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 :

Eugene Belilovsky

David Lemay

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

amin.mansouri@mila.quebec

Jonathan Lim

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

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 :

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 :

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

Adversarial Training with Synthesized Data: A Path to Robust and Generalizable Neural Networks

Reza Bayat

Adversarial Training (AT) is a well-known framework designed to mitigate adversarial vulnerabilities in neural networks. Recent research ind… (voir plus)icates that incorporating adversarial examples (AEs) in training can enhance models' generalization capabilities. To understand the impact of AEs on learning dynamics, we study AT through the lens of sample difficulty methodologies. Our findings show that AT leads to more stable learning dynamics compared to Natural Training (NT), resulting in gradual performance improvements and less overconfident predictions. This suggests that AT steers training away from learning easy, perturbable spurious features toward more resilient and generalizable ones. However, a trade-off exists between adversarial robustness and generalization gains, due to robust overfitting, limiting practical deployment. To address this, we propose using synthesized data to bridge this gap. Our results demonstrate that AT benefits significantly from synthesized data, whereas NT does not, enhancing generalization without compromising robustness and offering new avenues for developing robust and generalizable models.

2024-06-28

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/NextGenAISafety (poster)

Towards Adversarially Robust Vision-Language Models: Insights from Design Choices and Prompt Formatting Techniques

Rishika Bhagwatkar

Shravan Nayak

Reza Bayat

Alexis Roger

Daniel Z Kaplan

Pouya Bashivan

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have witnessed a surge in both research and real-world applications. However, as they becoming increasingly pr… (voir plus)evalent, ensuring their robustness against adversarial attacks is paramount. This work systematically investigates the impact of model design choices on the adversarial robustness of VLMs against image-based attacks. Additionally, we introduce novel, cost-effective approaches to enhance robustness through prompt formatting. By rephrasing questions and suggesting potential adversarial perturbations, we demonstrate substantial improvements in model robustness against strong image-based attacks such as Auto-PGD. Our findings provide important guidelines for developing more robust VLMs, particularly for deployment in safety-critical environments.

2024-06-28

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/NextGenAISafety (poster)

Interpretability in Action: Exploratory Analysis of VPT, a Minecraft Agent

Karolis Jucys

George Adamopoulos

Mehrab Hamidi

Stephanie Milani

Mohammad Reza Samsami

Artem Zholus

Sonia Joseph

Blake Richards

Özgür Şimşek

Understanding the mechanisms behind decisions taken by large foundation models in sequential tasks is critical to ensuring that such systems… (voir plus) operate transparently and safely. However, interpretability methods have not yet been applied extensively to large-scale agents based on reinforcement learning. In this work, we perform exploratory analysis on the Video PreTraining (VPT) Minecraft playing agent, one of the largest open-source vision-based agents. We try to illuminate its reasoning mechanisms by applying various interpretability techniques. First, we analyze the attention mechanism while the agent solves its training task --- crafting a diamond pickaxe. The agent seems to pay attention to the 4 last frames and several key-frames further back. This provides clues as to how it maintains coherence in the task that takes 3-10 minutes, despite the agent's short memory span of only six seconds. Second, we perform various interventions, which help us uncover a worrying case of goal misgeneralization: VPT mistakenly identifies a villager wearing brown clothes as a tree trunk and punches it to death, when positioned stationary under green tree leaves. We demonstrate similar misbehavior in a related agent (STEVE-1), which motivates the use of VPT as a model organism for large-scale vision-based agent interpretability.

2024-06-24

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/MI (poster)

Handling Delay in Reinforcement Learning Caused by Parallel Computations of Neurons

Ivan Anokhin

Rishav

Stephen Chung

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Biological neural networks operate in parallel, a feature that sets them apart from artificial neural networks and can significantly enhance… (voir plus) inference speed. However, this parallelism introduces challenges: when each neuron operates asynchronously with a fixed execution time, an

2024-06-19

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/ARLET (poster)

Realtime Reinforcement Learning: Towards Rapid Asynchronous Deployment of Large Models

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 long-term 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 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 Pokemon and Tetris.

2024-06-19

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/ARLET (poster)

Scalable Approaches for a Theory of Many Minds

Maximilian Puelma Touzel

Amin Memarian

Matthew D Riemer

Andrei Mircea

Andrew Robert Williams

Elin Ahlstrand

Lucas Lehnert

Rupali Bhati

A major challenge as we move towards building agents for real-world problems, which could involve a massive number of human and/or machine a… (voir plus)gents, is that we must learn to reason about the behavior of these many other agents. In this paper, we consider the problem of scaling a predictive Theory of Mind (ToM) model to a very large number of interacting agents with a fixed computational budget. Motivated by the limited diversity of agent types, existing approaches to scalable TOM learn versatile single-agent representations for quickly adapting to new agents encountered sequentially. We consider the more general setting that many agents are observed in parallel and formulate the corresponding Theory of Many Minds (ToMM) problem of estimating the joint policy. We frame the scaling behavior of solutions in terms of parameter sharing schemes and in particular propose two parameter-free architectural features that endow models with the ability to exploit action correlations: encoding a multi-agent context, and decoding through an abstracted joint action space. The increased predictive capabilities that have come with foundation models have made it easier to imagine the possibility of using these models to make simulations that imitate the behavior of many agents within complex real-world systems. Being able to perform these simulations in a general-purpose way would not only help make more capable agents, it also would be a very useful capability for applications in social science, political science, and economics.

