Portrait de Pascal Vincent

Pascal Vincent

Membre industriel principal
Professeur agrégé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Chercheur scientifique, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Montréal
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage profond
Google Scholar

Biographie

Pascal Vincent est chercheur à Meta (FAIR, Fundamental IA Research), professeur associé au Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal, membre fondateur de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle et chercheur associé à l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR, programme Apprentissage automatique, apprentissage biologique).

Ses recherches sur les principes et les algorithmes de l'apprentissage par représentation l'ont amené à développer plusieurs idées fondamentales qui sont devenues des éléments clés du succès des méthodes d'apprentissage profond. Parmi ses travaux les plus influents, il est coauteur de l'article fondateur sur les modèles de langage neuronaux « A Neural Probabilistic Language Model » (Bengio et al., 2013), qui a jeté les bases de tous les modèles de langage fondés sur les réseaux de neurones artificiels. Son travail sur les auto-encodeurs de débruitage (Vincent et al., 2008, 2010) a été le premier à proposer la tâche prétexte de remplir des blancs artificiellement introduits dans le but d'apprendre des représentations utiles dans n'importe quelle modalité, un précurseur de ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui « l'apprentissage autosupervisé ». En 2011, il a développé le principe du denoising score matching (P. Vincent, « A connection between score matching and denoising autoencoders », Neural Computation, 2011), qui est maintenant couramment utilisé pour former des modèles génératifs basés sur la diffusion. Ses recherches actuelles se concentrent sur de nouvelles théories et de nouveaux algorithmes pour l'apprentissage de la représentation afin de permettre une généralisation robuste en dehors de la distribution.

Étudiants actuels

Florian Bordes
Doctorat - UdeM
Github
Google Scholar
Vincent Michalski
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Site web
Github
Google Scholar

