Portrait de Joelle Pineau

Joelle Pineau

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeure agrégée, McGill University, École d'informatique
Co-directrice générale, Meta AI (FAIR - Facebook AI Research)

Biographie

Joelle Pineau est professeure agrégée et titulaire d’une bourse William Dawson à l'Université McGill, où elle codirige le Laboratoire de raisonnement et d'apprentissage. Elle est membre du corps professoral de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle et titulaire d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR. Elle est également vice-présidente de la recherche en IA chez Meta (anciennement Facebook), où elle dirige l'équipe FAIR (Fundamental AI Research). Elle détient un baccalauréat ès sciences en génie de l'Université de Waterloo et une maîtrise et un doctorat en robotique de l'Université Carnegie Mellon.

Ses recherches sont axées sur le développement de nouveaux modèles et algorithmes pour la planification et l'apprentissage dans des domaines complexes partiellement observables. Elle travaille également sur l'application de ces algorithmes à des problèmes complexes en robotique, dans les soins de santé, dans les jeux et dans les agents conversationnels. Elle est membre du comité de rédaction du Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research et du Journal of Machine Learning Research, et est actuellement présidente de l'International Machine Learning Society. Elle a été lauréate de la bourse commémorative E. W. R. Steacie du Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie (CRSNG) 2018 et du Prix du Gouverneur général pour l'innovation 2019. Elle est membre de l'Association pour l'avancement de l'intelligence artificielle (AAAI), membre principal de l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR) et membre de la Société royale du Canada.

Étudiants actuels

Stagiaire de recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - McGill University
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - Université de Montréal
Doctorat - McGill University
Doctorat - Université de Montréal
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - McGill University

Publications

The Curious Case of Absolute Position Embeddings
Koustuv Sinha
Amirhossein Kazemnejad
Dieuwke Hupkes
Adina Williams
Automated Data-Driven Generation of Personalized Pedagogical Interventions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Ekaterina Kochmar
Dung D. Vu
Robert Belfer
Varun Gupta
Iulian V. Serban
Automated Data-Driven Generation of Personalized Pedagogical Interventions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Ekaterina Kochmar
Dung D. Vu
Robert Belfer
Varun Gupta
Iulian V. Serban
SPeCiaL: Self-Supervised Pretraining for Continual Learning
Lucas Caccia
Model-Invariant State Abstractions for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Manan Tomar
Amy Zhang
Roberto Calandra
Matthew E. Taylor
Accuracy and generalization of dynamics models is key to the success of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). As the complexity of task… (voir plus)s increases, so does the sample inefficiency of learning accurate dynamics models. However, many complex tasks also exhibit sparsity in the dynamics, i.e., actions have only a local effect on the system dynamics. In this paper, we exploit this property with a causal invariance perspective in the single-task setting, introducing a new type of state abstraction called \textit{model-invariance}. Unlike previous forms of state abstractions, a model-invariance state abstraction leverages causal sparsity over state variables. This allows for compositional generalization to unseen states, something that non-factored forms of state abstractions cannot do. We prove that an optimal policy can be learned over this model-invariance state abstraction and show improved generalization in a simple toy domain. Next, we propose a practical method to approximately learn a model-invariant representation for complex domains and validate our approach by showing improved modelling performance over standard maximum likelihood approaches on challenging tasks, such as the MuJoCo-based Humanoid. Finally, within the MBRL setting we show strong performance gains with respect to sample efficiency across a host of other continuous control tasks.
Improving Reproducibility in Machine Learning Research (A Report from the NeurIPS 2019 Reproducibility Program)
Philippe Vincent‐lamarre
Koustuv Sinha
Vincent Larivière
Alina Beygelzimer
Florence D'alche-buc
E. Fox
Learning Robust State Abstractions for Hidden-Parameter Block MDPs
Amy Zhang
Shagun Sodhani
Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning as a Hidden-Parameter Block MDP
Amy Zhang
Shagun Sodhani
Multi-task reinforcement learning is a rich paradigm where information from previously seen environments can be leveraged for better perform… (voir plus)ance and improved sample-efficiency in new environments. In this work, we leverage ideas of common structure underlying a family of Markov decision processes (MDPs) to improve performance in the few-shot regime. We use assumptions of structure from Hidden-Parameter MDPs and Block MDPs to propose a new framework, HiP-BMDP, and approach for learning a common representation and universal dynamics model. To this end, we provide transfer and generalization bounds based on task and state similarity, along with sample complexity bounds that depend on the aggregate number of samples across tasks, rather than the number of tasks, a significant improvement over prior work. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, we empirically compare and show improvements against other multi-task and meta-reinforcement learning baselines.
Deep interpretability for GWAS
Deepak Sharma
Marc-andr'e Legault
Louis-philippe Lemieux Perreault
Audrey Lemaccon
Marie-Pierre Dub'e
Genome-Wide Association Studies are typically conducted using linear models to find genetic variants associated with common diseases. In the… (voir plus)se studies, association testing is done on a variant-by-variant basis, possibly missing out on non-linear interaction effects between variants. Deep networks can be used to model these interactions, but they are difficult to train and interpret on large genetic datasets. We propose a method that uses the gradient based deep interpretability technique named DeepLIFT to show that known diabetes genetic risk factors can be identified using deep models along with possibly novel associations.
Handling Black Swan Events in Deep Learning with Diversely Extrapolated Neural Networks
Maxime Wabartha
Vincent Francois-Lavet
By virtue of their expressive power, neural networks (NNs) are well suited to fitting large, complex datasets, yet they are also known to … (voir plus)produce similar predictions for points outside the training distribution. As such, they are, like humans, under the influence of the Black Swan theory: models tend to be extremely "surprised" by rare events, leading to potentially disastrous consequences, while justifying these same events in hindsight. To avoid this pitfall, we introduce DENN, an ensemble approach building a set of Diversely Extrapolated Neural Networks that fits the training data and is able to generalize more diversely when extrapolating to novel data points. This leads DENN to output highly uncertain predictions for unexpected inputs. We achieve this by adding a diversity term in the loss function used to train the model, computed at specific inputs. We first illustrate the usefulness of the method on a low-dimensional regression problem. Then, we show how the loss can be adapted to tackle anomaly detection during classification, as well as safe imitation learning problems.
On Overfitting and Asymptotic Bias in Batch Reinforcement Learning with Partial Observability (Extended Abstract)
Vincent Francois-Lavet
Damien Ernst
Raphael Fonteneau
When an agent has limited information on its environment, the suboptimality of an RL algorithm can be decomposed into the sum of two terms: … (voir plus)a term related to an asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and a term due to overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data). In the context of reinforcement learning with partial observability, this paper provides an analysis of the tradeoff between these two error sources. In particular, our theoretical analysis formally characterizes how a smaller state representation increases the asymptotic bias while decreasing the risk of overfitting.
A Large-Scale, Open-Domain, Mixed-Interface Dialogue-Based ITS for STEM
Iulian V. Serban
Varun Gupta
Ekaterina Kochmar
Dung D. Vu
Robert Belfer