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Pascal Vincent

34 accepted papers

2025

Compositional Risk Minimization

ICML 2025poster

Compositional generalization is a crucial step towards developing data-efficient intelligent machines that generalize in human-like ways. In this work, we tackle a challenging form of distribution shift, termed compositional shift, where some attribute combinations are completely absent at training…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

MaestroMotif: Skill Design from Artificial Intelligence Feedback

ICLR 2025oral

Describing skills in natural language has the potential to provide an accessible way to inject human knowledge about decision-making into an AI system. We present MaestroMotif, a method for AI-assisted skill design, which yields high-performing and adaptable agents. MaestroMotif leverages the capabi…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Pitfalls of Memorization: When Memorization Hurts Generalization

ICLR 2025poster

Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explanations. This behavior leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations rely on spurious correlations. In this work, we formalize $\textit{the interpla…

2024

Discovering Environments with XRM

ICML 2024oral

Environment annotations are essential for the success of many out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization methods. Unfortunately, these are costly to obtain and often limited by human annotators' biases. To achieve robust generalization, it is essential to develop algorithms for automatic environment d…

2024

Motif: Intrinsic Motivation from Artificial Intelligence Feedback

ICLR 2024poster

Exploring rich environments and evaluating one's actions without prior knowledge is immensely challenging. In this paper, we propose Motif, 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-ma…

2024

Stochastic positional embeddings improve masked image modeling

ICML 2024poster

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) is a promising self-supervised learning approach that enables learning from unlabeled images. Despite its recent success, learning good representations through MIM remains challenging because it requires predicting the right semantic content in accurate locations. For exa…

2023

Disentanglement of Correlated Factors via Hausdorff Factorized Support

ICLR 2023poster

A grand goal in deep learning research is to learn representations capable of generalizing across distribution shifts. Disentanglement is one promising direction aimed at aligning a model's representation with the underlying factors generating the data (e.g. color or background). Existing disentangl…

2023

Do SSL Models Have Déjà Vu? A Case of Unintended Memorization in Self-supervised Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms can produce useful image representations by learning to associate different parts of natural images with one another. However, when taken to the extreme, SSL models can unintendedly memorize specific parts in individual training samples rather than learning…

2023

ImageNet-X: Understanding Model Mistakes with Factor of Variation Annotations

ICLR 2023top-25%

Deep learning vision systems are widely deployed across applications where reliability is critical. However, even today's best models can fail to recognize an object when its pose, lighting, or background varies. While existing benchmarks surface examples challenging for models, they do not explain…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2023

PUG: Photorealistic and Semantically Controllable Synthetic Data for Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render as many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shi…

2023

Self-Supervised Learning From Images With a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture

CVPR 2023poster

This paper demonstrates an approach for learning highly semantic image representations without relying on hand-crafted data-augmentations. We introduce the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA), a non-generative approach for self-supervised learning from images. The idea behin…

2023

The hidden uniform cluster prior in self-supervised learning

ICLR 2023poster

A successful paradigm in representation learning is to perform self-supervised pretraining using tasks based on mini-batch statistics; (e.g., SimCLR, VICReg, SwAV, MSN). We show that in the formulation of all these methods is an overlooked prior to learn features that enable uniform clustering of th…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2022

Masked Siamese Networks for Label-Efficient Learning

ECCV 2022poster

"We propose Masked Siamese Networks (MSN), a self-supervised learning framework for learning image representations. Our approach matches the representation of an image view containing randomly masked patches to the representation of the original unmasked image. This self-supervised pre-training stra…

2022

Online Adversarial Attacks

ICLR 2022poster

Adversarial attacks expose important vulnerabilities of deep learning models, yet little attention has been paid to settings where data arrives as a stream. In this paper, we formalize the online adversarial attack problem, emphasizing two key elements found in real-world use-cases: attackers must o…

2022

Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning

ICLR 2022poster

Self-supervised visual representation learning aims to learn useful representations without relying on human annotations. Joint embedding approach bases on maximizing the agreement between embedding vectors from different views of the same image. Various methods have been proposed to solve the colla…

2021

Implicit Regularization via Neural Feature Alignment

AISTATS 2021poster

We approach the problem of implicit regularization in deep learning from a geometrical viewpoint. We highlight a regularization effect induced by a dynamical alignment ofthe neural tangent features introduced by Jacot et al. (2018), along a small number of task-relevant directions. This can be inter…