Publications

The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hinders Generalization
Reza Bayat
Mohammad Pezeshki
Elvis Dohmatob
David Lopez-Paz
Pascal Vincent
Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explan… (voir plus)ations. This leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations are spurious. In this work, we formalize
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SciForDL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Compositional Risk Minimization
Divyat Mahajan
Mohammad Pezeshki
Ioannis Mitliagkas
Kartik Ahuja
Pascal Vincent
2024-10-08
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Stochastic positional embeddings improve masked image modeling
Amir Bar
Florian Bordes
Assaf Shocher
Mahmoud Assran
Pascal Vincent
Nicolas Ballas
Trevor Darrell
Amir Globerson
Yann LeCun
2024-07-08
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (publié)
proceedings.mlr.press
openreview.net
Stochastic positional embeddings improve masked image modeling
Amir Bar
Florian Bordes
Assaf Shocher
Mahmoud Assran
Pascal Vincent
Nicolas Ballas
Trevor Darrell
Amir Globerson
Yann LeCun
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is a promising self-supervised learning approach that enables learning from unlabeled images. Despite its recent… (voir plus) success, learning good representations through MIM remains challenging because it requires predicting the right semantic content in accurate locations. For example, given an incomplete picture of a dog, we can guess that there is a tail, but we cannot determine its exact location. In this work, we propose to incorporate location uncertainty into MIM by using stochastic positional embeddings (StoP). Specifically, we condition the model on stochastic masked token positions drawn from a Gaussian distribution. StoP reduces overfitting to location features and guides the model toward learning features that are more robust to location uncertainties. Quantitatively, StoP improves downstream MIM performance on a variety of downstream tasks, including
2024-05-01
ICML.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors
Vitória Barin Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Pascal Vincent
Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from the observed distribution solely, and is formalized through the… (voir plus) theory of identifiability. The identifiability of independent latent factors is proven to be impossible in the unsupervised i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear map from factors to observations. In this work, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to recover quantized latent factors under a generic nonlinear diffeomorphism. We only assume that the latent factors have independent discontinuities in their density, without requiring the factors to be statistically independent. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized factor identifiability, and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of the quantized factors.
2024-03-15
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (publié)
proceedings.mlr.press
arxiv.org
Motif: Intrinsic Motivation from Artificial Intelligence Feedback
Martin Klissarov
Pierluca D'Oro
Shagun Sodhani
Roberta Raileanu
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Pascal Vincent
Amy Zhang
Mikael Henaff
Exploring rich environments and evaluating one's actions without prior knowledge is immensely challenging. In this paper, we propose Motif, … (voir plus)a general method to interface such prior knowledge from a Large Language Model (LLM) with an agent. Motif is based on the idea of grounding LLMs for decision-making without requiring them to interact with the environment: it elicits preferences from an LLM over pairs of captions to construct an intrinsic reward, which is then used to train agents with reinforcement learning. We evaluate Motif's performance and behavior on the challenging, open-ended and procedurally-generated NetHack game. Surprisingly, by only learning to maximize its intrinsic reward, Motif achieves a higher game score than an algorithm directly trained to maximize the score itself. When combining Motif's intrinsic reward with the environment reward, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches and makes progress on tasks where no advancements have ever been made without demonstrations. Finally, we show that Motif mostly generates intuitive human-aligned behaviors which can be steered easily through prompt modifications, while scaling well with the LLM size and the amount of information given in the prompt.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Discovering environments with XRM
Mohammad Pezeshki
Diane Bouchacourt
Mark Ibrahim
Nicolas Ballas
Pascal Vincent
David Lopez-Paz
Successful out-of-distribution generalization requires environment annotations. Unfortunately, these are resource-intensive to obtain, and t… (voir plus)heir relevance to model performance is limited by the expectations and perceptual biases of human annotators. Therefore, to enable robust AI systems across applications, we must develop algorithms to automatically discover environments inducing broad generalization. Current proposals, which divide examples based on their training error, suffer from one fundamental problem. These methods add hyper-parameters and early-stopping criteria that are impossible to tune without a validation set with human-annotated environments, the very information subject to discovery. In this paper, we propose Cross-Risk-Minimization (XRM) to address this issue. XRM trains two twin networks, each learning from one random half of the training data, while imitating confident held-out mistakes made by its sibling. XRM provides a recipe for hyper-parameter tuning, does not require early-stopping, and can discover environments for all training and validation data. Domain generalization algorithms built on top of XRM environments achieve oracle worst-group-accuracy, solving a long-standing problem in out-of-distribution generalization.
2023-10-27
NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/DistShift (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Self-Supervised Disentanglement by Leveraging Structure in Data Augmentations
Cian Eastwood
Julius von Kügelgen
Linus Ericsson
Diane Bouchacourt
Pascal Vincent
Mark Ibrahim
Bernhard Schölkopf
Self-supervised representation learning often uses data augmentations to induce some invariance to "style" attributes of the data. However, … (voir plus)with downstream tasks generally unknown at training time, it is difficult to deduce a priori which attributes of the data are indeed "style" and can be safely discarded. To address this, we introduce a more principled approach that seeks to disentangle style features rather than discard them. The key idea is to add multiple style embedding spaces where: (i) each is invariant to all-but-one augmentation; and (ii) joint entropy is maximized. We formalize our structured data-augmentation procedure from a causal latent-variable-model perspective, and prove identifiability of both content and (multiple blocks of) style variables. We empirically demonstrate the benefits our approach on synthetic datasets and then present promising but limited results on ImageNet.
2023-10-27
NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/CRL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
PUG: Photorealistic and Semantically Controllable Synthetic Data for Representation Learning
Florian Bordes
Shashank Shekhar
Mark Ibrahim
Diane Bouchacourt
Pascal Vincent
Ari S. Morcos
Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render a… (voir plus)s many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shifts between training and testing to isolate variables of interest for sound experimentation. Despite such promise, the use of synthetic image data is still limited -- and often played down -- mainly due to their lack of realism. Most works therefore rely on datasets of real images, which have often been scraped from public images on the internet, and may have issues with regards to privacy, bias, and copyright, while offering little control over how objects precisely appear. In this work, we present a path to democratize the use of photorealistic synthetic data: we develop a new generation of interactive environments for representation learning research, that offer both controllability and realism. We use the Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine well known in the entertainment industry, to produce PUG (Photorealistic Unreal Graphics) environments and datasets for representation learning. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of PUG to enable more rigorous evaluations of vision models.
openreview.net
Do SSL Models Have Déjà Vu? A Case of Unintended Memorization in Self-supervised Learning
Casey Meehan
Florian Bordes
Pascal Vincent
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Chuan Guo
Self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms can produce useful image representations by learning to associate different parts of natural image… (voir plus)s with one another. However, when taken to the extreme, SSL models can unintendedly memorize specific parts in individual training samples rather than learning semantically meaningful associations. In this work, we perform a systematic study of the unintended memorization of image-specific information in SSL models -- which we refer to as d\'ej\`a vu memorization. Concretely, we show that given the trained model and a crop of a training image containing only the background (e.g., water, sky, grass), it is possible to infer the foreground object with high accuracy or even visually reconstruct it. Furthermore, we show that d\'ej\`a vu memorization is common to different SSL algorithms, is exacerbated by certain design choices, and cannot be detected by conventional techniques for evaluating representation quality. Our study of d\'ej\`a vu memorization reveals previously unknown privacy risks in SSL models, as well as suggests potential practical mitigation strategies. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/DejaVu.
openreview.net
On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors
Vitória Barin Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Pascal Vincent
Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from the observed distribution solely, and is formalized through the … (voir plus)theory of identifiability. The identifiability of independent latent factors is proven to be impossible in the unsupervised i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear map from factors to observations. In this work, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to recover quantized latent factors under a generic nonlinear diffeomorphism. We only assume that the latent factors have independent discontinuities in their density, without requiring the factors to be statistically independent. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized factor identifiability, and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of the quantized factors.
2023-06-28
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Identifiability of Discretized Latent Coordinate Systems via Density Landmarks Detection
Vitória Barin-Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Pascal Vincent
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net