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Nicolas Usunier

29 accepted papers

2026

Winter Soldier: Backdooring Language Models at Pre-Training with Indirect Data Poisoning

ICLR 2026poster

The pre-training of large language models (LLMs) relies on massive text datasets sourced from diverse and difficult-to-curate origins. Although membership inference attacks and hidden canaries have been explored to trace data usage, such methods rely on *regurgitation* of training data, which LM pro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Data Taggants: Dataset Ownership Verification Via Harmless Targeted Data Poisoning

ICLR 2025poster

Dataset ownership verification, the process of determining if a dataset is used in a model's training data, is necessary for detecting unauthorized data usage and data contamination. Existing approaches, such as backdoor watermarking, rely on inducing a detectable behavior into the trained model on…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Targeted Data Poisoning for Black-Box Audio Datasets Ownership Verification

ICASSP 2025accepted

Protecting the use of audio datasets is a major concern for data owners, particularly with the recent rise of audio deep learning models. While watermarks can be used to protect the data itself, they do not allow to identify a deep learning model trained on a protected dataset. In this paper, we ada…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Contextual bandits with concave rewards, and an application to fair ranking

ICLR 2023poster

We consider Contextual Bandits with Concave Rewards (CBCR), a multi-objective bandit problem where the desired trade-off between the rewards is defined by a known concave objective function, and the reward vector depends on an observed stochastic context. We present the first algorithm with provably…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Online Certification of Preference-Based Fairness for Personalized Recommender Systems (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2023poster

Recommender systems are facing scrutiny because of their growing impact on the opportunities we have access to. Current audits for fairness are limited to coarse-grained parity assessments at the level of sensitive groups. We propose to audit for envy-freeness, a more granular criterion aligned with…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization

ICLR 2022poster

Machine learning systems typically assume that the distributions of training and test sets match closely. However, a critical requirement of such systems in the real world is their ability to generalize to unseen domains. Here, we propose an _inter-domain gradient matching_ objective that targets do…

2022

Online Certification of Preference-Based Fairness for Personalized Recommender Systems

AAAI 2022technical

Recommender systems are facing scrutiny because of their growing impact on the opportunities we have access to. Current audits for fairness are limited to coarse-grained parity assessments at the level of sensitive groups. We propose to audit for envy-freeness, a more granular criterion aligned with…

Cited by 53SourcePDFScholar
2021

Hierarchical Skills for Efficient Exploration

NeurIPS 2021poster

In reinforcement learning, pre-trained low-level skills have the potential to greatly facilitate exploration. However, prior knowledge of the downstream task is required to strike the right balance between generality (fine-grained control) and specificity (faster learning) in skill design. In previo…

2021

Two-sided fairness in rankings via Lorenz dominance

NeurIPS 2021poster

We consider the problem of generating rankings that are fair towards both users and item producers in recommender systems. We address both usual recommendation (e.g., of music or movies) and reciprocal recommendation (e.g., dating). Following concepts of distributive justice in welfare economics, ou…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2020

End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers

ECCV 2020poster

We present a new method that views object detection as a direct set prediction. Our approach streamlines the detection pipeline, effectively removing the need for many hand-designed components like a non-maximum suppression procedure or anchor generation that explicitly encode our prior knowledge ab…

2020

Fully Parallel Hyperparameter Search: Reshaped Space-Filling

ICML 2020poster

Space-filling designs such as Low Discrepancy Sequence (LDS), Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) and Jittered Sampling (JS) were proposed for fully parallel hyperparameter search, and were shown to be more effective than random and grid search. We prove that LHS and JS outperform random search only by a…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2020

Growing Action Spaces

ICML 2020poster

In complex tasks, such as those with large combinatorial action spaces, random exploration may be too inefficient to achieve meaningful learning progress. In this work, we use a curriculum of progressively growing action spaces to accelerate learning. We assume the environment is out of our control,…

2020

Tensor Decompositions for Temporal Knowledge Base Completion

ICLR 2020poster

Most algorithms for representation learning and link prediction in relational data have been designed for static data. However, the data they are applied to usually evolves with time, such as friend graphs in social networks or user interactions with items in recommender systems. This is also the ca…

Cited by 355SourcecodeScholar
2019

A Structured Prediction Approach for Generalization in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Effective coordination is crucial to solve multi-agent collaborative (MAC) problems. While centralized reinforcement learning methods can optimally solve small MAC instances, they do not scale to large problems and they fail to generalize to scenarios different from those seen during training. In t…

2019

To Reverse the Gradient or Not: an Empirical Comparison of Adversarial and Multi-task Learning in Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2019accepted

Transcribed datasets typically contain speaker identity for each instance in the data. We investigate two ways to incorporate this information during training: Multi-Task Learning and Adversarial Learning. In multi-task learning, the goal is speaker prediction; we expect a performance improvement wi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2019

Value Propagation Networks

ICLR 2019poster

We present Value Propagation (VProp), a set of parameter-efficient differentiable planning modules built on Value Iteration which can successfully be trained using reinforcement learning to solve unseen tasks, has the capability to generalize to larger map sizes, and can learn to navigate in dynamic…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2018

Canonical Tensor Decomposition for Knowledge Base Completion

ICML 2018oral

The problem of Knowledge Base Completion can be framed as a 3rd-order binary tensor completion problem. In this light, the Canonical Tensor Decomposition (CP) seems like a natural solution; however, current implementations of CP on standard Knowledge Base Completion benchmarks are lagging behind the…

2018

Forward Modeling for Partial Observation Strategy Games - A StarCraft Defogger

NeurIPS 2018poster

We formulate the problem of defogging as state estimation and future state prediction from previous, partial observations in the context of real-time strategy games. We propose to employ encoder-decoder neural networks for this task, and introduce proxy tasks and baselines for evaluation to assess t…

2018

Learning Filterbanks from Raw Speech for Phone Recognition

ICASSP 2018accepted

We train a bank of complex filters that operates on the raw waveform and is fed into a convolutional neural network for end-to-end phone recognition. These time-domain filterbanks (TD-filterbanks) are initialized as an approximation of mel-filterbanks, and then fine-tuned jointly with the remaining…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

SING: Symbol-to-Instrument Neural Generator

NeurIPS 2018poster

Recent progress in deep learning for audio synthesis opens the way to models that directly produce the waveform, shifting away from the traditional paradigm of relying on vocoders or MIDI synthesizers for speech or music generation. Despite their successes, current state-of-the-art neural audio synt…

2017

Episodic Exploration for Deep Deterministic Policies for StarCraft Micromanagement

ICLR 2017poster

We consider scenarios from the real-time strategy game StarCraft as benchmarks for reinforcement learning algorithms. We focus on micromanagement, that is, the short-term, low-level control of team members during a battle. We propose several scenarios that are challenging for reinforcement learning…

Cited by 21SourceScholar
2017

Fader Networks:Manipulating Images by Sliding Attributes

NeurIPS 2017poster

This paper introduces a new encoder-decoder architecture that is trained to reconstruct images by disentangling the salient information of the image and the values of attributes directly in the latent space. As a result, after training, our model can generate different realistic versions of an input…

2017

Parseval Networks: Improving Robustness to Adversarial Examples

ICML 2017poster

We introduce Parseval networks, a form of deep neural networks in which the Lipschitz constant of linear, convolutional and aggregation layers is constrained to be smaller than $1$. Parseval networks are empirically and theoretically motivated by an analysis of the robustness of the predictions made…

Cited by 958SourcePDFScholar