David Rolnick

Biographie

David Rolnick est professeur adjoint et titulaire d’une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR à l'École d'informatique de l'Université McGill et membre académique principal de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle. Ses travaux portent sur les applications de l'apprentissage automatique dans la lutte contre le changement climatique. Il est cofondateur et président de Climate Change AI et codirecteur scientifique de Sustainability in the Digital Age. David Rolnick a obtenu un doctorat en mathématiques appliquées du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Il a été chercheur postdoctoral en sciences mathématiques à la National Science Foundation (NSF), chercheur diplômé à la NSF et boursier Fulbright. Il a figuré sur la liste des « 35 innovateurs de moins de 35 ans » de la MIT Technology Review en 2021.

Étudiants actuels

Aditya Aditya

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University

Postdoctorat - McGill

Michael Bunsen

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill

Shahana Chatterjee

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A

Yuyan Chen

Doctorat - McGill

Eya Cherif

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Leipzig University

Othmane Echchabi

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Mohamed Elabbas

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Jannik Endres

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Jacopo Ghirri

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Politecnico di Milano

Paula Harder

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Johannes Kepler University

Christina Isaicu Isaicu

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Amsterdam

Gaurav Iyer

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Doctorat - McGill

Devin Kwok

Doctorat - McGill

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Université de Montréal

Pierre-Louis Lemaire

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Polytechnique Montréal

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Joshi Manoj

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of East Anglia

David Mickisch

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Juan Nathaniel Nathaniel

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Columbia university

Postdoctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Lena Podina

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo

Venkatesh Ramesh

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Marlena Reil

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Carla Roesch

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Columbia university

Rasha Saha

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Luca Marie Schmidt

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Tübingen

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Ilija Trajković

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Doctorat - McGill

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Catherine Villeneuve

Doctorat - McGill

Shan Zhao

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Technical University of Munich

Démocratiser l'accès aux données satellitaires grâce à l'IA

Billets de blogue

diagram illustrating how the AI foundation model for Earth observation, Galileo, works

21 octobre 2025

par

Gabriel Tseng

David Rolnick

Lire l'article

Publications

Semi-Supervised Object Detection for Agriculture

Gabriel Tseng

Krisztina Sinkovics

Tom Watsham

Thomas C. Walters

2023-01-25

AAAI.org/2023/Workshop/AIAFS (poster)

Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity

Alexandra Luccioni

ImageNet-1k is a dataset often used for benchmarking machine learning (ML) models and evaluating tasks such as image recognition and object … (voir plus)detection. Wild animals make up 27% of ImageNet-1k but, unlike classes representing people and objects, these data have not been closely scrutinized. In the current paper, we analyze the 13,450 images from 269 classes that represent wild animals in the ImageNet-1k validation set, with the participation of expert ecologists. We find that many of the classes are ill-defined or overlapping, and that 12% of the images are incorrectly labeled, with some classes having >90% of images incorrect. We also find that both the wildlife-related labels and images included in ImageNet-1k present significant geographical and cultural biases, as well as ambiguities such as artificial animals, multiple species in the same image, or the presence of humans. Our findings highlight serious issues with the extensive use of this dataset for evaluating ML systems, the use of such algorithms in wildlife-related tasks, and more broadly the ways in which ML datasets are commonly created and curated.

2022-12-31

AAAI (publié)

arxiv.org

Deep Networks as Paths on the Manifold of Neural Representations

Richard D Lange

Devin Kwok

Jordan Kyle Matelsky

Xinyue Wang

Konrad Paul Kording

2022-12-31

TAG-ML (publié)

proceedings.mlr.press

General Purpose AI Systems in the AI Act: Trying to Fit a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Claire Boine

2022-12-31

SSRN Electronic Journal (publié)

Hard-Constrained Deep Learning for Climate Downscaling

Paula Harder

Venkatesh Ramesh

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Qidong Yang

Prasanna Sattegeri

D. Szwarcman

Campbell Watson

The availability of reliable, high-resolution climate and weather data is important to inform long-term decisions on climate adaptation and … (voir plus)mitigation and to guide rapid responses to extreme events. Forecasting models are limited by computational costs and, therefore, often generate coarse-resolution predictions. Statistical downscaling, including super-resolution methods from deep learning, can provide an efficient method of upsampling low-resolution data. However, despite achieving visually compelling results in some cases, such models frequently violate conservation laws when predicting physical variables. In order to conserve physical quantities, here we introduce methods that guarantee statistical constraints are satisfied by a deep learning downscaling model, while also improving their performance according to traditional metrics. We compare different constraining approaches and demonstrate their applicability across different neural architectures as well as a variety of climate and weather data sets. Besides enabling faster and more accurate climate predictions through downscaling, we also show that our novel methodologies can improve super-resolution for satellite data and natural images data sets.

