William L. Hamilton

I am an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at McGill University and a Senior Quantitative Researcher at Citadel LLC. I develop machine learning models that can reason about our complex, interconnected world.

Broadly, my research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, network science, and natural language processing, with a current emphasis on the fast-growing subjects of graph representation learning and graph neural networks.

Note that I am no longer accepting new students, as I have shifted away from my full-time role at McGill University to an adjunct position.

2021
Exploring the Limits of Few-Shot Link Prediction in Knowledge Graphs
Dora Jambor, Komal Teru, Joelle Pineau, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of EACL. 2021.
pdf (arxiv)
Do Syntax Trees Help Pre-trained Transformers Extract Information?
Devendra Singh Sachan, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, and William Hamilton
Proceedings of EACL. 2021.
pdf (arxiv)
Neural Representation and Generation for RNA Secondary Structures
Zichao Yan, William L. Hamilton, and Mathieu Blanchette
Proceedings of ICLR. 2021.
pdf (openreview)
A Universal Representation Transformer Layer for Few-Shot Image Classification
Lu Liu, William L. Hamilton, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, and Hugo Larochelle
Proceedings of ICLR. 2021.
pdf (openreview)
2020
Adversarial Example Games
Avishek Joey Bose, Gauthier Gidel, Hugo Berard, Andre Cianflone, Pascal Vincent, Simon Lacoste-Julien, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games
Ashutosh Adhikari, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Mikuláš Zelinka, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Romain Laroche, Pascal Poupart, Jian Tang, Adam Trischler, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
Graph Representation Learning
William L. Hamilton
Morgan and Claypool Publishers. 2020.
pdf
Distilling Structured Knowledge for Text-Based Relational Reasoning
Jin Dong, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2020.
TeMP: Temporal Message Passing for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Jiapeng Wu, Meng Cao, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2020.
Structure Aware Negative Sampling in Knowledge Graphs
Kian Ahrabian, Aarash Feizi, Yasmin Salehi, William L. Hamilton, and Avishek Joey Bose
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2020.
Latent Variable Modelling with Hyperbolic Normalizing Flows
Avishek Joey Bose, Ariella Smofsky, Renjie Liao, Prakash Panangaden, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of ICML. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
Inductive Relation Prediction by Subgraph Reasoning
Komal K. Teru, Etienne Denis, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of ICML. 2020.
pdf
Augmented base pairing networks encode RNA-small molecule binding preferences
Carlos G. Oliver, Roman Gendron, Nicolas Moitessier, Vincent Mallet, Vladimir Reinharz, William L. Hamilton, Nicolas Moitessier, and Jérôme Waldispühl
Nucleic Acids Research (NAR). 2020.
pdf (biorxiv)
Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluation
Koustuv Sinha, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Jasmine Wang, Ryan Lowe, William L. Hamilton, and Joelle Pineau
Proceedings of ACL. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
Exploring the Limits of Simple Learners in Knowledge Distillation for Document Classification
Ashutosh Adhikari, Achyudh Ram, Raphael Tang, William L. Hamilton, and Jimmy Lin
ACL Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP. 2020.
Exploring Structural Inductive Biases in Emergent Communication
Agnieszka Słowik, Abhinav Gupta, William L. Hamilton, Mateja Jamnik, Sean B. Holden, and Christopher Pal
AAMAS Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
Graph Neural Representational Learning of RNA Secondary Structures for Predicting RNA-Protein Interactions
Zichao Yan, William L. Hamilton, and Mathieu Blanchette
Proceedings of ISMB. 2020.
pdf (bioarxiv)
Towards Graph Representation Learning in Emergent Communication
