The neural net computer simulations which will be presented here are based on the acceptance of a set of assumptions that for the last twenty years have been expressed in the fields of information processing, neurophysiology and cognitive sciences. First of all, neural networks and their dynamical behaviors in terms of attractors is the natural way adopted by the brain to encode information. Any information item to be stored in the neural net should be coded in some way or another in one of the dynamical attractors of the brain and retrieved by stimulating the net so as to trap its dynamics in the desired item's basin of attraction. The second view shared by neural net researchers is to base the learning of the synaptic matrix on a local Hebbian mechanism. The last assumption is the presence of chaos and the benefit gained by its presence. Chaos, although very simply produced, inherently possesses an infinite amount of cyclic regimes that can be exploited for coding information. Moreover, the network randomly wanders around these unstable regimes in a spontaneous way, thus rapidly proposing alternative responses to external stimuli and being able to easily switch from one of these potential attractors to another in response to any coming stimulus.<p><p>In this thesis, it is shown experimentally that the more information is to be stored in robust cyclic attractors, the more chaos appears as a regime in the back, erratically itinerating among brief appearances of these attractors. Chaos does not appear to be the cause but the consequence of the learning. However, it appears as an helpful consequence that widens the net's encoding capacity. To learn the information to be stored, an unsupervised Hebbian learning algorithm is introduced. By leaving the semantics of the attractors to be associated with the feeding data unprescribed, promising results have been obtained in term of storing capacity. / Doctorat en sciences appliquées / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In ant societies, and, more in general, in insect societies, the activities of the individuals, as well as of the society as a whole, are not regulated by any explicit form of centralized control. On the other hand, adaptive and robust behaviors transcending the behavioral repertoire of the single individual can be easily observed at society level. These complex global behaviors are the result of self-organizing dynamics driven by local interactions and communications among a number of relatively simple individuals.<p><p>The simultaneous presence of these and other fascinating and unique characteristics have made ant societies an attractive and inspiring model for building new algorithms and new multi-agent systems. In the last decade, ant societies have been taken as a reference for an ever growing body of scientific work, mostly in the fields of robotics, operations research, and telecommunications.<p><p>Among the different works inspired by ant colonies, the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic (ACO) is probably the most successful and popular one. The ACO metaheuristic is a multi-agent framework for combinatorial optimization whose main components are: a set of ant-like agents, the use of memory and of stochastic decisions, and strategies of collective and distributed learning.<p><p>It finds its roots in the experimental observation of a specific foraging behavior of some ant colonies that, under appropriate conditions, are able to select the shortest path among few possible paths connecting their nest to a food site. The pheromone, a volatile chemical substance laid on the ground by the ants while walking and affecting in turn their moving decisions according to its local intensity, is the mediator of this behavior.<p><p>All the elements playing an essential role in the ant colony foraging behavior were understood, thoroughly reverse-engineered and put to work to solve problems of combinatorial optimization by Marco Dorigo and his co-workers at the beginning of the 1990's.<p><p>From that moment on it has been a flourishing of new combinatorial optimization algorithms designed after the first algorithms of Dorigo's et al. and of related scientific events.<p><p>In 1999 the ACO metaheuristic was defined by Dorigo, Di Caro and Gambardella with the purpose of providing a common framework for describing and analyzing all these algorithms inspired by the same ant colony behavior and by the same common process of reverse-engineering of this behavior. Therefore, the ACO metaheuristic was defined a posteriori, as the result of a synthesis effort effectuated on the study of the characteristics of all these ant-inspired algorithms and on the abstraction of their common traits.<p><p>The ACO's synthesis was also motivated by the usually good performance shown by the algorithms (e.g. for several important combinatorial problems like the quadratic assignment, vehicle routing and job shop scheduling, ACO implementations have outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms).<p><p>The definition and study of the ACO metaheuristic is one of the two fundamental goals of the thesis. The other one, strictly related to this former one, consists in the design, implementation, and testing of ACO instances for problems of adaptive routing in telecommunication networks.