Portrait de Tegan Maharaj

Tegan Maharaj

Membre académique principal
Professeure adjointe en apprentissage automatique, HEC Montréal, Département de sciences de la décision
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage profond
Systèmes dynamiques
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique

Biographie

Je suis professeure adjointe au Département de sciences de la décision à HEC Montréal. Mes objectifs de recherche sont de contribuer à la compréhension et aux techniques de la science du développement responsable de l’IA, tout en appliquant utilement l’IA à des problèmes écologiques à fort impact liés au changement climatique, à l’épidémiologie, à l’alignement de l’IA et à l’évaluation des impacts écologiques. Mes travaux récents portent sur deux thèmes : l’utilisation de modèles profonds pour l’analyse des politiques et l’atténuation des risques; et la conception de données ou d’environnements de tests unitaires pour évaluer empiriquement le comportement d’apprentissage ou simuler le déploiement d’un système d’IA. N’hésitez pas à me contacter pour toute collaboration dans ces domaines.

Je suis généralement intéressée par l’étude de ce qui « entre » dans les modèles profonds : non seulement les données, mais l’environnement d’apprentissage plus globalement, qui comprend la conception/spécification des tâches, la fonction de perte et la régularisation, ainsi que le contexte sociétal du déploiement, notamment les considérations de confidentialité, les tendances et les incitatifs, les normes et les préjugés humains. Je suis préoccupée et passionnée par l’éthique de l’IA, la sécurité et l’application de l’apprentissage machine à la gestion de l’environnement, à la santé et au bien-être social.

