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

Benjamin Akera Binen

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Mohit Anand

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - The University of Dresden, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig

Ayush Ayush Prasad

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - National Observatory of Athens

Postdoctorat - McGill

Michael Bunsen

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill

Juan Sebastián Cañas

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Yoshua Bengio

Yuyan Chen

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Eya Cherif

Stagiaire de recherche - Leipzig University

Amna El-Mustafa

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Mohamed Elabbas

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Paula Harder

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Christina Humer

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

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Vanessa Mac

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo

David Mickisch

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Felix Andreas Nahrstedt

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Arthur Ouaknine

Postdoctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Lena Podina

Doctorat - University of Waterloo

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche - McGill

luca.schmidt@uni-tuebingen.de

Luca Marie Schmidt

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Tübingen

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

seth.pratinav@gmail.com

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Yoshua Bengio

Ilija Trajković

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Doctorat - McGill

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

anna.viklund@mila.quebec

Doctorat - McGill

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Publications

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).

2022-06-13

TMLR (accepté)

openreview.net

On Neural Architecture Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks

Giancarlo Kerg

Sarthak Mittal

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.

2022-06-09

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Aligning artificial intelligence with climate change mitigation

Lynn H. Kaack

Priya L. Donti

Emma Strubell

George Yoshito Kamiya

Felix Creutzig

2022-06-01

Nature Climate Change (publié)

Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks

Giancarlo Kerg

Sarthak Mittal

Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution performance but struggle in out-of-distribution settings. This is especiall… (voir plus)y true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing rules in sequences, as required in many intelligence tests. In contrast, our brains are remarkably flexible at such tasks, an attribute that is likely linked to anatomical constraints on computations. Inspired by this, recent work has explored how enforcing that relational representations remain distinct from sensory representations can help artificial systems. Building on this work, we further explore and formalize the advantages afforded by ``partitioned'' representations of relations and sensory details. We investigate inductive biases that ensure abstract relations are learned and represented distinctly from sensory data across several neural network architectures and show that they outperform existing architectures on out-of-distribution generalization for various relational tasks. These results show that partitioning relational representations from other information streams may be a simple way to augment existing network architectures' robustness when performing relational computations.

2022-03-25

ICLR.cc/2022/Workshop/OSC (poster)

openreview.net

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

Priya L. Donti

Lynn H. Kaack

Kelly Kochanski

Alexandre Lacoste

Kris Sankaran

Andrew Slavin Ross

Nikola Milojevic-Dupont

Natasha Jaques

Anna Waldman-Brown

Alexandra Luccioni

Tegan Maharaj

Evan David Sherwin

S. Karthik Mukkavilli

Konrad Paul Kording

Carla P. Gomes

Andrew Y. Ng

Demis Hassabis

John C. Platt

Felix Creutzig … (voir 2 de plus)

Jennifer T Chayes

Yoshua Bengio

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning (ML) experts, may wonder how we can help. Here… (voir plus) we describe how ML can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where existing gaps can be filled by ML, in collaboration with other fields. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the ML community to join the global effort against climate change.

2022-02-07

ACM Computing Surveys (publié)

arxiv.org

TIML: Task-Informed Meta-Learning for Agriculture

Gabriel Tseng

Hannah Kerner

Labeled datasets for agriculture are extremely spatially imbalanced. When developing algorithms for data-sparse regions, a natural approach … (voir plus)is to use transfer learning from data-rich regions. While standard transfer learning approaches typically leverage only direct inputs and outputs, geospatial imagery and agricultural data are rich in metadata that can inform transfer learning algorithms, such as the spatial coordinates of data-points or the class of task being learned. We build on previous work exploring the use of meta-learning for agricultural contexts in data-sparse regions and introduce task-informed meta-learning (TIML), an augmentation to model-agnostic meta-learning which takes advantage of task-specific metadata. We apply TIML to crop type classification and yield estimation, and find that TIML significantly improves performance compared to a range of benchmarks in both contexts, across a diversity of model architectures. While we focus on tasks from agriculture, TIML could offer benefits to any meta-learning setup with task-specific metadata, such as classification of geo-tagged images and species distribution modelling.

2022-02-04

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Understanding the Evolution of Linear Regions in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Setareh Cohan

Nam Hee Gordon Kim