Irina Rish

Biographie

Irina Rish est professeure titulaire à l'Université de Montréal (UdeM), où elle dirige le Laboratoire d'IA autonome. Membre du corps professoral de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, elle est titulaire d'une chaire d'excellence en recherche du Canada (CERC) et d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR. Irina dirige le projet INCITE du ministère américain de l'Environnement au sujet des modèles de fondation évolutifs sur les superordinateurs Summit et Frontier à l'Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). Elle est cofondatrice et directrice scientifique de Nolano.ai.

Ses recherches actuelles portent sur les lois de mise à l'échelle neuronale et les comportements émergents (capacités et alignement) dans les modèles de fondation, ainsi que sur l'apprentissage continu, la généralisation hors distribution et la robustesse. Avant de se joindre à l'UdeM en 2019, Irina était chercheuse au Centre de recherche IBM Thomas J. Watson, où elle a travaillé sur divers projets à l'intersection des neurosciences et de l'IA, et dirigé le défi NeuroAI. Elle a reçu plusieurs prix IBM : ceux de l’excellence et de l’innovation exceptionnelle (2018), celui de la réalisation technique exceptionnelle (2017), et celui de l’accomplissement en recherche (2009). Elle détient 64 brevets et a écrit plus de 120 articles de recherche, plusieurs chapitres de livres, trois livres publiés et une monographie sur la modélisation éparse.

Étudiants actuels

George Adamopoulos

Stagiaire de recherche

Ivan Anokhin

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Doctorat - UdeM

Arjun Ashok

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Blake Richards

Mohammad Javad Darvishi Bayazi

Amin Darabi

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Karim Jerbi

Wagner Drew

Maîtrise recherche - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Nizar Islah

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Eilif Benjamin Muller

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Zafir Khalid

Maîtrise recherche - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Neeraj Kumar

Maîtrise professionnelle - UdeM

Gwen Legate

Doctorat - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Lemay

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

amin.mansouri@mila.quebec

Jonathan Lim

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni

Doctorat - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Diganta Misra

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Timothy Nest

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Eilif Benjamin Muller

Mohammad Pezeshki

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Pouya Bashivan

Mahta Ramezanian

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Dumas

Roland Riachi

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Matthew Riemer

Doctorat - UdeM

Alexis Roger

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Blake Richards

Zahra Sheikhbahaee

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Guillaume Dumas

Vaibhav Singh

Doctorat - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Publications

Continual Pre-training of MoEs: How robust is your router?

Benjamin Thérien

Charles-Étienne Joseph

Zain Sarwar

Ashwinee Panda

Anirban Das

Shi-Xiong Zhang

Stephen Rawls

Sambit Sahu

2025-03-06

ArXiv (prépublication)

Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training

Vaibhav Singh

Paul Janson

Paria Mehrbod

Adam Ibrahim

Benjamin Thérien

The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. Whi… (voir plus)le self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting meaningful representations from vast amounts of unlabeled data, existing methods still struggle to adapt to the non-stationary, non-IID nature of real-world data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Recent works have adopted a repeated cosine annealing schedule for large-scale continual pre-training; however, these schedules (1) inherently cause forgetting during the re-warming phase and (2) have not been systematically compared to existing continual SSL methods. In this work, we systematically compare the widely used cosine schedule with the recently proposed infinite learning rate schedule and empirically find the latter to be a more effective alternative. Our extensive empirical evaluation across diverse image and language datasets demonstrates that the infinite learning rate schedule consistently enhances continual pre-training performance compared to a repeated cosine decay without being restricted to a fixed iteration budget. For instance, in a small-scale MAE pre-training setup, it outperforms several strong baselines from the literature. We then scale up our experiments to larger MAE pre-training and autoregressive language model pre-training. Our results show that the infinite learning rate schedule remains effective at scale, surpassing repeated cosine decay for both MAE pre-training and zero-shot LM benchmarks.

2025-03-04

ArXiv (prépublication)

Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training

Vaibhav Singh

Paul Janson

Paria Mehrbod

Adam Ibrahim

Benjamin Thérien

2025-03-04

ArXiv (prépublication)

Maxwell's Demon at Work: Efficient Pruning by Leveraging Saturation of Neurons

Simon Dufort-Labbé

Pierluca D'Oro

Evgenii Nikishin

Razvan Pascanu

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Aristide Baratin

2025-02-13

TMLR (accepté)

Enabling Realtime Reinforcement Learning at Scale with Staggered Asynchronous Inference

