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Aaron C. Courville

12 accepted papers

2020

Unsupervised Learning of Dense Visual Representations

NeurIPS 2020poster

Contrastive self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising approach to unsupervised visual representation learning. In general, these methods learn global (image-level) representations that are invariant to different views (i.e., compositions of data augmentation) of the same image. However, m…

2019

MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis

NeurIPS 2019poster

Previous works (Donahue et al., 2018a; Engel et al., 2019a) have found that generating coherent raw audio waveforms with GANs is challenging. In this paper, we show that it is possible to train GANs reliably to generate high quality coherent waveforms by introducing a set of architectural changes an…

2019

No-Press Diplomacy: Modeling Multi-Agent Gameplay

NeurIPS 2019poster

Diplomacy is a seven-player non-stochastic, non-cooperative game, where agents acquire resources through a mix of teamwork and betrayal. Reliance on trust and coordination makes Diplomacy the first non-cooperative multi-agent benchmark for complex sequential social dilemmas in a rich environment. In…

2019

Ordered Memory

NeurIPS 2019poster

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired…

2018

Improving Explorability in Variational Inference with Annealed Variational Objectives

NeurIPS 2018poster

Despite the advances in the representational capacity of approximate distributions for variational inference, the optimization process can still limit the density that is ultimately learned. We demonstrate the drawbacks of biasing the true posterior to be unimodal, and introduce Annealed Variational…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar
2018

Towards Text Generation with Adversarially Learned Neural Outlines

NeurIPS 2018poster

Recent progress in deep generative models has been fueled by two paradigms -- autoregressive and adversarial models. We propose a combination of both approaches with the goal of learning generative models of text. Our method first produces a high-level sentence outline and then generates words seque…

2017

GibbsNet: Iterative Adversarial Inference for Deep Graphical Models

NeurIPS 2017poster

Directed latent variable models that formulate the joint distribution as $p(x,z) = p(z) p(x \mid z)$ have the advantage of fast and exact sampling. However, these models have the weakness of needing to specify $p(z)$, often with a simple fixed prior that limits the expressiveness of the model. Undi…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2017

Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs

NeurIPS 2017poster

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only poor samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems…

2017

Modulating early visual processing by language

NeurIPS 2017spotlight

It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view dominates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic inputs are mostly processed independently before b…

Cited by 617SourcePDFScholar
2016

Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks

NeurIPS 2016poster

The Teacher Forcing algorithm trains recurrent networks by supplying observed sequence values as inputs during training and using the network’s own one-step-ahead predictions to do multi-step sampling. We introduce the Professor Forcing algorithm, which uses adversarial domain adaptation to encourag…

Cited by 805SourcePDFScholar
2015

A Recurrent Latent Variable Model for Sequential Data

NeurIPS 2015poster

In this paper, we explore the inclusion of latent random variables into the hidden state of a recurrent neural network (RNN) by combining the elements of the variational autoencoder. We argue that through the use of high-level latent random variables, the variational RNN (VRNN) can model the kind of…