Portrait de Derek Nowrouzezahrai

Derek Nowrouzezahrai

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, McGill University, Département de génie électrique et informatique
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Modèles génératifs
Photographie computationnelle
Systèmes dynamiques
Vision par ordinateur

Biographie

Derek Nowrouzezahrai est professeur titulaire à l'Université McGill, directeur du Centre sur les machines intelligentes et codirecteur du Laboratoire de graphisme et d’imagerie de McGill (MGIL), ainsi que titulaire d’une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR et de la chaire Ubisoft-Mila de mise à l'échelle des univers de jeux grâce à une IA responsable.

Ses recherches portent sur la simulation de divers phénomènes physiques - tels que la dynamique des objets en mouvement et l'éclairage pour la synthèse d'images réalistes - avec des applications dans les domaines de la réalité virtuelle, des jeux vidéo, de la simulation fluide et contrôlée, de la fabrication numérique, de l'optique augmentée par le calcul et du traitement de la géométrie. En outre, Derek s'intéresse au développement de simulateurs dérivables de ces systèmes dynamiques et à leurs applications aux problèmes inverses en robotique et dans le domaine de la vision.

Son travail repose sur le développement de méthodes Monte Carlo à haute performance et efficaces en matière d'échantillonnage (chaîne de Markov), de statistiques d'ordre élevé et de méthodes de calcul pour les problèmes d'intégration multidimensionnelle complexes, de simulateurs dérivables basés sur la physique et de méthodes numériques pour les systèmes dynamiques, ainsi que sur l'application de l'apprentissage automatique aux médias 3D, visuels et interactifs.

