Yoshua Bengio

Biography

*For media requests, please write to medias@mila.quebec.

For more information please contact Marie-Josée Beauchamp, Administrative Assistant at marie-josee.beauchamp@mila.quebec.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as a leading expert in AI. He is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, which earned him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Bengio is a full professor at Université de Montréal, and the founder and scientific director of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also a senior fellow at CIFAR and co-directs its Learning in Machines & Brains program, serves as scientific director of IVADO, and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

In 2019, Bengio was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world by h-index. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France and Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2023, he was appointed to the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology.

Concerned about the social impact of AI, Bengio helped draft the Montréal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence and continues to raise awareness about the importance of mitigating the potentially catastrophic risks associated with future AI systems.

Current Students

Jamal Abou Haibeh

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

Salwane Agassoussi

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ayoub Atanane

Collaborating Alumni - Université du Québec à Rimouski

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Paul Bertin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ghait Boukachab

Collaborating Alumni - UQAR

Oussama Boussif

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Eric Elmoznino

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Léna Nehale Ezzine

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Leo Feng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Research Intern - Barcelona University

Piotr Gainski

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Ivan Grega

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Pietro Greiner

Research Intern

Mohsin Hasan

PhD - Université de Montréal

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Edward Hu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Minsu Kim

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Zhen Liu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Collaborating Alumni - Imperial College London

PhD - Université de Montréal

Mohammed Mahfoud

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Nikolay Malkin

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sören Mindermann

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Sarthak Mittal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Ali Parviz

Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

Nassim Rahaman

Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

PhD - Université de Montréal

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

James Requeima

Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Julie Hussin

Victor Schmidt

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Marcin Sendera

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Dounia Shaaban Kabakibo

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Vedant Shah

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni

Marco Stock

Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

marco.stock@tum.de

Vincent Taboga

Postdoctorate - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Zichao Yan

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Omar G. Younis

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Mathieu Blanchette

Dinghuai Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Skipper: Combining Spatial and Temporal Abstraction for Better Generalization

Harry Zhao

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Blog Posts

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

February 22, 2024

Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Doina Precup

Yoshua Bengio

Scaling in the Service of Reasoning & Model-Based ML

April 4, 2023

Yoshua Bengio

Edward J. Hu

A collaboration between Mila and Relation Therapeutics to discover novel synergistic combinations of drugs in vitro

March 23, 2022

Paul Bertin

Jake P. Taylor-King

Yoshua Bengio

March 15, 2022

Generative Flow Networks

Yoshua Bengio

Publications

AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: new obligations for media and tech companies

Alistair Knott

Dino Pedreschi

Toshiya Jitsuzumi

Susan Leavy

D. Eyers

Tapabrata Chakraborti

Andrew Trotman

Sundar Sundareswaran

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Przemyslaw Biecek

Adrian Weller

Paul D. Teal

Subhadip Basu

Mehmet Haklidir

Virginia Morini

Stuart Russell

2024-09-21

Ethics and Information Technology (published)

A high-throughput phenotypic screen combined with an ultra-large-scale deep learning-based virtual screening reveals novel scaffolds of antibacterial compounds

Gabriele Scalia

Steven T. Rutherford

Ziqing Lu

Kerry R. Buchholz

Nicholas Skelton

Kangway Chuang

Nathaniel Diamant

Jan-Christian Hütter

Jerome-Maxim Luescher

Anh Miu

Jeff Blaney

Leo Gendelev

Elizabeth Skippington

Greg Zynda

Nia Dickson

Michał Koziarski

Aviv Regev

Man-Wah Tan

Tommaso Biancalani

2024-09-14

bioRxiv (preprint)

Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models

Usman Anwar

Abulhair Saparov

Javier Rando

Daniel Paleka

Miles Turpin

Peter Hase

Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Erik Jenner

Stephen Casper

Oliver Sourbut

Benjamin L. Edelman

Zhaowei Zhang

Mario Günther

Anton Korinek

Jose Hernandez-Orallo

Lewis Hammond

Eric J Bigelow

Alexander Pan

Lauro Langosco

Tomasz Korbak … (see 22 more)