2022-12-31

Journal of Machine Learning Research (publié)

arxiv.org

Normalization Layers Are All That Sharpness-Aware Minimization Needs

Maximilian Müller

Tiffany Vlaar

Matthias Hein

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in va… (voir plus)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.

2022-12-31

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) (publié)

Digitalization and the Anthropocene

Felix Creutzig

Daron Acemoglu

Xuemei Bai

Paul N. Edwards

Marie Josefine Hintz

Lynn H. Kaack

Siir Kilkis

Stefanie Kunkel

Amy Luers

Nikola Milojevic-Dupont

Dave Rejeski

Jürgen Renn

Christoph Rosol

Daniela Russ

Thomas Turnbull

Elena Verdolini

Felix Wagner

Charlie Wilson

Aicha Zekar … (voir 1 de plus)

Marius Zumwald

Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically i… (voir plus)ncreased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through the lens of three interdependent elements of the Anthropocene: ( a) planetary boundaries and stability, ( b) equity within and between countries, and ( c) human agency and governance, mediated via ( i) increasing resource efficiency, ( ii) accelerating consumption and scale effects, ( iii) expanding political and economic control, and ( iv) deteriorating social cohesion. While direct environmental impacts matter, the indirect and systemic effects of digitalization are more profoundly reshaping the relationship between humans, technosphere and planet. We develop three scenarios: planetary instability, green but inhumane, and deliberate for the good. We conclude with identifying leverage points that shift human–digital–Earth interactions toward sustainability.

2022-09-01

Annual Review Environment and Resources (publié)

A portrait of the different configurations between digitally-enabled innovations and climate governance

Pierre J. C. Chuard

Jennifer Garard

Karsten A. Schulz

Nilushi Kumarasinghe

Damon Matthews

2022-07-31

Earth System Governance (publié)

Neural Networks as Paths through the Space of Representations

Richard D Lange

Jordan Kyle Matelsky

Xinyue Wang

Devin Kwok

Konrad Paul Kording

2022-06-21

ArXiv (prépublication)

Clustering units in neural networks: upstream vs downstream information

Richard D Lange

Konrad Paul Kording

It has been hypothesized that some form of"modular"structure in artificial neural networks should be useful for learning, compositionality, … (voir plus)and generalization. However, defining and quantifying modularity remains an open problem. We cast the problem of detecting functional modules into the problem of detecting clusters of similar-functioning units. This begs the question of what makes two units functionally similar. For this, we consider two broad families of methods: those that define similarity based on how units respond to structured variations in inputs ("upstream"), and those based on how variations in hidden unit activations affect outputs ("downstream"). We conduct an empirical study quantifying modularity of hidden layer representations of simple feedforward, fully connected networks, across a range of hyperparameters. For each model, we quantify pairwise associations between hidden units in each layer using a variety of both upstream and downstream measures, then cluster them by maximizing their"modularity score"using established tools from network science. We find two surprising results: first, dropout dramatically increased modularity, while other forms of weight regularization had more modest effects. Second, although we observe that there is usually good agreement about clusters within both upstream methods and downstream methods, there is little agreement about the cluster assignments across these two families of methods. This has important implications for representation-learning, as it suggests that finding modular representations that reflect structure in inputs (e.g. disentanglement) may be a distinct goal from learning modular representations that reflect structure in outputs (e.g. compositionality).

2022-06-12

TMLR (accepté)

On Neural Architecture Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks

Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution generalization performance, but struggle with out-of-distribution generaliz… (voir plus)ation. This is especially true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing rules in sequences, as we find in many intelligence tests. Recent work has explored how forcing relational representations to remain distinct from sensory representations, as it seems to be the case in the brain, can help artificial systems. Building on this work, we further explore and formalize the advantages afforded by 'partitioned' representations of relations and sensory details, and how this inductive bias can help recompose learned relational structure in newly encountered settings. We introduce a simple architecture based on similarity scores which we name Compositional Relational Network (CoRelNet). Using this model, we investigate a series of inductive biases that ensure abstract relations are learned and represented distinctly from sensory data, and explore their effects on out-of-distribution generalization for a series of relational psychophysics tasks. We find that simple architectural choices can outperform existing models in out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these results show that partitioning relational representations from other information streams may be a simple way to augment existing network architectures' robustness when performing out-of-distribution relational computations.

2022-06-08

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation

Lynn H. Kaack

Priya L. Donti

Emma Strubell

George Kamiya

Felix Creutzig

2022-05-31

Nature Climate Change (inconnu)