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

WOODS: Benchmarks for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series Tasks
Cognitive Models as Simulators: The Case of Moral Decision-Making
Ardavan S. Nobandegani
T. Shultz
Continual Learning In Environments With Polynomial Mixing Times
The mixing time of the Markov chain induced by a policy limits performance in real-world continual learning scenarios. Yet, the effect of mi… (voir plus)xing times on learning in continual reinforcement learning (RL) remains underexplored. In this paper, we characterize problems that are of long-term interest to the development of continual RL, which we call scalable MDPs, through the lens of mixing times. In particular, we theoretically establish that scalable MDPs have mixing times that scale polynomially with the size of the problem. We go on to demonstrate that polynomial mixing times present significant difficulties for existing approaches, which suffer from myopic bias and stale bootstrapped estimates. To validate our theory, we study the empirical scaling behavior of mixing times with respect to the number of tasks and task duration for high performing policies deployed across multiple Atari games. Our analysis demonstrates both that polynomial mixing times do emerge in practice and how their existence may lead to unstable learning behavior like catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Optimizing deep learning for Magnetoencephalography (MEG): From sensory perception to sex prediction and brain fingerprinting
PRACTICAL GUIDE
Summarizing Societies: Agent Abstraction in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Agents cannot make sense of many-agent societies through direct consideration of small-scale, low-level agent identities, but instead must r… (voir plus)ecognize emergent collective identities. Here, we take a first step towards a framework for recognizing this structure in large groups of low-level agents so that they can be modeled as a much smaller number of high-level agents—a process that we call agent abstraction. We illustrate this process by extending bisimulation metrics for state abstraction in reinforcement learning to the setting of multi-agent reinforcement learning and analyze a straightforward, if crude, abstraction based on experienced joint actions. It addresses non-stationarity due to other learning agents by improving minimax regret by a intuitive factor. To test if this compression factor provides signal for higher-level agency, we applied it to a large dataset of human play of the popular social dilemma game Diplomacy. We find that it correlates strongly with the degree of ground-truth abstraction of low-level units into the human players.
Generative Models of Brain Dynamics -- A review
The principled design and discovery of biologically- and physically-informed models of neuronal dynamics has been advancing since the mid-tw… (voir plus)entieth century. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated this progress. This review article gives a high-level overview of the approaches across different scales of organization and levels of abstraction. The studies covered in this paper include fundamental models in computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamics, data-driven methods, as well as emergent practices. While not all of these models span the intersection of neuroscience, AI, and system dynamics, all of them do or can work in tandem as generative models, which, as we argue, provide superior properties for the analysis of neuroscientific data. We discuss the limitations and unique dynamical traits of brain data and the complementary need for hypothesis- and data-driven modeling. By way of conclusion, we present several hybrid generative models from recent literature in scientific machine learning, which can be efficiently deployed to yield interpretable models of neural dynamics.
Scaling Laws for the Few-Shot Adaptation of Pre-trained Image Classifiers
Empirical science of neural scaling laws is a rapidly growing area of significant importance to the future of machine learning, particularly… (voir plus) in the light of recent breakthroughs achieved by large-scale pre-trained models such as GPT-3, CLIP and DALL-e. Accurately predicting the neural network performance with increasing resources such as data, compute and model size provides a more comprehensive evaluation of different approaches across multiple scales, as opposed to traditional point-wise comparisons of fixed-size models on fixed-size benchmarks, and, most importantly, allows for focus on the best-scaling, and thus most promising in the future, approaches. In this work, we consider a challenging problem of few-shot learning in image classification, especially when the target data distribution in the few-shot phase is different from the source, training, data distribution, in a sense that it includes new image classes not encountered during training. Our current main goal is to investigate how the amount of pre-training data affects the few-shot generalization performance of standard image classifiers. Our key observations are that (1) such performance improvements are well-approximated by power laws (linear log-log plots) as the training set size increases, (2) this applies to both cases of target data coming from either the same or from a different domain (i.e., new classes) as the training data, and (3) few-shot performance on new classes converges at a faster rate than the standard classification performance on previously seen classes. Our findings shed new light on the relationship between scale and generalization.
Approximate Bayesian Optimisation for Neural Networks
Toward Optimal Solution for the Context-Attentive Bandit Problem
Djallel Bouneffouf
Raphael Feraud
Sohini Upadhyay
Yasaman Khazaeni
Sequoia: A Software Framework to Unify Continual Learning Research
Pau Rodríguez
J. Hurtado
Dominic Zhao
Ryan Lindeborg
Timothee LESORT
Massimo Caccia
The field of Continual Learning (CL) seeks to develop algorithms that accumulate knowledge and skills over time through interaction with non… (voir plus)-stationary environments. In practice, a plethora of evaluation procedures (settings) and algorithmic solutions (methods) exist, each with their own potentially disjoint set of assumptions. This variety makes measuring progress in CL difficult. We propose a taxonomy of settings, where each setting is described as a set of assumptions. A tree-shaped hierarchy emerges from this view, where more general settings become the parents of those with more restrictive assumptions. This makes it possible to use inheritance to share and reuse research, as developing a method for a given setting also makes it directly applicable onto any of its children. We instantiate this idea as a publicly available software framework called Sequoia, which features a wide variety of settings from both the Continual Supervised Learning (CSL) and Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) domains. Sequoia also includes a growing suite of methods which are easy to extend and customize, in addition to more specialized methods from external libraries. We hope that this new paradigm and its first implementation can help unify and accelerate research in CL. You can help us grow the tree by visiting www.github.com/lebrice/Sequoia.
Learning Brain Dynamics With Coupled Low-Dimensional Nonlinear Oscillators and Deep Recurrent Networks.
Aleksandr Y. Aravkin
Peng Zheng
James R. Kozloski
Pablo Polosecki
David D. Cox
Silvina Ponce Dawson
Guillermo A. Cecchi
Many natural systems, especially biological ones, exhibit complex multivariate nonlinear dynamical behaviors that can be hard to capture by … (voir plus)linear autoregressive models. On the other hand, generic nonlinear models such as deep recurrent neural networks often require large amounts of training data, not always available in domains such as brain imaging; also, they often lack interpretability. Domain knowledge about the types of dynamics typically observed in such systems, such as a certain type of dynamical systems models, could complement purely data-driven techniques by providing a good prior. In this work, we consider a class of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models known as van der Pol (VDP) oscil lators and evaluate their ability to capture a low-dimensional representation of neural activity measured by different brain imaging modalities, such as calcium imaging (CaI) and fMRI, in different living organisms: larval zebrafish, rat, and human. We develop a novel and efficient approach to the nontrivial problem of parameters estimation for a network of coupled dynamical systems from multivariate data and demonstrate that the resulting VDP models are both accurate and interpretable, as VDP's coupling matrix reveals anatomically meaningful excitatory and inhibitory interactions across different brain subsystems. VDP outperforms linear autoregressive models (VAR) in terms of both the data fit accuracy and the quality of insight provided by the coupling matrices and often tends to generalize better to unseen data when predicting future brain activity, being comparable to and sometimes better than the recurrent neural networks (LSTMs). Finally, we demonstrate that our (generative) VDP model can also serve as a data-augmentation tool leading to marked improvements in predictive accuracy of recurrent neural networks. Thus, our work contributes to both basic and applied dimensions of neuroimaging: gaining scientific insights and improving brain-based predictive models, an area of potentially high practical importance in clinical diagnosis and neurotechnology.