2020

A Closer Look at the Optimization Landscapes of Generative Adversarial Networks

ICLR 2020poster

Generative adversarial networks have been very successful in generative modeling, however they remain relatively challenging to train compared to standard deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose new visualization techniques for the optimization landscapes of GANs that enable us to study the…

Cited by 83SourcecodeScholar
2020

Adversarial Example Games

NeurIPS 2020poster

The existence of adversarial examples capable of fooling trained neural network classifiers calls for a much better understanding of possible attacks to guide the development of safeguards against them. This includes attack methods in the challenging {\em non-interactive blackbox} setting, where adv…

2020

SVRG for Policy Evaluation with Fewer Gradient Evaluations

IJCAI 2020poster

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement learning in which one aims to estimate the value function of a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Stable Policy Optimization via Off-Policy Divergence Regularization

UAI 2020poster

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks, there is room for improvemen…

2020

Stochastic Hamiltonian Gradient Methods for Smooth Games

ICML 2020poster

The success of adversarial formulations in machine learning has brought renewed motivation for smooth games. In this work, we focus on the class of stochastic Hamiltonian methods and provide the first convergence guarantees for certain classes of stochastic smooth games. We propose a novel unbiased…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar
2020

Stochastic Neural Network with Kronecker Flow

AISTATS 2020poster

Recent advances in variational inference enable the modelling of highly structured joint distributions, but are limited in their capacity to scale to the high-dimensional setting of stochastic neural networks. This limitation motivates a need for scalable parameterizations of the noise generation pr…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2019

A Variational Inequality Perspective on Generative Adversarial Networks

ICLR 2019poster

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) form a generative modeling approach known for producing appealing samples, but they are notably difficult to train. One common way to tackle this issue has been to propose new formulations of the GAN objective. Yet, surprisingly few studies have looked at optim…

2019

Randomized Value Functions via Multiplicative Normalizing Flows

UAI 2019poster

Randomized value functions offer a promising approach towards the challenge of efficient exploration in complex environments with high dimensional state and action spaces. Unlike traditional point estimate methods, randomized value functions maintain a posterior distribution over action-space values…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2019

Reducing Uncertainty in Undersampled MRI Reconstruction With Active Acquisition

CVPR 2019poster

The goal of MRI reconstruction is to restore a high fidelity image from partially observed measurements. This partial view naturally induces reconstruction uncertainty that can only be reduced by acquiring additional measurements. In this paper, we present a novel method for MRI reconstruction that,…

Cited by 147PDFScholar
2018

Convergent Tree Backup and Retrace with Function Approximation

ICML 2018oral

Off-policy learning is key to scaling up reinforcement learning as it allows to learn about a target policy from the experience generated by a different behavior policy. Unfortunately, it has been challenging to combine off-policy learning with function approximation and multi-step bootstrapping in…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2018

Fast Approximate Natural Gradient Descent in a Kronecker Factored Eigenbasis

NeurIPS 2018poster

Optimization algorithms that leverage gradient covariance information, such as variants of natural gradient descent (Amari, 1998), offer the prospect of yielding more effective descent directions. For models with many parameters, the covari- ance matrix they are based on becomes gigantic, making the…

Cited by 193SourcePDFScholar
2018

Improving Landmark Localization With Semi-Supervised Learning

CVPR 2018poster

We present two techniques to improve landmark localization in images from partially annotated datasets. Our primary goal is to leverage the common situation where precise landmark locations are only provided for a small data subset, but where class labels for classification or regression tasks relat…

Cited by 211SourcePDFScholar
2018

Parametric Adversarial Divergences are Good Task Losses for Generative Modeling

ICLR 2018workshop

Generative modeling of high dimensional data like images is a notoriously difficult and ill-defined problem. In particular, how to evaluate a learned generative model is unclear. In this paper, we argue that *adversarial learning*, pioneered with generative adversarial networks (GANs), provides an i…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2016

Recombinator Networks: Learning Coarse-To-Fine Feature Aggregation

CVPR 2016spotlight

Deep neural networks with alternating convolutional, max-pooling and decimation layers are widely used in state of the art architectures for computer vision. Max-pooling purposefully discards precise spatial information in order to create features that are more robust, and typically organized as low…

Cited by 156PDFcodeScholar
2015

Efficient Exact Gradient Update for training Deep Networks with Very Large Sparse Targets

NeurIPS 2015oral

An important class of problems involves training deep neural networks with sparse prediction targets of very high dimension D. These occur naturally in e.g. neural language models or the learning of word-embeddings, often posed as predicting the probability of next words among a vocabulary of size D…