<p><p>This thesis is an in-depth journey through the ACO metaheuristic, during which we have (re)defined ACO and tried to get a clear understanding of its potentialities, limits, and relationships with other frameworks and with its biological background. The thesis takes into account all the developments that have followed the original 1999's definition, and provides a formal and comprehensive systematization of the subject, as well as an up-to-date and quite comprehensive review of current applications. We have also identified in dynamic problems in telecommunication networks the most appropriate domain of application for the ACO ideas. According to this understanding, in the most applicative part of the thesis we have focused on problems of adaptive routing in networks and we have developed and tested four new algorithms.<p><p>Adopting an original point of view with respect to the way ACO was firstly defined (but maintaining full conceptual and terminological consistency), ACO is here defined and mainly discussed in the terms of sequential decision processes and Monte Carlo sampling and learning.<p><p>More precisely, ACO is characterized as a policy search strategy aimed at learning the distributed parameters (called pheromone variables in accordance with the biological metaphor) of the stochastic decision policy which is used by so-called ant agents to generate solutions. Each ant represents in practice an independent sequential decision process aimed at constructing a possibly feasible solution for the optimization problem at hand by using only information local to the decision step.<p>Ants are repeatedly and concurrently generated in order to sample the solution set according to the current policy. The outcomes of the generated solutions are used to partially evaluate the current policy, spot the most promising search areas, and update the policy parameters in order to possibly focus the search in those promising areas while keeping a satisfactory level of overall exploration.<p><p>This way of looking at ACO has facilitated to disclose the strict relationships between ACO and other well-known frameworks, like dynamic programming, Markov and non-Markov decision processes, and reinforcement learning. In turn, this has favored reasoning on the general properties of ACO in terms of amount of complete state information which is used by the ACO's ants to take optimized decisions and to encode in pheromone variables memory of both the decisions that belonged to the sampled solutions and their quality.<p><p>The ACO's biological context of inspiration is fully acknowledged in the thesis. We report with extensive discussions on the shortest path behaviors of ant colonies and on the identification and analysis of the few nonlinear dynamics that are at the very core of self-organized behaviors in both the ants and other societal organizations. We discuss these dynamics in the general framework of stigmergic modeling, based on asynchronous environment-mediated communication protocols, and (pheromone) variables priming coordinated responses of a number of ``cheap' and concurrent agents.<p><p>The second half of the thesis is devoted to the study of the application of ACO to problems of online routing in telecommunication networks. This class of problems has been identified in the thesis as the most appropriate for the application of the multi-agent, distributed, and adaptive nature of the ACO architecture.<p><p>Four novel ACO algorithms for problems of adaptive routing in telecommunication networks are throughly described. The four algorithms cover a wide spectrum of possible types of network: two of them deliver best-effort traffic in wired IP networks, one is intended for quality-of-service (QoS) traffic in ATM networks, and the fourth is for best-effort traffic in mobile ad hoc networks.<p><p>The two algorithms for wired IP networks have been extensively tested by simulation studies and compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for a wide set of reference scenarios. The algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks is still under development, but quite extensive results and comparisons with a popular state-of-the-art algorithm are reported. No results are reported for the algorithm for QoS, which has not been fully tested. The observed experimental performance is excellent, especially for the case of wired IP networks: our algorithms always perform comparably or much better than the state-of-the-art competitors.<p><p>In the thesis we try to understand the rationale behind the brilliant performance obtained and the good level of popularity reached by our algorithms. More in general, we discuss the reasons of the general efficacy of the ACO approach for network routing problems compared to the characteristics of more classical approaches. Moving further, we also informally define Ant Colony Routing (ACR), a multi-agent framework explicitly integrating learning components into the ACO's design in order to define a general and in a sense futuristic architecture for autonomic network control.