Étudiants actuels

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Quantifying Likeness: A Simple Machine Learning Approach to Identifying Copyright Infringement in (AI-Generated) Artwork
Michaela Drouillard
Ryan Spencer
Nikée Nantambu-Allen
Through study of legal precedent, we propose a pragmatic way to quantify copyright infringement, via stylistic similarity, in AI-generated a… (voir plus)rtwork. Copyright infringement by AI systems is a topic of rapidly-increasing importance as generative AI becomes more widespread and commercial. In contrast to typical work in this field, more in line with a realistic legal setting, our approach quantifies similarity of a set of potentially-infringing "defendant" artworks to a set of copyrighted "plaintiff" artworks. We develop our approach by making use of one of the most litigated artistic creations of this century -- Mickey Mouse. We curate a dataset using Mickey as the plaintiff, and perform hyperparameter search, scaling, and robustness analyses with various defendent artworks from real legal cases to find settings that generalize well. We operationalize similarity via a simple discrimintative task which can be accomplished in a low-resource setting by non-experts -- our aim is to provide a `plug and play' method that is feasible for artists and/or legal experts to use with their own plaintiff sets of artworks. We further demonstrate the viability of our approach by quantifying similarity in a second curated dataset of Maria Prymachenko's art vs. AI-generated images. We conclude by discussing uses of our work in both legal and other settings, including provision of artist compensation.
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models
Usman Anwar
Abulhair Saparov
Javier Rando
Daniel Paleka
Miles Turpin
Peter Hase
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Erik Jenner
Stephen Casper
Oliver Sourbut
Benjamin L. Edelman
Zhaowei Zhang
Mario Günther
Anton Korinek
Jose Hernandez-Orallo
Lewis Hammond
Eric J Bigelow
Alexander Pan
Lauro Langosco
Tomasz Korbak … (voir 22 de plus)
Heidi Chenyu Zhang
Ruiqi Zhong
Sean O hEigeartaigh
Gabriel Recchia
Giulio Corsi
Alan Chan
Markus Anderljung
Lilian Edwards
Aleksandar Petrov
Christian Schroeder de Witt
Danqi Chen
Sumeet Ramesh Motwani
Samuel Albanie
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Philip Torr
Florian Tramèr
He He
Atoosa Kasirzadeh
Yejin Choi
Implicit meta-learning may lead language models to trust more reliable sources
Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
Egor Krasheninnikov
Bruno Mlodozeniec
We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) may learn indicators of document usefulness and modulate their updates accordingly. We intr… (voir plus)oduce random strings ("tags") as indicators of usefulness in a synthetic fine-tuning dataset. Fine-tuning on this dataset leads to **implicit meta-learning (IML)**: in further fine-tuning, the model updates to make more use of text that is tagged as useful. We perform a thorough empirical investigation of this phenomenon, finding (among other things) that (i) it occurs in both pretrained LLMs and those trained from scratch, as well as on a vision task, and (ii) larger models and smaller batch sizes tend to give more IML. We also use probing to examine how IML changes the way models store knowledge in their parameters. Finally, we reflect on what our results might imply about the capabilities, risks, and controllability of future AI systems.
Machine Learning Data Practices through a Data Curation Lens: An Evaluation Framework
Eshta Bhardwaj
Harshit Gujral
Siyi Wu
Ciara Zogheib
Christoph Becker
Studies of dataset development in machine learning call for greater attention to the data practices that make model development possible and… (voir plus) shape its outcomes. Many argue that the adoption of theory and practices from archives and data curation fields can support greater fairness, accountability, transparency, and more ethical machine learning. In response, this paper examines data practices in machine learning dataset development through the lens of data curation. We evaluate data practices in machine learning as data curation practices. To do so, we develop a framework for evaluating machine learning datasets using data curation concepts and principles through a rubric. Through a mixed-methods analysis of evaluation results for 25 ML datasets, we study the feasibility of data curation principles to be adopted for machine learning data work in practice and explore how data curation is currently performed. We find that researchers in machine learning, which often emphasizes model development, struggle to apply standard data curation principles. Our findings illustrate difficulties at the intersection of these fields, such as evaluating dimensions that have shared terms in both fields but non-shared meanings, a high degree of interpretative flexibility in adapting concepts without prescriptive restrictions, obstacles in limiting the depth of data curation expertise needed to apply the rubric, and challenges in scoping the extent of documentation dataset creators are responsible for. We propose ways to address these challenges and develop an overall framework for evaluation that outlines how data curation concepts and methods can inform machine learning data practices.
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models
Usman Anwar
Abulhair Saparov
Javier Rando
Daniel Paleka
Miles Turpin
Peter Hase
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Erik Jenner
Stephen Casper
Oliver Sourbut
Benjamin L. Edelman
Zhaowei Zhang
Mario Günther
Anton Korinek
Jose Hernandez-Orallo
Lewis Hammond
Eric J Bigelow
Alexander Pan
Lauro Langosco
Tomasz Korbak … (voir 18 de plus)
Heidi Zhang
Ruiqi Zhong
Sean 'o H'eigeartaigh
Gabriel Recchia
Giulio Corsi
Alan Chan
Markus Anderljung
Lilian Edwards
Danqi Chen
Samuel Albanie
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Florian Tramèr
He He
Atoosa Kasirzadeh
Yejin Choi
This work identifies 18 foundational challenges in assuring the alignment and safety of large language models (LLMs). These challenges are o… (voir plus)rganized into three different categories: scientific understanding of LLMs, development and deployment methods, and sociotechnical challenges. Based on the identified challenges, we pose
Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child Welfare
Erina Seh-Young Moon
Erin Moon
Devansh Saxena
Shion Guha
Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress
Geoffrey Hinton
Andrew Yao
Dawn Song
Pieter Abbeel
Trevor Darrell
Yuval Noah Harari
Ya-Qin Zhang
Lan Xue
Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Gillian K. Hadfield
Jeff Clune
Frank Hutter
Atilim Güneş Baydin
Sheila McIlraith
Qiqi Gao
Ashwin Acharya
Anca Dragan … (voir 5 de plus)
Philip Torr
Stuart Russell
Daniel Kahneman
Jan Brauner
Sören Mindermann
Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems
Alan Chan
Rebecca Salganik
Alva Markelius