Agnieszka Słowik, Abhinav Gupta, William L. Hamilton, Mateja Jamnik, and Sean B. Holden
AAAI Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games. 2020.
pdf (arxiv)
2019
Meta-Graph: Few shot Link Prediction via Meta-Learning
Avishek Joey Bose, Ankit Jain, Piero Molino, and William L. Hamilton
NeurIPS Graph Representation Learning Workshop 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
CLUTRR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Inductive Reasoning from Text
Koustuv Sinha, Shagun Sodhani, Jin Dong, Joelle Pineau, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
Efficient Graph Generation with Graph Recurrent Attention Networks
Renjie Liao, Yujia Li, Yang Song, Shenlong Wang, Charlie Nash, ,William L. Hamilton, David Duvenaud, Raquel Urtasun, and Richard S Zemel
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
Neural Transfer Learning for Cry-based Diagnosis of Perinatal Asphyxia
Charles C. Onu, Jonathan Lebensold, William L. Hamilton, and Doina Precup
Interspeech. 2019.
Compositional Fairness Constraints for Graph Embeddings
Avishek Joey Bose and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of ICML. 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
Discrete Off-policy Policy Gradients Using Continuous Relaxations
Andre Cianflone, Zafarali Ahmed, Riashat Islam, Avishek Joey Bose, and William L. Hamilton
Proceedings of RLDM. 2019.
Neural Transfer Learning for Cry-based Diagnosis of Perinatal Asphyxia
Charles C. Onu, Jonathan Lebensold, William L. Hamilton, and Doina Precup
ICLR AI for Social Good Workshop. 2019.
Tutorial on Graph Representation Learning
William L. Hamilton and Jian Tang
AAAI Tutorial Forum. 2019.
slides (zip)
Deep Graph Infomax
Petar Velickovic, William Fedus, William L. Hamilton, Pietro Lio, Yoshua Bengio, and R Devon Hjelm.  
Proceedings of ICLR. 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks
Christoper Morris, Martin Ritzert, Matthias Fey, William L. Hamilton, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gaurav Rattan, and Martin Grohe.  
Proceedings of AAAI. 2019.
pdf (arxiv)
2018
Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning with Differentiable Pooling
Jiaxuan You, Rex Ying, Christopher Morris, Xiang Ren, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec.  
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2018.
pdf (arxiv)
Embedding Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs
William L. Hamilton, Marinka Zitnik, Payal Bajaj, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec.  
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2018.
pdf (arxiv)
Compositional Fairness Constraints for Graph Embeddings
Joey Bose and William L. Hamilton.
NeurIPS Relational Representation Learning Workshop. 2018.
Compositional Language Understanding with Text-based Relational Reasoning
Koustuv Sinha, Shagun Sodhani, William L. Hamilton, and Joelle Pineau.  
NeurIPS Relational Representation Learning Workshop. 2018.
Deep Graph Infomax
Petar Velickovic, William Fedus, William L. Hamilton, Pietro Lio, Yoshua Bengio, and R Devon Hjelm.  
NeurIPS Relational Representation Learning Workshop. 2018.
GraphRNN: A Deep Generative Model for Graphs
Jiaxuan You, Rex Ying, Xiang Ren, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec.  
Proceedings of ICML. 2018.
pdf (arxiv)
Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-scale Recommender Systems
Rex Ying, Ruining He, Kaifeng Chen, Pong Eksombatchai,
William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec.  
Proceedings of KDD. 2018.
pdf (arxiv)
Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web
Srijan Kumar, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.      
Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW). 2018.
pdf (arxiv)   project website (code + data)
2017
Representation Learning on Graphs: Methods and Applications
William L. Hamilton, Rex Ying, Jure Leskovec.
IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. 2017.
pdf
Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs
William L. Hamilton*, Rex Ying*, Jure Leskovec.
Proceedings of NeurIPS. 2017.
pdf     project website (code+data)
Community Identity and User Engagement in a
Multi-Community Landscape