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

Reinforcement Learning for Sequence Design Leveraging Protein Language Models
Jithendaraa Subramanian
Shiva Kanth Sujit
Niloy Irtisam
Umong Sain
Riashat Islam
Regional Adaptive Metropolis Light Transport
Hisanari Otsu
Killian Herveau
Johannes Hanika
Carsten Dachsbacher
The design of the proposal distributions, and most notably the kernel parameters, are crucial for the performance of Markov chain Monte Carl… (voir plus)o (MCMC) rendering. A poor selection of parameters can increase the correlation of the Markov chain and result in bad rendering performance. We approach this problem by a novel path perturbation strategy for online-learning of state-dependent kernel parameters. We base our approach on the theoretical framework of regional adaptive MCMC which enables the adaptation of parameters depending on the region of the state space which contains the current sample, and on information collected from previous samples. For this, we define a partitioning of the path space on a low-dimensional canonical space to capture the characteristics of paths, with a focus on path segments closer to the sensor. Fast convergence is achieved by adaptive refinement of the partitions. Exemplarily, we present two novel regional adaptive path perturbation techniques akin to lens and multi-chain perturbations. Our approach can easily be used on top of existing path space MLT methods to improve rendering efficiency, while being agnostic to the initial choice of kernel parameters.
Minimax Exploiter: A Data Efficient Approach for Competitive Self-Play
Daniel Bairamian
Philippe Marcotte
Joshua Romoff
Gabriel Robert
A Model-Based Solution to the Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Coordination Problem
Paul Barde
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Amy Zhang
Cone-Traced Supersampling with Subpixel Edge Reconstruction.
Andrei Chubarau
Yangyang Zhao
Ruby Rao
Paul Kry
While signed distance fields (SDFs) in theory offer infinite level of detail, they are typically rendered using the sphere tracing algorithm… (voir plus) at finite resolutions, which causes the common rasterized image synthesis problem of aliasing. Most existing optimized antialiasing solutions rely on polygon mesh representations; SDF-based geometry can only be directly antialiased with the computationally expensive supersampling or with post-processing filters that may produce undesirable blurriness and ghosting. In this work, we present cone-traced supersampling (CTSS), an efficient and robust spatial antialiasing solution that naturally complements the sphere tracing algorithm, does not require casting additional rays per pixel or offline prefiltering, and can be easily implemented in existing real-time SDF renderers. CTSS performs supersampling along the traced ray near surfaces with partial visibility – object contours – identified by evaluating cone intersections within a pixel's view frustum. We further introduce subpixel edge reconstruction (SER), a technique that extends CTSS to locate and resolve complex pixels with geometric edges in relatively flat regions, which are otherwise undetected by cone intersections. Our combined solution relies on a specialized sampling strategy to minimize the number of shading computations and correlates sample visibility to aggregate the samples. With comparable antialiasing quality at significantly lower computational cost, CTSS is a reliable practical alternative to conventional supersampling.
Efficient Graphics Representation with Differentiable Indirection
Sayantan Datta
Carl Marshall
Zhao Dong
Zhengqin Li
We introduce differentiable indirection – a novel learned primitive that employs differentiable multi-scale lookup tables as an effective … (voir plus)substitute for traditional compute and data operations across the graphics pipeline. We demonstrate its flexibility on a number of graphics tasks, i.e., geometric and image representation, texture mapping, shading, and radiance field representation. In all cases, differentiable indirection seamlessly integrates into existing architectures, trains rapidly, and yields both versatile and efficient results.
Differentiable visual computing for inverse problems and machine learning
Andrew Spielberg
Fangcheng Zhong
Konstantinos Rematas
Krishna Murthy
Cengiz Oztireli
Tzu-Mao Li
STAMP: Differentiable Task and Motion Planning via Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Yewon Lee
Philip Huang
Yizhou Huang
Krishna Murthy
Andrew Zou Li
Fabian Damken
Eric Heiden
Kevin A. Smith
Fabio Ramos
Florian Shkurti
Carnegie-mellon University
M. I. O. Technology
Technische Universitat Darmstadt
Nvidia
M. University
University of Sydney
Planning for many manipulation tasks, such as using tools or assembling parts, often requires both symbolic and geometric reasoning. Task an… (voir plus)d Motion Planning (TAMP) algorithms typically solve these problems by conducting a tree search over high-level task sequences while checking for kinematic and dynamic feasibility. While performant, most existing algorithms are highly inefficient as their time complexity grows exponentially with the number of possible actions and objects. Additionally, they only find a single solution to problems in which many feasible plans may exist. To address these limitations, we propose a novel algorithm called Stein Task and Motion Planning (STAMP) that leverages parallelization and differentiable simulation to efficiently search for multiple diverse plans. STAMP relaxes discrete-and-continuous TAMP problems into continuous optimization problems that can be solved using variational inference. Our algorithm builds upon Stein Variational Gradient Descent, a gradient-based variational inference algorithm, and parallelized differentiable physics simulators on the GPU to efficiently obtain gradients for inference. Further, we employ imitation learning to introduce action abstractions that reduce the inference problem to lower dimensions. We demonstrate our method on two TAMP problems and empirically show that STAMP is able to: 1) produce multiple diverse plans in parallel; and 2) search for plans more efficiently compared to existing TAMP baselines.
Learning Neural Implicit Representations with Surface Signal Parameterizations
Yanran Guan
Andrei Chubarau
Ruby Rao
Parameter-space ReSTIR for Differentiable and Inverse Rendering
Wesley Chang
Venkataram Sivaram
Toshiya Hachisuka
Ravi Ramamoorthi
Tzu-Mao Li
Differentiable rendering is frequently used in gradient descent-based inverse rendering pipelines to solve for scene parameters – such as … (voir plus)reflectance or lighting properties – from target image inputs. Efficient computation of accurate, low variance gradients is critical for rapid convergence. While many methods employ variance reduction strategies, they operate independently on each gradient descent iteration, requiring large sample counts and computation. Gradients may however vary slowly between iterations, leading to unexplored potential benefits when reusing sample information to exploit this coherence. We develop an algorithm to reuse Monte Carlo gradient samples between gradient iterations, motivated by reservoir-based temporal importance resampling in forward rendering. Direct application of this method is not feasible, as we are computing many derivative estimates (i.e., one per optimization parameter) instead of a single pixel intensity estimate; moreover, each of these gradient estimates can affect multiple pixels, and gradients can take on negative values. We address these challenges by reformulating differential rendering integrals in parameter space, developing a new resampling estimator that treats negative functions, and combining these ideas into a reuse algorithm for inverse texture optimization. We significantly reduce gradient error compared to baselines, and demonstrate faster inverse rendering convergence in settings involving complex direct lighting and material textures.
Cone-Traced Supersampling for Signed Distance Field Rendering
Andrei Chubarau
Yangyang Zhao
Ruby Rao
Paul Kry
While Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) in theory offer infinite level of detail, they are typically rendered using the sphere tracing algorithm… (voir plus) at finite resolutions, which causes the common rasterized image synthesis problem of aliasing. Most existing optimized antialiasing solutions rely on polygon mesh representations; SDF-based geometry can only be directly antialiased with the computationally expensive supersampling or with post-processing filters that often lead to undesirable blurriness and ghosting. In this work, we present cone-traced supersampling (CTSS), an efficient and robust spatial antialiasing solution that naturally complements the sphere tracing algorithm, does not require casting additional rays per pixel or offline pre-filtering, and can be easily implemented in existing real-time SDF renderers. CTSS performs supersampling along the traced ray near surfaces with partial visibility identified by evaluating cone intersections within a pixel's view frustum. We further devise a specialized sampling strategy to minimize the number of shading computations and aggregate the collected samples based on their correlated visibility. Depending on configuration, CTSS incurs roughly 15-30% added computational cost and significantly outperforms conventional supersampling approaches while offering comparative antialiasing and visual image quality for most geometric edges.
Visual Question Answering From Another Perspective: CLEVR Mental Rotation Tests
Christopher Beckham
Martin Weiss
Florian Golemo
Sina Honari