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 - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Eugene Belilovsky

Mohammad Javad Darvishi Bayazi

Amin Darabi

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Wagner Drew

Maîtrise recherche - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Sarath Chandar

Parviz Haggi Mani

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - -

Nadhir Hassen

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Nizar Islah

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Neeraj Kumar

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Gwen Legate

Doctorat - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Eugene Belilovsky

David Lemay

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Amin Mansouri

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Gabriela Moisescu-Pareja

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doina Precup

Timothy Nest

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Eilif B. Muller

Mohammad Pezeshki

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Polytechnique

Motahareh Pourrahimi

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Pouya Bashivan

Mahta Ramezanian

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Dumas

Matthew Riemer

Doctorat - UdeM

Alexis Roger

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Blake Richards

Munish Sathish Kumar

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Vaibhav Singh

Doctorat - Concordia

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Sihui Wei

Baccalauréat - McGill

Andrew Williams

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

He Zhu

Doctorat - McGill

Publications

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

Arthur Dehgan

Hamza Abdelhedi

Vanessa Hadid

Karim Jerbi CoCo Lab

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.

2025-05-26

Journal of Neural Engineering (publié)

Context is Key: A Benchmark for Forecasting with Essential Textual Information

Arjun Ashok

Andrew R. Williams

Étienne Marcotte

Valentina Zantedeschi

Jithendaraa Subramanian

Alexandre Lacoste

Forecasting is a critical task in decision-making across numerous domains. While historical numerical data provide a start, they fail to con… (voir plus)vey the complete context for reliable and accurate predictions. Human forecasters frequently rely on additional information, such as background knowledge and constraints, which can efficiently be communicated through natural language. However, in spite of recent progress with LLM-based forecasters, their ability to effectively integrate this textual information remains an open question. To address this, we introduce "Context is Key" (CiK), a time-series forecasting benchmark that pairs numerical data with diverse types of carefully crafted textual context, requiring models to integrate both modalities; crucially, every task in CiK requires understanding textual context to be solved successfully. We evaluate a range of approaches, including statistical models, time series foundation models, and LLM-based forecasters, and propose a simple yet effective LLM prompting method that outperforms all other tested methods on our benchmark. Our experiments highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information, demonstrate surprising performance when using LLM-based forecasting models, and also reveal some of their critical shortcomings. This benchmark aims to advance multimodal forecasting by promoting models that are both accurate and accessible to decision-makers with varied technical expertise. The benchmark can be visualized at https://servicenow.github.io/context-is-key-forecasting/v0/.

2025-04-30

International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)

proceedings.mlr.press

AI for Global Climate Cooperation: Modeling Global Climate Negotiations, Agreements, and Long-Term Cooperation in RICE-N

Tianyu Zhang

Andrew Williams

Phillip Wozny

Kai-Hendrik Cohrs

Koen Ponse

Marco Jiralerspong

Soham Phade

Sunil Srinivasa

Lu Li

Yang Zhang

Prateek Gupta

Erman Acar

Yoshua Bengio

Stephan Zheng

Comprehensive global cooperation is essential to limit global temperature increases while continuing economic development, e.g., reducing se… (voir plus)vere inequality or achieving long-term economic growth. Achieving long-term cooperation on climate change mitigation with n strategic agents poses a complex game-theoretic problem. For example, agents may negotiate and reach climate agreements, but there is no central authority to enforce adherence to those agreements. Hence, it is critical to design negotiation and agreement frameworks that foster cooperation, allow all agents to meet their individual policy objectives, and incentivize long-term adherence. This is an interdisciplinary challenge that calls for collaboration between researchers in machine learning, economics, climate science, law, policy, ethics, and other fields. In particular, we argue that machine learning is a critical tool to address the complexity of this domain. To facilitate this research, here we introduce RICE-N, a multi-region integrated assessment model that simulates the global climate and economy, and which can be used to design and evaluate the strategic outcomes for different negotiation and agreement frameworks. We also describe how to use multi-agent reinforcement learning to train rational agents using RICE-N. This framework underpinsAI for Global Climate Cooperation, a working group collaboration and competition on climate negotiation and agreement design. Here, we invite the scientific community to design and evaluate their solutions using RICE-N, machine learning, economic intuition, and other domain knowledge. More information can be found on www.ai4climatecoop.org.

