55% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art. Notably, even in this limited data regime, SPR exceeds expert human scores on 7 out of 26 games. The code associated with this work is available at https://github.com/mila-iqia/spr

2021-05-30

Université de Montréal (publié)

Convex Potential Flows: Universal Probability Distributions with Optimal Transport and Convex Optimization

Chin-wei Huang

Ricky T. Q. Chen

Christos Tsirigotis

Flow-based models are powerful tools for designing probabilistic models with tractable density. This paper introduces Convex Potential Flows… (voir plus) (CP-Flow), a natural and efficient parameterization of invertible models inspired by the optimal transport (OT) theory. CP-Flows are the gradient map of a strongly convex neural potential function. The convexity implies invertibility and allows us to resort to convex optimization to solve the convex conjugate for efficient inversion. To enable maximum likelihood training, we derive a new gradient estimator of the log-determinant of the Jacobian, which involves solving an inverse-Hessian vector product using the conjugate gradient method. The gradient estimator has constant-memory cost, and can be made effectively unbiased by reducing the error tolerance level of the convex optimization routine. Theoretically, we prove that CP-Flows are universal density approximators and are optimal in the OT sense. Our empirical results show that CP-Flow performs competitively on standard benchmarks of density estimation and variational inference.

2021-05-02

International Conference on Learning Representations (Poster)

Integrating Categorical Semantics into Unsupervised Domain Translation

Samuel Lavoie

Faruk Ahmed

While unsupervised domain translation (UDT) has seen a lot of success recently, we argue that mediating its translation via categorical sema… (voir plus)ntic features could broaden its applicability. In particular, we demonstrate that categorical semantics improves the translation between perceptually different domains sharing multiple object categories. We propose a method to learn, in an unsupervised manner, categorical semantic features (such as object labels) that are invariant of the source and target domains. We show that conditioning the style encoder of unsupervised domain translation methods on the learned categorical semantics leads to a translation preserving the digits on MNIST

2021-05-02

International Conference on Learning Representations (Poster)

Iterated Learning for Emergent Systematicity in VQA

Ankit Vani

Max Schwarzer

Yuchen Lu

Eeshan Dhekane

Although neural module networks have an architectural bias towards compositionality, they require gold standard layouts to generalize system… (voir plus)atically in practice. When instead learning layouts and modules jointly, compositionality does not arise automatically and an explicit pressure is necessary for the emergence of layouts exhibiting the right structure. We propose to address this problem using iterated learning, a cognitive science theory of the emergence of compositional languages in nature that has primarily been applied to simple referential games in machine learning. Considering the layouts of module networks as samples from an emergent language, we use iterated learning to encourage the development of structure within this language. We show that the resulting layouts support systematic generalization in neural agents solving the more complex task of visual question-answering. Our regularized iterated learning method can outperform baselines without iterated learning on SHAPES-SyGeT (SHAPES Systematic Generalization Test), a new split of the SHAPES dataset we introduce to evaluate systematic generalization, and on CLOSURE, an extension of CLEVR also designed to test systematic generalization. We demonstrate superior performance in recovering ground-truth compositional program structure with limited supervision on both SHAPES-SyGeT and CLEVR.

2021-05-02

International Conference on Learning Representations (Oral)