Justine Zhang*, William L. Hamilton*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil,
Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of ICWSM. 2017.
pdf
Loyalty in Online Communities
William L. Hamilton*, Justine Zhang*, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil,
Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of ICWSM (short paper). 2017.
pdf
Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect
Rob Voigt, Nicholas P. Camp, Vinod Prabhakaran, William L. Hamilton, Rebecca C. Hetey, Camilla M. Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). 2017.
pdf
2016
Inducing Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicons from Unlabeled Corpora
William L. Hamilton, Kevin Clark, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2016.
pdf     project website (code+data)
Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Models of Semantic Change
William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of EMNLP. 2016.
pdf     project website (code+data)
Learning Linguistic Descriptors of User Roles in Online Communities
Alex Wang, William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec.
EMNLP Workshop on Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS). 2016.
pdf
Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change
William L. Hamilton, Jure Leskovec, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of ACL. 2016.
pdf     project website (code+data)
Predicting the Rise and Fall of Scientific Topics from Trends in their Rhetorical Framing
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, William L. Hamilton, Dan McFarland, Dan Jurafsky.
Proceedings of ACL. 2016.
pdf
2014
Compressed Predictive State Representation: An Efficient Moment-Method for Sequence Prediction and Sequential Decision Making
William L. Hamilton
MSc Thesis. McGill University.
Canadian AI Association (CAIAC) 2014 MSc Thesis Award
pdf
Methods of Moments for Learning Stochastic Languages: Unified Presentation and Empirical Comparison
Borja Balle*, William L. Hamilton*, Joelle Pineau  
Proceedings of ICML. 2014.
pdf
Efficient Learning and Planning with Compressed Predictive States  
William L. Hamilton, Mahdi Milani Fard, Joelle Pineau.
Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). 2014.
pdf  code
2013
Modelling Sparse Dynamical Systems with Compressed Predictive State Representations
William L. Hamilton, Mahdi Milani Fard, Joelle Pineau.
Proceedings of ICML. 2013.
pdf  code
COMP 451 --- Fundamentals of Machine Learning

In the winter semester of 2021, I will teach a course on the Fundamentals of Machine Learning at McGill. Check out the course website for more information.


COMP 551 --- Applied Machine Learning

I teach a course on Applied Machine Learning at McGill. I taught the course in the winter semester of 2019 as well as in the fall of 2019. Check out the course website for more information.


COMP 766 --- Graph Representation Learning

In winter 2020, I taught a graduate-level course on Graph Representation Learning. Check out the course website for more information.

William (Will) Hamilton is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and a member of the Mila AI Institute of Quebec. Will completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in 2018. He received the 2018 Arthur Samuel Thesis Award for best Computer Science PhD Thesis from Stanford University, the 2014 CAIAC MSc Thesis Award for best AI-themed MSc thesis in Canada, as well as an honorable mention for the 2013 ACM Undergraduate Researcher of the Year. His interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, network science, and natural language processing, with a current emphasis on the fast-growing subject of graph representation learning. Will was the SAP Stanford Graduate Fellow (2014-2018), received the Cozzarelli Best Paper Award from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2017, and his work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including Wired, The New York Times, and The BBC.

PhD Students
Joey Bose
Personal Website
Research areas: Generative models, adversarial learning, graph representation learning
Devendra Sachan Singh
Google Scholar Profile
Research areas: Natural language processing, graph representation learning
Koustuv Sinha
Personal Website
Research areas: Natural language processing, logical reasoning, graph representation learning
Priyesh Vijayan
Personal Website
Research areas: Graph representation learning
Zichao Yan
Personal Website
Research areas: Graph representation learning, computational biology
Carlos Gonzalez Oliver
Personal Website
Research areas: Graph representation learning, computational biology
MSc Students
Dora Jambor
Personal Website
Research areas: Graph representation learning, natural language processing
Jiapeng (Paul) Wu
Personal Website
Research areas: Knowledge graphs, natural language processing
Alumni
Jin Dong
Now a Machine Learning Engineer at Microsoft
Komal Teru Kumar
Now a Research Scientist at Vanguard

Stanford University

Adjunct Professor
McGill University, Mila

wlh@cs.mcgill.ca


Google Scholar


Many thanks to David Jurgens for the site template/inspiration