Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Center for Cognitive Science
Rutgers University




I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University where I lead the Rutgers Machine Learning Group (RUML). I’m also affiliated with Center for Cognitive Science. My research focus is how an AI-agent can learn to build and represent models of the world in an unsupervised and compositional way. My approach to achieving this is based on deep learning, Bayesian modeling, reinforcement learning, and inspiration from cognitive & neuroscience. I received my Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine on the study of scalable approximate Bayesian inference under the supervision of Prof. Max Welling. I did my postdoc working on deep learning at MILA under Prof. Yoshua Bengio. Then, I joined Rutgers University in Fall 2018.

Email: sjn.[last_name] at gmail
Address: CBIM 9, 617 Bowser Rd, Piscataway, NJ 08854

News

• I’m co-organizing ICML 2020 Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning (https://oolworkshop.github.io/)
• Teaching in Fall 2020: CS 444: Deep Learning
• A postdoc position is available. For more information, send me an email with your CV.
• Invited to give a talk at DeepMind
  
• 2 papers accepted in ICLR 2020
• Teaching CS 536: Machine Learning in Spring 2020
• 3 papers accepted in NeurIPS 2019 including one spotlight paper

Publications / Google Scholar

2020

Learning to Infer 3D Object Models from Images
{C. Chen, F. Deng}, S. Ahn
Preprint [arxiv] [project]

Improving Generative Imagination in Object-Centric World Models
Z. Lin, Y. Wu, S. Peri, B. Fu, J. Jiang, S. Ahn
ICML 20 [pdf] [project] [code]

Robustifying Sequential Neural Processes
J. Yoon, G. Singh, and S. Ahn
ICML 20 [arxiv]

SCALOR: Generative World Models with Scalable Object Representations
{J. Jiang, S. Janghorbani}, G. Melo, and S. Ahn
ICLR 20 [arxiv] [project] [code]

SPACE: Unsupervised Object-Oriented Scene Representation via Spatial Attention and Decomposition
{Z. Lin, Y. Wu, S. Peri}, W. Sun, G. Singh, F. Deng, J. Jiang, S. Ahn
ICLR 20 [pdf] [project] [code]

Hierarchical Decomposition and Generation of Scenes with Compositional Objects
F. Deng, Z. Zhi, S. Ahn
ICML 20 Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning Spotlight [pdf]

Generating Stochastic Object Dynamics in Scenes
Z. Lin, Y. Wu, S. Peri, B. Fu, J. Jiang, and S. Ahn
ICML 20 Workshop on Object-Oriented Learning [pdf]

2019

Sequential Neural Processes
{G. Singh, J. Yoon}, Y. Sohn, and S. Ahn
NeurIPS 19, Spotlight (top 2.4% = 164/6743)
[pdf] [project] [code]

Variational Temporal Abstraction
T. Kim, {S. Ahn, Y. Bengio}
NeurIPS 19

Neural Multisensory Scene Inference
J. Lim, P. Pinheiro, N. Rostamzadeh, C. Pal, and S. Ahn
NeurIPS 19

Learning Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Adversarial Training
P. Pinheiro, N. Rostamzadeh, and S. Ahn
ICCV 19, Oral (top 4.3% of all the submitted)

Generative Hierarchical Models for Parts, Objects, and Scenes
F. Deng, Z. Zhi, and S. Ahn
arXiv

Reinforced Imitation in Heterogeneous Action Space
K. Zolna, N. Rostamzadeh, Y. Bengio, {S. Ahn, P. O. Pinheiro}
arXiv

2018

Bayesian Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning
{J Yoon, T Kim}, O. Dia, S. Kim, Y. Bengio, S. Ahn
NeurIPS 18, Spotlight (top 3.5% = 168/4856)

Reinforced Imitation Learning from Observations
K. Żołna, N. Rostamzadeh, Y. Bengio, {S. Ahn, P. Pinheiro}
NeurIPS 18 Workshop on Imitation Learning and Its Challenges in Robotics

2017

Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks
J. Chung, S. Ahn, Y. Bengio
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)

Denoising Criterion for Variational Auto-Encoding Framework
D. Im, S. Ahn, R. Memisevic, Y. Bengio
AAAI Conferenceon Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

SENA: Preserving Social Structure for Network Embedding
S. Hong, T. Chakraborty, S. Ahn, G. Husari and N. Park
ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media

2016

Pointing the Unknown Words
C. Gulcehre, S. Ahn, R. Nallapati, B. Zhou, Y. Bengio
ACL16

Generating Factoid Questions with Recurrent Neural Networks: The 30M Factoid Question-Answer Corpus
{I. V. Serban, A. G. Duran}, C. Gulcehre, S. Ahn, S. Chandar, A. Courville, Y. Bengio
ACL16

Scalable MCMC for Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels
{W. Li, S. Ahn}, and M. Welling
AISTATS16

Scalable Overlapping Community Detection
I. El-Helw, R. Hofman, W. Li, S. Ahn, M. Welling, H. Bal
ParLearning16, Best Paper Award

Learning Latent Multiscale Structure using Recurrent Neural Networks
J. Chung, S. Ahn, Y. Bengio
NIPS 2016 Workshop on Neural Abstract Machines & Program Induction (NAMPI)

A Neural Knowledge Language Model
S. Ahn, H. Choi, T. Parnamaa, Y. Bengio
arXiv

Hierarchical Memory Networks
S. Chandar, S. Ahn, H. Larochelle, P. Vincent, G. Tasauro, Y. Bengio
arXiv

~2015 (selected publications)

Stochastic Gradient MCMC: Algorithms and Applications
PhD Dissertation

Large-Scale Distributed Bayesian Matrix Factorization using Stochastic Gradient MCMC
S. Ahn, A. Korattikara, N. Liu, S. Rajan, and M. Welling
KDD15

Distributed Stochastic Gradient MCMC
S. Ahn, B. Shahbaba, and M. Welling
ICML14

Distributed and Adaptive Darting Monte Carlo through Regenerations
S. Ahn, Y. Chen, and M. Welling
AISTATS13

Bayesian Posterior Sampling via Stochastic Gradient Fisher Scoring
S. Ahn, A. Korattikara, and M. Welling
ICML12 Best Paper Award