Portrait de Irina Rish

Irina Rish

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeure titulaire, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage en ligne
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Modèles génératifs
Neurosciences computationnelles
Traitement du langage naturel

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

Stagiaire de recherche
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - -
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Polytechnique
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Doctorat - Concordia
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Baccalauréat - McGill
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill

Publications

AI Agents Learn to Trust
Ardavan S. Nobandegani
T. Shultz
GOKU-UI: Ubiquitous Inference through Attention and Multiple Shooting for Continuous-time Generative Models
Mahta Ramezanian-Panahi
Pablo Polosecki
Silvina Ponce Dawson
Guillermo Cecchi
Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) is a burgeoning field that synergistically combines domain-aware and interpretable models with agnosti… (voir plus)c machine learning techniques. In this work, we introduce GOKU-UI, an evolution of the SciML generative model GOKU-nets. The GOKU-UI broadens the original model’s spectrum to incorporate other classes of differential equations, such as Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs), and integrates a distributed, i.e. ubiquitous, inference through attention mechanisms and a novel multiple shooting training strategy in the latent space. These enhancements have led to a significant increase in its performance in both reconstruction and forecast tasks, as demonstrated by our evaluation of simulated and empirical data. Specifically, GOKU-UI outperformed all baseline models on synthetic datasets even with a training set 32-fold smaller, underscoring its remarkable data efficiency. Furthermore, when applied to empirical human brain data, while incorporating stochastic Stuart-Landau
Gradient Masked Averaging for Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm that permits a large number of clients with heterogeneous data to coordinate learning of a u… (voir plus)nified global model without the need to share data amongst each other. A major challenge in federated learning is the heterogeneity of data across client, which can degrade the performance of standard FL algorithms. Standard FL algorithms involve averaging of model parameters or gradient updates to approximate the global model at the server. However, we argue that in heterogeneous settings, averaging can result in information loss and lead to poor generalization due to the bias induced by dominant client gradients. We hypothesize that to generalize better across non-i.i.d datasets, the algorithms should focus on learning the invariant mechanism that is constant while ignoring spurious mechanisms that differ across clients. Inspired from recent works in Out-of-Distribution generalization, we propose a gradient masked averaging approach for FL as an alternative to the standard averaging of client updates. This aggregation technique for client updates can be adapted as a drop-in replacement in most existing federated algorithms. We perform extensive experiments on multiple FL algorithms with in-distribution, real-world, feature-skewed out-of-distribution, and quantity imbalanced datasets and show that it provides consistent improvements, particularly in the case of heterogeneous clients.
Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning: A Review and Perspectives
Continual Learning with Foundation Models: An Empirical Study of Latent Replay
Timothee LESORT
Pau Rodríguez
Md Rifat Arefin
Arthur Douillard
Rapid development of large-scale pre-training has resulted in foundation models that can act as effective feature extractors on a variety of… (voir plus) downstream tasks and domains. Motivated by this, we study the efficacy of pre-trained vision models as a foundation for downstream continual learning (CL) scenarios. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to understand the compute-accuracy trade-off between CL in the raw-data space and in the latent space of pre-trained encoders. Second, we investigate how the characteristics of the encoder, the pre-training algorithm and data, as well as of the resulting latent space affect CL performance. For this, we compare the efficacy of various pre-trained models in large-scale benchmarking scenarios with a vanilla replay setting applied in the latent and in the raw-data space. Notably, this study shows how transfer, forgetting, task similarity and learning are dependent on the input data characteristics and not necessarily on the CL algorithms. First, we show that under some circumstances reasonable CL performance can readily be achieved with a non-parametric classifier at negligible compute. We then show how models pre-trained on broader data result in better performance for various replay sizes. We explain this with representational similarity and transfer properties of these representations. Finally, we show the effectiveness of self-supervised pre-training for downstream domains that are out-of-distribution as compared to the pre-training domain. We point out and validate several research directions that can further increase the efficacy of latent CL including representation ensembling. The diverse set of datasets used in this study can serve as a compute-efficient playground for further CL research. The codebase is available under https://github.com/oleksost/latent_CL.
APP: Anytime Progressive Pruning
Tianlong Chen
Zhangyang Wang