<p><p>Most of the material of the thesis comes from a re-elaboration of material co-authored and published in a number of books, journal papers, conference proceedings, and technical reports. The detailed list of references is provided in the Introduction.<p><p><p> / Doctorat en sciences appliquées / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Dans cette mémoire nous discutons l´élaboration d´électrodes poreuses par un processus de type “template” et leur application potentielle dans le domaine de l´analyse environnementale et neurobiologique. La première partie de ce travail est dédiée à l'élaboration d’électrodes poreuses de bismuth et d'antimoine. Ces électrodes montrent des limites de détection améliorées par rapport à des électrodes non poreuses, ouvrant ainsi des applications prometteuses dans le domaine de l'analyse de trace. La deuxième partie vise à surmonter des facteurs limitants de micro-électrodes dans le cadre de l'enregistrement de signaux extracellulaires et la stimulation de réseaux neuronaux en culture, qui peut donner des informations sur des interactions et des phénomènes synergétiques dans les systèmes nerveux. / In the present dissertation thesis the elaboration of porous electrodes via templating methods and their potential application in the field of environmental and neurobiological analysis are discussed. The electrodes of controlled porosity are characterized by an increased internal electroactive area and thus they can be used to enhance significantly the electrochemical performance. High surface area materials are promising for biosensing and more generally in electrochemical experiments. The first part of this work is focused on the elaboration of porous bismuth and antimony film electrodes. These porous electrodes show improved detection limits compared to non-porous one and thus open up promising applications in the field of trace analysis. The second part deals with overcoming limiting factors of microelectrode arrays in the context of extracellular recording and stimulating cellular neuronal networks or neural tissues in culture that can reveal information about interactions and synergetic features of nervous systems.

Avant-propos: Cet ouvrage se base en partie sur le travail réalisé en collaboration avec Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Ioannis Mitliagkas et Rémi Tachet des Combes, réalisé en 2020 et publié à la conférence internationale d'apprentissage de représentations (ICLR 2021). Les analyses présentées dans les prochaines pages approfondissent, corrigent et ajoutent à cet ouvrage de manière substantive, sans toutefois reposer sur cet ouvrage ou quelconque connaissance couverte par ce texte. / Ce mémoire a pour but de présenter des analyses pertinentes au sujet des méthodes génératives dites Denoising Score Matching dans le but de mieux comprendre leur fonctionnement et d'améliorer les techniques existantes. Ces méthodes consistent à graduellement réduire le bruit dans une image en usant de réseaux neuraux profonds à des fins de synthèse. Tandis que les premiers chapitres contextualisent le problème du Denoising Score Matching, les chapitres suivants s’affairent à reformuler l’objectif d’entraînement du réseau neuronal, puis à analyser le processus itératif générateur. J’introduis par la suite les concepts fondateurs des méthodes de Monte Carlo par chaînes de Markov (MCMC) pour dynamiques Hamiltoniennes, que j’adapte ensuite à la synthèse d’image par réduction graduelle de bruit. Tandis que les dynamiques de Langevin ont jusqu’alors eut monopole des processus génératifs dans la littérature de synthèse par le score, les dynamiques Hamiltoniennes font l'objet d’un engouement quant à leur vitesse de convergence supérieure. Je démontre leur efficacité dans les sections suivantes et précise, dans le cas de la génération d'images complexes, les contextes dans lesquels leur usage est avantageux. Lors d’une étude d’ablation complète, je présente les gains indépendants et jumelés des améliorations proposées, et par le fait même, je contribue à notre compréhension des modèles basés sur le score. / This thesis presents pertinent analysis around generative modeling of the Denoising Score Matching family with the goals of better understanding how they work and improving existing methods. These methods work by gradually reducing noise in images using deep neural networks. While the first chapters contextualize the problem of Denoising Score Matching, the following chapters focus on reformulating the training objective of the neural network and analysing the iterative generative process. I introduce the founding concepts of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Hamiltonian Dynamics and adapt them to our framework of image synthesis by annealing of Gaussian noise. While Langevin Dynamics have thus far dominated generative processes in the Denoising Score Matching literature, Hamiltonian Dynamics sustained interest from their superior convergence rate. I demonstrate their efficiency in the next chapters and elaborate on the contexts in which their use is advantageous to complex image generation. In a complete ablation study, I present the independent and coupled gains from every proposed improvements and thereby elevate our comprehension of Denoising Score Matching methods.

