David Rolnick

Biography

David Rolnick is an assistant professor at McGill University’s School of Computer Science, a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Rolnick’s work focuses on applications of machine learning to help address climate change. He is the co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, and scientific co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. After completing his PhD in applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He was named to MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” in 2021.

Current Students

Benjamin Akera Binen

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Co-supervisor :

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Michael Bunsen

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Juan Sebastián Cañas

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Co-supervisor :

Yuyan Chen

Master's Research - McGill University

Eya Cherif

Research Intern - Leipzig University

Amna El-Mustafa

Collaborating researcher

Mohamed Elabbas

Collaborating researcher

Paula Harder

Independent visiting researcher

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Christina Humer

Collaborating researcher - Johannes Kepler University

Christina Isaicu Isaicu

Collaborating researcher - University of Amsterdam

Gaurav Iyer

Master's Research - McGill University

Julia Kaltenborn

PhD - McGill University

Devin Kwok

PhD - McGill University

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher

Felix Andreas Nahrstedt

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Juan Nathaniel Nathaniel

Collaborating researcher - Columbia university

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Marlena Reil

Master's Research - McGill University

Carla Roesch

Collaborating researcher - Columbia university

Luca Marie Schmidt

Collaborating researcher - University of Tübingen

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Gabriel Tseng

PhD - McGill University

Donna Vakalis

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher

[email protected]

Catherine Villeneuve

PhD - McGill University

Tiffany Vlaar

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Publications

Bird Distribution Modelling using Remote Sensing and Citizen Science data

Mélisande Teng

Amna Elmustafa

Benjamin Akera

Hugo Larochelle

2023-05-01

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Applications of machine learning techniques for materials modeling typically involve functions known to be equivariant or invariant to speci… (see more)fic symmetries. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven successful in such tasks, they enforce symmetries via the model architecture, which often reduces their expressivity, scalability and comprehensibility. In this paper, we introduce (1) a flexible framework relying on stochastic frame-averaging (SFA) to make any model E(3)-equivariant or invariant through data transformations. (2) FAENet: a simple, fast and expressive GNN, optimized for SFA, that processes geometric information without any symmetrypreserving design constraints. We prove the validity of our method theoretically and empirically demonstrate its superior accuracy and computational scalability in materials modeling on the OC20 dataset (S2EF, IS2RE) as well as common molecular modeling tasks (QM9, QM7-X). A package implementation is available at https://faenet.readthedocs.io.

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

2023-04-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Lightweight, Pre-trained Transformers for Remote Sensing Timeseries

Gabriel Tseng

Ruben Cartuyvels

Ivan Zvonkov

Mirali Purohit

Hannah Kerner

Machine learning methods for satellite data have a range of societally relevant applications, but labels used to train models can be difficu… (see more)lt or impossible to acquire. Self-supervision is a natural solution in settings with limited labeled data, but current self-supervised models for satellite data fail to take advantage of the characteristics of that data, including the temporal dimension (which is critical for many applications, such as monitoring crop growth) and availability of data from many complementary sensors (which can significantly improve a model's predictive performance). We present Presto (the Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer), a model pre-trained on remote sensing pixel-timeseries data. By designing Presto specifically for remote sensing data, we can create a significantly smaller but performant model. Presto excels at a wide variety of globally distributed remote sensing tasks and performs competitively with much larger models while requiring far less compute. Presto can be used for transfer learning or as a feature extractor for simple models, enabling efficient deployment at scale.

2023-04-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Maximal Initial Learning Rates in Deep ReLU Networks

Gaurav Iyer

Boris Hanin

Training a neural network requires choosing a suitable learning rate, which involves a trade-off between speed and effectiveness of converge… (see more)nce. While there has been considerable theoretical and empirical analysis of how large the learning rate can be, most prior work focuses only on late-stage training. In this work, we introduce the maximal initial learning rate

2023-04-24

ICML.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Semi-Supervised Object Detection for Agriculture

Gabriel Tseng

Krisztina Sinkovics

Tom Watsham

Thomas C. Walters

2023-01-26

AAAI.org/2023/Workshop/AIAFS (poster)

Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity

Alexandra Luccioni

ImageNet-1k is a dataset often used for benchmarking machine learning (ML) models and evaluating tasks such as image recognition and object … (see more)detection. Wild animals make up 27% of ImageNet-1k but, unlike classes representing people and objects, these data have not been closely scrutinized. In the current paper, we analyze the 13,450 images from 269 classes that represent wild animals in the ImageNet-1k validation set, with the participation of expert ecologists. We find that many of the classes are ill-defined or overlapping, and that 12% of the images are incorrectly labeled, with some classes having >90% of images incorrect. We also find that both the wildlife-related labels and images included in ImageNet-1k present significant geographical and cultural biases, as well as ambiguities such as artificial animals, multiple species in the same image, or the presence of humans. Our findings highlight serious issues with the extensive use of this dataset for evaluating ML systems, the use of such algorithms in wildlife-related tasks, and more broadly the ways in which ML datasets are commonly created and curated.

2023-01-01

AAAI (published)

Deep Networks as Paths on the Manifold of Neural Representations

Richard D Lange

Devin Kwok

Jordan Kyle Matelsky

Xinyue Wang

Konrad Paul Kording

2023-01-01

TAG-ML (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

General Purpose AI Systems in the AI Act: Trying to Fit a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Claire Boine

2023-01-01

SSRN Electronic Journal (published)

Normalization Layers Are All That Sharpness-Aware Minimization Needs

Maximilian Mueller

Tiffany Joyce Vlaar

Matthias Hein

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in va… (see more)rious settings. In this work we show that perturbing only the affine normalization parameters (typically comprising 0.1% of the total parameters) in the adversarial step of SAM can outperform perturbing all of the parameters.This finding generalizes to different SAM variants and both ResNet (Batch Normalization) and Vision Transformer (Layer Normalization) architectures. We consider alternative sparse perturbation approaches and find that these do not achieve similar performance enhancement at such extreme sparsity levels, showing that this behaviour is unique to the normalization layers. Although our findings reaffirm the effectiveness of SAM in improving generalization performance, they cast doubt on whether this is solely caused by reduced sharpness.

PhAST: Physics-Aware, Scalable, and Task-specific GNNs for Accelerated Catalyst Design

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Santiago Miret

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Mitigating the climate crisis requires a rapid transition towards lower-carbon energy. Catalyst materials play a crucial role in the electro… (see more)chemical reactions involved in numerous industrial processes key to this transition, such as renewable energy storage and electrofuel synthesis. To reduce the energy spent on such activities, we must quickly discover more efficient catalysts to drive electrochemical reactions. Machine learning (ML) holds the potential to efficiently model materials properties from large amounts of data, accelerating electrocatalyst design. The Open Catalyst Project OC20 dataset was constructed to that end. However, ML models trained on OC20 are still neither scalable nor accurate enough for practical applications. In this paper, we propose task-specific innovations applicable to most architectures, enhancing both computational efficiency and accuracy. This includes improvements in (1) the graph creation step, (2) atom representations, (3) the energy prediction head, and (4) the force prediction head. We describe these contributions, referred to as PhAST, and evaluate them thoroughly on multiple architectures. Overall, PhAST improves energy MAE by 4 to 42

2022-11-22

ArXiv (preprint)