2025-04-30

ICML.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

proceedings.mlr.press

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

When training neural networks, dying neurons -- units becoming inactive or saturated -- are traditionally seen as harmful. This paper sheds … (voir plus)new light on this phenomenon. By exploring the impact of various hyperparameter configurations on dying neurons during training, we gather insights on how to improve upon sparse training approaches to pruning. We introduce Demon Pruning (DemP), a method that controls the proliferation of dead neurons through a combination of noise injection on active units and a one-cycle schedule regularization strategy, dynamically leading to network sparsity. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that DemP outperforms existing dense-to-sparse structured pruning methods, achieving better accuracy-sparsity tradeoffs and accelerating training by up to 3.56

2025-02-12

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.

2025-01-21

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Handling Delay in Real-Time Reinforcement Learning

Ivan Anokin

Rishav Rishav

Matthew 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

2025-01-21

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Non-Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Successor Feature Matching

Sanjiban Choudhury

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), an agent seeks to replicate expert demonstrations through interactions with the environment. Tradit… (voir plus)ionally, IRL is treated as an adversarial game, where an adversary searches over reward models, and a learner optimizes the reward through repeated RL procedures. This game-solving approach is both computationally expensive and difficult to stabilize. In this work, we propose a novel approach to IRL by direct policy optimization: exploiting a linear factorization of the return as the inner product of successor features and a reward vector, we design an IRL algorithm by policy gradient descent on the gap between the learner and expert features. Our non-adversarial method does not require learning a reward function and can be solved seamlessly with existing actor-critic RL algorithms. Remarkably, our approach works in state-only settings without expert action labels, a setting which behavior cloning (BC) cannot solve. Empirical results demonstrate that our method learns from as few as a single expert demonstration and achieves improved performance on various control tasks.

2025-01-21

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

Christopher Pal

Decoder-only Transformers often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, particularly arithmetic reasoning requiring multiple sequential opera… (voir plus)tions. In this work, we identify representation collapse in the model's intermediate layers as a key factor limiting their reasoning capabilities. To address this, we propose Sequential Variance-Covariance Regularization (Seq-VCR), which enhances the entropy of intermediate representations and prevents collapse. Combined with dummy pause tokens as substitutes for chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens, our method significantly improves performance in arithmetic reasoning problems. In the challenging

2025-01-21

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

CHIRP: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Open-Ended Response Evaluation in Vision-Language Models

Daniel Z Kaplan

Qirui Sun

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.

2025-01-15

ArXiv (prépublication)

CAVE: Detecting and Explaining Commonsense Anomalies in Visual Environments

Rishika Bhagwatkar

Syrielle Montariol

Angelika Romanou

Beatriz Borges

Antoine Bosselut

2024-12-31

EMNLP (publié)

GitChameleon 2.0: Evaluating AI Code Generation Against Python Library Version Incompatibilities

Victor May

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Massimo Caccia

The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent v… (voir plus)ersion updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon 2.0, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon 2.0 rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon 2.0 enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.

2024-12-31

arXiv (prépublication)

Training Dynamics Underlying Language Model Scaling Laws: Loss Deceleration and Zero-Sum Learning

Andrei Mircea

Supriyo Chakraborty

Nima Chitsazan

Ekaterina Lobacheva

This work aims to understand how scaling improves language models, specifically in terms of training dynamics. We find that language models … (voir plus)undergo loss deceleration early in training; an abrupt slowdown in the rate of loss improvement, resulting in piecewise linear behaviour of the loss curve in log-log space. Scaling up the model mitigates this transition by (1) decreasing the loss at which deceleration occurs, and (2) improving the log-log rate of loss improvement after deceleration. We attribute loss deceleration to a type of degenerate training dynamics we term zero-sum learning (ZSL). In ZSL, per-example gradients become systematically opposed, leading to destructive interference in per-example changes in loss. As a result, improving loss on one subset of examples degrades it on another, bottlenecking overall progress. Loss deceleration and ZSL provide new insights into the training dynamics underlying language model scaling laws, and could potentially be targeted directly to improve language models independent of scale. We make our code and artefacts available at: https://github.com/mirandrom/zsl

2024-12-31

ACL (1) (publié)