Le déploiement généralisé de modèles d’apprentissage automatique de plus en plus performants a entraîné des pressions croissantes pour améliorer la robustesse, la sécurité et l’équité de ces modèles—-souvent en raison de considérations réglementaires et éthiques. En outre, la mise en œuvre de solutions d’intelligence artificielle dans des applications réelles est limitée par leur incapacité actuelle à garantir la conformité aux normes industrielles et aux réglementations gouvernementales. Les pipelines standards pour le développement de modèles d’apprentissage automatique adoptent une mentalité de “construire maintenant, réparer plus tard”, intégrant des mesures de sécurité a posteriori. Cette accumulation continue de dette technique entrave le progrès du domaine à long terme. L’optimisation sous contraintes offre un cadre conceptuel accompagné d’outils algorithmiques permettant d’imposer de manière fiable des propriétés complexes sur des modèles d’apprentissage automatique. Cette thèse appelle à un changement de paradigme dans lequel les contraintes constituent une partie intégrante du processus de développement des modèles, visant à produire des modèles d’apprentissage automatique qui sont intrinsèquement sécurisés par conception. Cette thèse offre une perspective holistique sur l’usage de l’optimisation sous contraintes dans les tâches d’apprentissage profond. Nous examinerons i) la nécessité de formulations contraintes, ii) les avantages offerts par le point de vue de l’optimisation sous contraintes, et iii) les défis algorithmiques qui surgissent dans la résolution de ces problèmes. Nous présentons plusieurs études de cas illustrant l’application des techniques d’optimisation sous contraintes à des problèmes courants d’apprentissage automatique. Dans la Contribution I, nous plaidons en faveur de l’utilisation des formulations sous contraintes en apprentissage automatique. Nous soutenons qu’il est préférable de gérer des régularisateurs interprétables via des contraintes explicites plutôt que par des pénalités additives, particulièrement lorsqu’il s’agit de modèles non convexes. Nous considérons l’entraînement de modèles creux avec une régularisation L0 et démontrons que i) il est possible de trouver des solutions réalisables et performantes à des problèmes de grande envergure avec des contraintes non convexes ; et que ii) l’approche contrainte peut éviter les coûteux ajustements par essais et erreurs inhérents aux techniques basées sur les pénalités. La Contribution II approfondit la contribution précédente en imposant des contraintes explicites sur le taux de compression atteint par les Représentations Neuronales Implicites—-une classe de modèles visant à entreposer efficacement des données (telles qu’une image) dans les paramètres d’un réseau neuronal. Dans ce travail, nous nous concentrons sur l’interaction entre la taille du modèle, sa capacité représentationnelle, et le temps d’entraînement requis. Plutôt que de restreindre la taille du modèle à un budget fixe (qui se conforme au taux de compression requis), nous entraînons un modèle surparamétré et creux avec des contraintes de taux de compression. Cela nous permet d’exploiter la puissance de modèles plus grands pour obtenir de meilleures reconstructions, plus rapidement, sans avoir à nous engager à leur taux de compression indésirable. La Contribution III présente les avantages des formulations sous contraintes dans une application réaliste de la parcimonie des modèles avec des contraintes liées à l’équité non différentiables. Les performances des réseaux neuronaux élagués se dégradent de manière inégale entre les sous-groupes de données, nécessitant ainsi l’utilisation de techniques d’atténuation. Nous proposons une formulation qui impose des contraintes sur les changements de précision du modèle dans chaque sous-groupe, contrairement aux travaux antérieurs qui considèrent des contraintes basées sur des métriques de substitution (telles que la perte du sous-groupe). Nous abordons les défis de la non-différentiabilité et de la stochasticité posés par nos contraintes proposées, et démontrons que notre méthode s’adapte de manière fiable aux problèmes d’optimisation impliquant de grands modèles et des centaines de sous-groupes. Dans la Contribution IV, nous nous concentrons sur la dynamique de l’optimisation lagrangienne basée sur le gradient, une technique populaire pour résoudre les problèmes sous contraintes non convexes en apprentissage profond. La nature adversariale du jeu min-max lagrangien le rend sujet à des comportements oscillatoires ou instables. En nous basant sur des idées tirées de la littérature sur les régulateurs PID, nous proposons un algorithme pour modifier les multiplicateurs de Lagrange qui offre une dynamique d’entraînement robuste et stable. Cette contribution met en place les bases pour que les praticiens adoptent et mettent en œuvre des approches sous contraintes avec confiance dans diverses applications réelles. Dans la Contribution V, nous fournissons un aperçu de