Chris Pang
Nitarshan Rajkumar
Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
Lauro Langosco
Zhonghao He
Yawen Duan
Micah Carroll
Michelle Lin
Alex Mayhew
Katherine Collins
Maryam Molamohammadi
John Burden
Wanru Zhao
Shalaleh Rismani
Konstantinos Voudouris
Umang Bhatt
Adrian Weller … (voir 2 de plus)
Research in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE)1 has established many sources and forms of algorithmic harm, in domain… (voir plus)s as diverse as health care, finance, policing, and recommendations. Much work remains to be done to mitigate the serious harms of these systems, particularly those disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing harms, new systems are being developed and deployed, typically without strong regulatory barriers, threatening the perpetuation of the same harms and the creation of novel ones. In response, the FATE community has emphasized the importance of anticipating harms, rather than just responding to them. Anticipation of harms is especially important given the rapid pace of developments in machine learning (ML). Our work focuses on the anticipation of harms from increasingly agentic systems. Rather than providing a definition of agency as a binary property, we identify 4 key characteristics which, particularly in combination, tend to increase the agency of a given algorithmic system: underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We also discuss important harms which arise from increasing agency – notably, these include systemic and/or long-range impacts, often on marginalized or unconsidered stakeholders. We emphasize that recognizing agency of algorithmic systems does not absolve or shift the human responsibility for algorithmic harms. Rather, we use the term agency to highlight the increasingly evident fact that ML systems are not fully under human control. Our work explores increasingly agentic algorithmic systems in three parts. First, we explain the notion of an increase in agency for algorithmic systems in the context of diverse perspectives on agency across disciplines. Second, we argue for the need to anticipate harms from increasingly agentic systems. Third, we discuss important harms from increasingly agentic systems and ways forward for addressing them. We conclude by reflecting on implications of our work for anticipating algorithmic harms from emerging systems.
Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Martin Weiss
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Joanna Merckx
andrew williams
Victor Schmidt
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Akshay Patel
Yang Zhang
Bernhard Schölkopf
Factors Influencing Generalization in Chaotic Dynamical Systems
Luã Streit
Vikram Voleti
Many real-world systems exhibit chaotic behaviour, for example: weather, fluid dynamics, stock markets, natural ecosystems, and disease tran… (voir plus)smission. While chaotic systems are often thought to be completely unpredictable, in fact there are patterns within and across that experts frequently describe and contrast qualitatively. We hypothesize that given the right supervision / task definition, representation learning systems will be able to pick up on these patterns, and successfully generalize both in- and out-of-distribution (OOD). Thus, this work explores and identifies key factors which lead to good generalization. We observe a variety of interesting phenomena, including: learned representations transfer much better when fine-tuned vs. frozen; forecasting appears to be the best pre-training task; OOD robustness falls off very quickly outside the training distribution; recurrent architectures generally outperform others on OOD generalization. Our findings are of interest to any domain of prediction where chaotic dynamics play a role.
Metadata Archaeology: Unearthing Data Subsets by Leveraging Training Dynamics
Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui
Nitarshan Rajkumar
Sara Hooker
Modern machine learning research relies on relatively few carefully curated datasets. Even in these datasets, and typically in `untidy' or r… (voir plus)aw data, practitioners are faced with significant issues of data quality and diversity which can be prohibitively labor intensive to address. Existing methods for dealing with these challenges tend to make strong assumptions about the particular issues at play, and often require a priori knowledge or metadata such as domain labels. Our work is orthogonal to these methods: we instead focus on providing a unified and efficient framework for Metadata Archaeology -- uncovering and inferring metadata of examples in a dataset. We curate different subsets of data that might exist in a dataset (e.g. mislabeled, atypical, or out-of-distribution examples) using simple transformations, and leverage differences in learning dynamics between these probe suites to infer metadata of interest. Our method is on par with far more sophisticated mitigation methods across different tasks: identifying and correcting mislabeled examples, classifying minority-group samples, prioritizing points relevant for training and enabling scalable human auditing of relevant examples.
Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision for Stylized Opinion Summarization
Reinald Kim
Mirella Lapata. 2020
Un-611
Emmanuel Bengio
Maxinder S. Kan-620
Asja Fischer
Somnath Basu
Roy Chowdhury
Chao Zhao
Tanya Goyal
Junyi Jiacheng Xu
Jessy Li
Ivor Wai-hung Tsang
James T. Kwok
Neil Houlsby
Andrei Giurgiu
Stanisław Jastrzębski … (voir 22 de plus)
Bruna Morrone
Quentin de Laroussilhe
Mona Gesmundo
Attariyan Sylvain
Gelly
Thomas Wolf
Lysandre Debut
Julien Victor Sanh
Clement Chaumond
Anthony Delangue
Pier-339 Moi
Tim ric Cistac
R´emi Rault
Morgan Louf
Funtow-900 Joe
Sam Davison
Patrick Shleifer
Von Platen
Clara Ma
Yacine Jernite
Julien Plu
Canwen Xu
Opinion summarization research has primar-001 ily focused on generating summaries reflect-002 ing important opinions from customer reviews 0… (voir plus)03 without paying much attention to the writing 004 style. In this paper, we propose the stylized 005 opinion summarization task, which aims to 006 generate a summary of customer reviews in 007 the desired (e.g., professional) writing style. 008 To tackle the difficulty in collecting customer 009 and professional review pairs, we develop a 010 non-parallel training framework, Noisy Pair-011 ing and Partial Supervision ( NAPA ), which 012 trains a stylized opinion summarization sys-013 tem from non-parallel customer and profes-014 sional review sets. We create a benchmark P RO - 015 S UM by collecting customer and professional 016 reviews from Yelp and Michelin. Experimental 017 results on P RO S UM and FewSum demonstrate 018 that our non-parallel training framework con-019 sistently improves both automatic and human 020 evaluations, successfully building a stylized 021 opinion summarization model that can gener-022 ate professionally-written summaries from cus-023 tomer reviews. 024