With the latest advances in deep learning, several methods have been investigated for optimal learning settings in scenarios where the data … (voir plus)stream is continuous over time. However, training sparse networks in such settings has often been overlooked. In this paper, we explore the problem of training a neural network with a target sparsity in a particular case of online learning: the anytime learning at macroscale paradigm (ALMA). We propose a novel way of progressive pruning, referred to as \textit{Anytime Progressive Pruning} (APP); the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline dense and Anytime OSP models across multiple architectures and datasets under short, moderate, and long-sequence training. Our method, for example, shows an improvement in accuracy of
Aligning MAGMA by Few-Shot Learning and Finetuning
Jean-Charles Layoun
Generative Models of Brain Dynamics
Towards Scaling Difference Target Propagation by Learning Backprop Targets
The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to… (voir plus) scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains. As such, it is important to explore learning algorithms that come with strong theoretical guarantees and can match the performance of backpropagation (BP) on complex tasks. One such algorithm is Difference Target Propagation (DTP), a biologically-plausible learning algorithm whose close relation with Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization has been recently established. However, the conditions under which this connection rigorously holds preclude layer-wise training of the feedback pathway synaptic weights (which is more biologically plausible). Moreover, good alignment between DTP weight updates and loss gradients is only loosely guaranteed and under very specific conditions for the architecture being trained. In this paper, we propose a novel feedback weight training scheme that ensures both that DTP approximates BP and that layer-wise feedback weight training can be restored without sacrificing any theoretical guarantees. Our theory is corroborated by experimental results and we report the best performance ever achieved by DTP on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32
Parametric Scattering Networks
The wavelet scattering transform creates geometric invariants and deformation stability. In multiple signal domains, it has been shown to yi… (voir plus)eld more discriminative representations compared to other non-learned representations and to outperform learned representations in certain tasks, particularly on limited labeled data and highly structured signals. The wavelet filters used in the scattering transform are typically selected to create a tight frame via a parameterized mother wavelet. In this work, we investigate whether this standard wavelet filterbank construction is optimal. Focusing on Morlet wavelets, we propose to learn the scales, orientations, and aspect ratios of the filters to produce problem-specific parameterizations of the scattering transform. We show that our learned versions of the scattering transform yield significant performance gains in small-sample classification settings over the standard scattering transform. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that traditional filterbank constructions may not always be necessary for scattering transforms to extract effective representations.
A Remedy For Distributional Shifts Through Expected Domain Translation.
Machine learning models often fail to generalize to unseen domains due to the distributional shifts. A family of such shifts, “correlation… (voir plus) shifts,” is caused by spurious correlations in the data. It is studied under the overarching topic of “domain generalization.” In this work, we employ multi-modal translation networks to tackle the correlation shifts that appear when data is sampled out-of-distribution. Learning a generative model from training domains enables us to translate each training sample under the special characteristics of other possible domains. We show that by training a predictor solely on the generated samples, the spurious correlations in training domains average out, and the invariant features corresponding to true correlations emerge. Our proposed technique, Expected Domain Translation (EDT), is benchmarked on the Colored MNIST dataset and drastically improves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy by 38% with train-domain validation model selection.
Compositional Attention: Disentangling Search and Retrieval
Multi-head, key-value attention is the backbone of the widely successful Transformer model and its variants. This attention mechanism uses m… (voir plus)ultiple parallel key-value attention blocks (called heads), each performing two fundamental computations: (1) search - selection of a relevant entity from a set via query-key interactions, and (2) retrieval - extraction of relevant features from the selected entity via a value matrix. Importantly, standard attention heads learn a rigid mapping between search and retrieval. In this work, we first highlight how this static nature of the pairing can potentially: (a) lead to learning of redundant parameters in certain tasks, and (b) hinder generalization. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel attention mechanism, called Compositional Attention, that replaces the standard head structure. The proposed mechanism disentangles search and retrieval and composes them in a dynamic, flexible and context-dependent manner through an additional soft competition stage between the query-key combination and value pairing. Through a series of numerical experiments, we show that it outperforms standard multi-head attention on a variety of tasks, including some out-of-distribution settings. Through our qualitative analysis, we demonstrate that Compositional Attention leads to dynamic specialization based on the type of retrieval needed. Our proposed mechanism generalizes multi-head attention, allows independent scaling of search and retrieval, and can easily be implemented in lieu of standard attention heads in any network architecture.