Cooper : une bibliothèque pour l’optimisation sous contraintes basée sur le lagrangien dans PyTorch. Cette bibliothèque open-source implémente toutes les contributions principales présentées dans les chapitres précédents et s’intègre harmonieusement dans le cadre PyTorch. Nous avons développé Cooper dans le but de rendre les techniques d’optimisation sous contraintes facilement accessibles aux chercheurs et praticiens de l’apprentissage automatique. / The widespread deployment of increasingly capable machine learning models has resulted in mounting pressures to enhance the robustness, safety and fairness of such models--often arising from regulatory and ethical considerations. Further, the implementation of artificial intelligence solutions in real-world applications is limited by their current inability to guarantee compliance with industry standards and governmental regulations. Current standard pipelines for developing machine learning models embrace a “build now, fix later” mentality, retrofitting safety measures as afterthoughts. This continuous incurrence of technical debt hinders the progress of the field in the long-term. Constrained optimization offers a conceptual framework accompanied by algorithmic tools for reliably enforcing complex properties on machine learning models. This thesis calls for a paradigm shift in which constraints constitute an integral part of the model development process, aiming to produce machine learning models that are inherently secure by design. This thesis provides a holistic perspective on the use of constrained optimization in deep learning tasks. We shall explore i) the need for constrained formulations, ii) the advantages afforded by the constrained optimization standpoint and iii) the algorithmic challenges arising in the solution of such problems. We present several case-studies illustrating the application of constrained optimization techniques to popular machine learning problems. In Contribution I, we advocate for the use of constrained formulations in machine learning. We argue that it is preferable to handle interpretable regularizers via explicit constraints, rather than using additive penalties, specially when dealing with non-convex models. We consider the training of sparse models with L0-regularization and demonstrate that i) it is possible to find feasible, well-performing solutions to large-scale problems with non-convex constraints; and that ii) the constrained approach can avoid the costly trial-and-error tuning inherent to penalty-based techniques. Contribution II expands on the previous contribution by imposing explicit constraints on the compression-rate achieved by Implicit Neural Representations—-a class of models that aim to efficiently store data (such as an image) within a neural network’s parameters. In this work we concentrate on the interplay between the model size, its representational capacity and the required training time. Rather than restricting the model size to a fixed budget (that complies with the required compression rate), we train an overparametrized, sparse model with compression-rate constraints. This allows us to exploit the power of larger models to achieve better reconstructions, faster; without having to commit to their undesirable compression rate. Contribution III showcases the advantages of constrained formulations in a realistic model sparsity application with non-differentiable fairness-related constraints. The performance of pruned neural networks degrades unevenly across data sub-groups, thus requiring the use of mitigation techniques. We propose a formulation that imposes constraints on changes in the model accuracy in each sub-group, in contrast to prior work which considers constraints based on surrogate metrics (such as the sub-group loss). We address the non-differentiability and stochasticity challenges posed by our proposed constraints, and demonstrate that our method scales reliably to optimization problems involving large models and hundreds of sub-groups. In Contribution IV, we focus on the dynamics of gradient-based Lagrangian optimization, a popular technique for solving the non-convex constrained problems arising in deep learning. The adversarial nature of the min-max Lagrangian game makes it prone to oscillatory or unstable behaviors. Based on ideas from the PID control literature, we propose an algorithm for updating the Lagrange multipliers which yields robust, stable training dynamics. This contribution lays the groundwork for practitioners to adopt and implement constrained approaches confidently in diverse real-world applications. In Contribution V, we provide an overview of Cooper: a library for Lagrangian-based constrained optimization in PyTorch. This open-source library implements all the core contributions presented in the preceding chapters and integrates seamlessly with the PyTorch framework. We developed Cooper with the goal of making constrained optimization techniques readily available to machine learning researchers and practitioners.