2024-06-18

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/Agentic_Markets (poster)

Is a Good Description Worth a Thousand Pictures? Reducing Multimodal Alignment to Text-Based, Unimodal Alignment

Amin Memarian

Touraj Laleh

Ardavan S. Nobandegani

Generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Llama, etc.) are increasingly adopted across a range of high-stake domains, including healthcare and crimina… (voir plus)l justice system. This rapid adoption indeed raises moral and ethical concerns. The emerging field of AI alignment aims to make AI systems that respect human values. In this work, we focus on evaluating the ethics of multimodal AI systems involving both text and images --- a relatively under-explored area, as most alignment work is currently focused on language models. Specifically, here we investigate whether the multimodal alignment problem (i.e., the problem of aligning a multimodal system) could be effectively reduced to the (text-based) unimodal alignment problem, wherein a language model would make a moral judgment purely based on a description of an image. Focusing on GPT-4 and LLaVA as two prominent examples of multimodal systems, here we demonstrate, rather surprisingly, that this reduction can be achieved with a relatively small loss in moral judgment performance in the case of LLaVa, and virtually no loss in the case of GPT-4.

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/MFHAIA (poster)

Lost in Translation: The Algorithmic Gap Between LMs and the Brain

Tosato Tommaso

Tikeng Notsawo Pascal Junior

Helbling Saskia

Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing … (voir plus)in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at different levels of analysis, emphasizing the importance of looking beyond input-output behavior to examine and compare the internal processes of these systems. We discuss how insights from neuroscience, such as sparsity, modularity, internal states, and interactive learning, can inform the development of more biologically plausible language models. Furthermore, we explore the role of scaling laws in bridging the gap between LMs and human cognition, highlighting the need for efficiency constraints analogous to those in biological systems. By developing LMs that more closely mimic brain function, we aim to advance both artificial intelligence and our understanding of human cognition.

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/LLMs_and_Cognition (poster)

Revisiting Successor Features for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Arnav Kumar Jain

Harley Wiltzer

Jesse Farebrother

Glen Berseth

Sanjiban Choudhury

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/MFHAIA (poster)

Gradient Dissent in Language Model Training and Saturation

Andrei Mircea

Ekaterina Lobacheva

We seek to shed light on language model (LM) saturation from the perspective of learning dynamics. To this end, we define a decomposition o… (voir plus)f the cross-entropy gradient, which forms a shared low-dimensional basis for analyzing the training dynamics of models across scales. Intuitively, this decomposition consists of attractive and repulsive components that increase the logit of the correct class and decrease the logits of incorrect classes, respectively. Our analysis in this subspace reveals a phenomenon we term \textit{gradient dissent}, characterized by gradient components becoming systematically opposed such that loss cannot be improved along one component without being degraded along the other. Notably, we find that complete opposition, which we term \textit{total dissent}, reliably occurs in tandem with the saturation of smaller LMs. Based on these results, we hypothesize that gradient dissent can provide a useful foundation for better understanding and mitigating saturation.

2024-06-16

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/HiLD (poster)

μLO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers

Benjamin Thérien

Charles-Étienne Joseph

Boris Knyazev

Edouard Oyallon

Eugene Belilovsky

2024-05-31

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Deep Generative Sampling in the Dual Divergence Space: A Data-efficient&Interpretative Approach for Generative AI

Sahil Garg

Anderson Schneider

Anant Raj

Kashif Rasul

Yuriy Nevmyvaka

S. Gopal

Amit Dhurandhar

Guillermo A. Cecchi

Building on the remarkable achievements in generative sampling of natural images, we propose an innovative challenge, potentially overly amb… (voir plus)itious, which involves generating samples of entire multivariate time series that resemble images. However, the statistical challenge lies in the small sample size, sometimes consisting of a few hundred subjects. This issue is especially problematic for deep generative models that follow the conventional approach of generating samples from a canonical distribution and then decoding or denoising them to match the true data distribution. In contrast, our method is grounded in information theory and aims to implicitly characterize the distribution of images, particularly the (global and local) dependency structure between pixels. We achieve this by empirically estimating its KL-divergence in the dual form with respect to the respective marginal distribution. This enables us to perform generative sampling directly in the optimized 1-D dual divergence space. Specifically, in the dual space, training samples representing the data distribution are embedded in the form of various clusters between two end points. In theory, any sample embedded between those two end points is in-distribution w.r.t. the data distribution. Our key idea for generating novel samples of images is to interpolate between the clusters via a walk as per gradients of the dual function w.r.t. the data dimensions. In addition to the data efficiency gained from direct sampling, we propose an algorithm that offers a significant reduction in sample complexity for estimating the divergence of the data distribution with respect to the marginal distribution. We provide strong theoretical guarantees along with an extensive empirical evaluation using many real-world datasets from diverse domains, establishing the superiority of our approach w.r.t. state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

2024-04-10

ArXiv (prépublication)