Jean-Noël Rivasseau

CTO / Founder at Kameleoon. Entrepreneur and expert software engineer.

Research and Thesis Courses taken Teaching responsabilities

My research interests and projects

My interests lie primarily within the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field, and more particularly Machine-Learning methods. I personally view Machine-Learning as the subdomain of AI when a machine can be labelled as intelligent because it "learns" something, generally by observing human behavior or collecting huge amounts of data. So, instead of implementing explicitly rules that will make your machine behave like an human, you just make the machine look at what the human does, and then replicate it...

There are lots of possible applications of machine-learning. It has been succesfully used in speech processing, sensor-networks, diagnostics (it is not often used in games AI yet, probably because the models would be too complex). However, my own research focuses more on the theoretical side of machine-learning than its applications. I try to design new efficient algorithms for performing inference on hard statistical networks. As such, I am in fact a researcher in the probabilistic machine learning field.

Hard probabilistic problems have a strange but very direct connection to graph theory. It turns out that many probabilistic problems can be expressed within a graphical framework; such models are called probabilistic graphical models. Once you have modelled your problem, several various exact and/or approximate inference algorithms can be run on the created graph (which very underlying structure depends on the independence/dependence assumptions of the original problem).

With Nando de Freitas, my supervisor, we are exploring better/faster ways of doing approximate inference. All our work is heavily based on computational statistics, and since we are doing approximate inference, I am very familiar with a wide array of Monte Carlo methods (both Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Sequential Monte Carlo).

Since it turns out that on trees, better inference algorithms are available, the ideas at the heart of my research is to partition a general undirected graph into several trees. You then run inference algorithms on these trees, and try to somehow combine the individual results of each of these algorithms into something giving you the marginals (or means, or whatever estimator you are interested in) for the whole graph.

Latest update: my Msc. thesis is completed! This thesis contains most of my research results. Along with the thesis, an inference toolbox has also been written in C++ with a Matlab interface. I am maintaining a page related to this software (it contains a tutorial, the C++ sources and downloadable binaries for various platforms).

Below is a list of all the projects I'm currently involved in or recently completed.

From the Jungle to the Garden: Growing Trees for Markov Chain Monte Carlo Inference in Undirected Graphical Models
Download it (PDF, 972 k) PDF

In machine-learning, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) strategies such as Gibbs sampling are important approximate inference techniques. They use a Markov Chain mechanism to explore and sample the state space of a target distribution. The generated samples are then used to approximate the target distribution.

MCMC is mathematically guaranteed to converge with enough samples. Yet some complex graphical models can cause it to converge very slowly to the true distribution of interest. Improving the quality and efficiency of MCMC methods is an active topic of research in the probabilistic graphical models field. One possible method is to “block” some parts of the graph together, sampling groups of variables instead of single variables.

In this document, we concentrate on a particular blocking scheme known as tree sampling. Tree sampling operates on groups of trees, and as such requires that the graph be partitioned in a special way prior to inference. We present new algorithms to find tree partitions on arbitrary graphs. This allows tree sampling to be used on any undirected probabilistic graphical model.

This is my thesis for the completion of my Msc. degree at UBC. It contains almost all my research results in inference algorithms for undirected graphical models.

Useful links:

[This contains documentation about the software framework I wrote for my thesis, named PGM. This is an inference toolbox written in C++, capable of running various inference algorithms described in my thesis. Sources and binaries are available.]
(10/10/2005)
Understanding and Applying the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to first-order Markov Chains
Download it (PDF, 120 k) PDF

This is the report for the project I did for Nando de Freitas Machine-Learning course, during the Winter 2003 term. Clustering data collections (such as text corpora) into different groups (corresponding to different "styles") is a very frequent application of Machine-Learning. Whereas a simple multinomial model allows documents to belong to only one cluster or style, the LDA model allows an unique document to exhibit a mixture of different styles, thus is much more flexible.

My project focused on understanding the LDA model and applying it to Markov chains documents (and not to simple text documents, as it was first intended for). Markov chains can be applied in a wide range of applications (notably, games); on this paper I used Markov chains as a very simple representation for musical data.

Useful links:

[The initial code I based my work upon]
(15/12/2003)

Here are links to my publications or to my old (or very old) projects.

© 2003-2021, Jean-Noel Rivasseau.