Portrait de Dzmitry Bahdanau

Dzmitry Bahdanau

Membre industriel principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur associé, McGill University, École d'informatique
Chercheur scientifique IA, Periodic
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

Dzmitry Bahdanau est professeur adjoint à l’Université McGill et chercheur à ServiceNow Element AI. Précédemment, il a obtenu son doctorat à l'Université de Montréal / Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle en travaillant avec Yoshua Bengio. Il s'intéresse aux questions fondamentales et appliquées concernant la compréhension du langage naturel. Ses principaux domaines de recherche comprennent l'analyse sémantique, les interfaces utilisateur du langage, la généralisation systématique et les systèmes hybrides neuronaux symboliques.

Étudiants actuels

Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

CLOSURE: Assessing Systematic Generalization of CLEVR Models
Timothy J. O'Donnell
Shikhar Murty
Philippe Beaudoin
The CLEVR dataset of natural-looking questions about 3D-rendered scenes has recently received much attention from the research community. A … (voir plus)number of models have been proposed for this task, many of which achieved very high accuracies of around 97-99%. In this work, we study how systematic the generalization of such models is, that is to which extent they are capable of handling novel combinations of known linguistic constructs. To this end, we test models' understanding of referring expressions based on matching object properties (such as e.g. "the object that is the same size as the red ball") in novel contexts. Our experiments on the thereby constructed CLOSURE benchmark show that state-of-the-art models often do not exhibit systematicity after being trained on CLEVR. Surprisingly, we find that an explicitly compositional Neural Module Network model also generalizes badly on CLOSURE, even when it has access to the ground-truth programs at test time. We improve the NMN's systematic generalization by developing a novel Vector-NMN module architecture with vector-valued inputs and outputs. Lastly, we investigate the extent to which few-shot transfer learning can help models that are pretrained on CLEVR to adapt to CLOSURE. Our few-shot learning experiments contrast the adaptation behavior of the models with intermediate discrete programs with that of the end-to-end continuous models.
Automated curriculum generation for Policy Gradients from Demonstrations
BabyAI: A Platform to Study the Sample Efficiency of Grounded Language Learning
Allowing humans to interactively train artificial agents to understand language instructions is desirable for both practical and scientific … (voir plus)reasons, but given the poor data efficiency of the current learning methods, this goal may require substantial research efforts. Here, we introduce the BabyAI research platform to support investigations towards including humans in the loop for grounded language learning. The BabyAI platform comprises an extensible suite of 19 levels of increasing difficulty. The levels gradually lead the agent towards acquiring a combinatorially rich synthetic language which is a proper subset of English. The platform also provides a heuristic expert agent for the purpose of simulating a human teacher. We report baseline results and estimate the amount of human involvement that would be required to train a neural network-based agent on some of the BabyAI levels. We put forward strong evidence that current deep learning methods are not yet sufficiently sample efficient when it comes to learning a language with compositional properties.
Systematic Generalization: What Is Required and Can It Be Learned?
BabyAI: First Steps Towards Grounded Language Learning With a Human In the Loop
Allowing humans to interactively train artificial agents to understand language instructions is desirable for both practical and scientific … (voir plus)reasons, but given the poor data efficiency of the current learning methods, this goal may require substantial research efforts. Here, we introduce the BabyAI research platform to support investigations towards including humans in the loop for grounded language learning. The BabyAI platform comprises an extensible suite of 19 levels of increasing difficulty. The levels gradually lead the agent towards acquiring a combinatorially rich synthetic language which is a proper subset of English. The platform also provides a heuristic expert agent for the purpose of simulating a human teacher. We report baseline results and estimate the amount of human involvement that would be required to train a neural network-based agent on some of the BabyAI levels. We put forward strong evidence that current deep learning methods are not yet sufficiently sample efficient when it comes to learning a language with compositional properties.
Commonsense mining as knowledge base completion? A study on the impact of novelty
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Seyedarian Hosseini
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Commonsense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet represent knowledge in the form of relational triples. Inspired by the recent work by Li et a… (voir plus)l., we analyse if knowledge base completion models can be used to mine commonsense knowledge from raw text. We propose novelty of predicted triples with respect to the training set as an important factor in interpreting results. We critically analyse the difficulty of mining novel commonsense knowledge, and show that a simple baseline method outperforms the previous state of the art on predicting more novel.
Learning to Compute Word Embeddings on the Fly
Tom Bosc
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Edward Grefenstette
Yoshua Bengios
Words in natural language follow a Zipfian distribution whereby some words are frequent but most are rare. Learning representations for word… (voir plus)s in the "long tail" of this distribution requires enormous amounts of data. Representations of rare words trained directly on end tasks are usually poor, requiring us to pre-train embeddings on external data, or treat all rare words as out-of-vocabulary words with a unique representation. We provide a method for predicting embeddings of rare words on the fly from small amounts of auxiliary data with a network trained end-to-end for the downstream task. We show that this improves results against baselines where embeddings are trained on the end task for reading comprehension, recognizing textual entailment and language modeling.
An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction
We present an approach to training neural networks to generate sequences using actor-critic methods from reinforcement learning (RL). Curren… (voir plus)t log-likelihood training methods are limited by the discrepancy between their training and testing modes, as models must generate tokens conditioned on their previous guesses rather than the ground-truth tokens. We address this problem by introducing a \textit{critic} network that is trained to predict the value of an output token, given the policy of an \textit{actor} network. This results in a training procedure that is much closer to the test phase, and allows us to directly optimize for a task-specific score such as BLEU. Crucially, since we leverage these techniques in the supervised learning setting rather than the traditional RL setting, we condition the critic network on the ground-truth output. We show that our method leads to improved performance on both a synthetic task, and for German-English machine translation. Our analysis paves the way for such methods to be applied in natural language generation tasks, such as machine translation, caption generation, and dialogue modelling.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-Rfou
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermueller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin Bayer
Anatoly Belikov
Alexander Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Pierre-Luc Carrier
Paul Christiano
Myriam Côté
Yann N. Dauphin
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Matt Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
Sean Lee
Simon Lefrancois
Jesse A. Livezey
Cory Lorenz
Jeremiah Lowin
Qianli Ma
Robert T. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Christopher Pal
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew Rocklin
Adriana Romero
Markus Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian Vlad Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Ramana Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
Matthew Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (voir plus)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
Task Loss Estimation for Sequence Prediction