Matthew D Riemer

Gopeshh Subbaraj

Glen Berseth

Realtime environments change even as agents perform action inference and learning, thus requiring high interaction frequencies to effectivel… (voir plus)y minimize regret. However, recent advances in machine learning involve larger neural networks with longer inference times, raising questions about their applicability in realtime systems where reaction time is crucial. We present an analysis of lower bounds on regret in realtime reinforcement learning (RL) environments to show that minimizing long-term regret is generally impossible within the typical sequential interaction and learning paradigm, but often becomes possible when sufficient asynchronous compute is available. We propose novel algorithms for staggering asynchronous inference processes to ensure that actions are taken at consistent time intervals, and demonstrate that use of models with high action inference times is only constrained by the environment's effective stochasticity over the inference horizon, and not by action frequency. Our analysis shows that the number of inference processes needed scales linearly with increasing inference times while enabling use of models that are multiple orders of magnitude larger than existing approaches when learning from a realtime simulation of Game Boy games such as Pokémon and Tetris.

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Handling Delay in Real-Time Reinforcement Learning

Ivan Anokhin

Rishav

Matthew D Riemer

Stephen Chung

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Real-time reinforcement learning (RL) introduces several challenges. First, policies are constrained to a fixed number of actions per second… (voir plus) due to hardware limitations. Second, the environment may change while the network is still computing an action, leading to observational delay. The first issue can partly be addressed with pipelining, leading to higher throughput and potentially better policies. However, the second issue remains: if each neuron operates in parallel with an execution time of

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Non-Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Successor Feature Matching

Arnav Kumar Jain

Harley Wiltzer

Jesse Farebrother

Glen Berseth

Sanjiban Choudhury

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Seq-VCR: Preventing Collapse in Intermediate Transformer Representations for Enhanced Reasoning

Md Rifat Arefin

Gopeshh Subbaraj

Nicolas Gontier

Yann LeCun

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

Chris Pal

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Artificial Neural Networks for Magnetoencephalography: A review of an emerging field

Arthur Dehgan

Hamza Abdelhedi

Vanessa Hadid

Karim Jerbi

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a cutting-edge neuroimaging technique that measures the intricate brain dynamics underlying cognitive proces… (voir plus)ses with an unparalleled combination of high temporal and spatial precision. MEG data analytics has always relied on advanced signal processing and mathematical and statistical tools for various tasks ranging from data cleaning to probing the signals' rich dynamics and estimating the neural sources underlying the surface-level recordings. Like in most domains, the surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to the increased use of Machine Learning (ML) methods for MEG data classification. More recently, an emerging trend in this field is using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to address many MEG-related tasks. This review provides a comprehensive overview of how ANNs are being used with MEG data from three vantage points: First, we review work that employs ANNs for MEG signal classification, i.e., for brain decoding. Second, we report on work that has used ANNs as putative models of information processing in the human brain. Finally, we examine studies that use ANNs as techniques to tackle methodological questions in MEG, including artifact correction and source estimation. Furthermore, we assess the current strengths and limitations of using ANNs with MEG and discuss future challenges and opportunities in this field. Finally, by establishing a detailed portrait of the field and providing practical recommendations for the future, this review seeks to provide a helpful reference for both seasoned MEG researchers and newcomers to the field who are interested in using ANNs to enhance the exploration of the complex dynamics of the human brain with MEG.

2025-01-20

ArXiv (prépublication)

Artificial Neural Networks for Magnetoencephalography: A review of an emerging field

Arthur Dehgan

Hamza Abdelhedi

Vanessa Hadid

Karim Jerbi

2025-01-20

ArXiv (prépublication)

Robin: a Suite of Multi-Scale Vision-Language Models and the CHIRP Evaluation Benchmark

Alexis Roger

Prateek Humane

Daniel Z Kaplan

Kshitij Gupta

Qi Sun

George Adamopoulos

Jonathan Siu Chi Lim

Quentin Gregory Anthony

Edwin Fennell

The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the past several years calls for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation methods and ben… (voir plus)chmarks. This work analyzes existing VLM evaluation techniques, including automated metrics, AI-based assessments, and human evaluations across diverse tasks. We first introduce Robin - a novel suite of VLMs that we built by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Encoders (VEs) at multiple scales, and use Robin to identify shortcomings of current evaluation approaches across scales. Next, to overcome the identified limitations, we introduce CHIRP - a new long form response benchmark we developed for more robust and complete VLM evaluation. We provide open access to the Robin training code, model suite, and CHIRP benchmark to promote reproducibility and advance VLM research.

2025-01-16

ArXiv (prépublication)

Enabling Realtime Reinforcement Learning at Scale with Staggered Asynchronous Inference

Matthew Riemer

Gopeshh Raaj Subbaraj

Glen Berseth

2024-12-18

ArXiv (prépublication)