Heidi Chenyu Zhang

Ruiqi Zhong

Sean O hEigeartaigh

Gabriel Recchia

Giulio Corsi

Alan Chan

Markus Anderljung

Lilian Edwards

Aleksandar Petrov

Christian Schroeder de Witt

Danqi Chen

Sumeet Ramesh Motwani

Samuel Albanie

Tegan Maharaj

Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

Philip Torr

Florian Tramèr

He He

Atoosa Kasirzadeh

Yejin Choi

David Scott Krueger

2024-09-02

TMLR (accepted)

Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning

Aniket Rajiv Didolkar

Andrii Zadaianchuk

Anirudh Goyal

Michael Curtis Mozer

Georg Martius

Maximilian Seitzer

The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities… (see more). Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.

2024-08-17

ArXiv (preprint)

Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?

Michael K. Cohen

Nikolay Malkin

Matt MacDermott

Damiano Fornasiere

Pietro Greiner

Younesse Kaddar

Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the … (see more)long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the iid case and in the non-iid case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.

2024-08-09

ArXiv (preprint)

Open Problems in Technical AI Governance

Anka Reuel

Benjamin Bucknall

Stephen Casper

Tim Fist

Lisa Soder

Onni Aarne

Lewis Hammond

Lujain Ibrahim

Alan Chan

Peter Wills

Markus Anderljung

Ben Garfinkel

Lennart Heim

Andrew Trask

Gabriel Mukobi

Rylan Schaeffer

Mauricio Baker

Sara Hooker

Irene Solaiman

Alexandra Luccioni … (see 11 more)

Nitarshan Rajkumar

Nicolas Moes

Jeffrey Ladish

Neel Guha

Jessica Newman

Tobin South

Alex Pentland

Sanmi Koyejo

Mykel Kochenderfer

Robert F. Trager

AI progress is creating a growing range of risks and opportunities, but it is often unclear how they should be navigated. In many cases, the… (see more) barriers and uncertainties faced are at least partly technical. Technical AI governance, referring to technical analysis and tools for supporting the effective governance of AI, seeks to address such challenges. It can help to (a) identify areas where intervention is needed, (b) identify and assess the efficacy of potential governance actions, and (c) enhance governance options by designing mechanisms for enforcement, incentivization, or compliance. In this paper, we explain what technical AI governance is, why it is important, and present a taxonomy and incomplete catalog of its open problems. This paper is intended as a resource for technical researchers or research funders looking to contribute to AI governance.

2024-07-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Redesigning Information Markets in the Era of Language Models

Martin Weiss

Nasim Rahaman

Manuel Wüthrich

Li Erran Li

Bernhard Schölkopf

Chris Pal

2024-07-10

colmweb.org/COLM/2024/Conference (accepted)

Improving Gradient-Guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference

Pablo Lemos

Nikolay Malkin

Will Handley

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Yashar Hezaveh

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling (GGNS) algorithm, combining the state of the art in differentiable … (see more)programming, Hamiltonian slice sampling, clustering, mode separation, dynamic nested sampling, and parallelization. This unique combination allows GGNS to scale well with dimensionality and perform competitively on a variety of synthetic and real-world problems. We also show the potential of combining nested sampling with generative flow networks to obtain large amounts of high-quality samples from the posterior distribution. This combination leads to faster mode discovery and more accurate estimates of the partition function.

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Memory Efficient Neural Processes via Constant Memory Attention Block

Leo Feng

Frederick Tung

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

On Generalization for Generative Flow Networks

Anas Krichel

Nikolay Malkin

Salem Lahlou

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have emerged as an innovative learning paradigm designed to address the challenge of sampling from an u… (see more)nnormalized probability distribution, called the reward function. This framework learns a policy on a constructed graph, which enables sampling from an approximation of the target probability distribution through successive steps of sampling from the learned policy. To achieve this, GFlowNets can be trained with various objectives, each of which can lead to the model s ultimate goal. The aspirational strength of GFlowNets lies in their potential to discern intricate patterns within the reward function and their capacity to generalize effectively to novel, unseen parts of the reward function. This paper attempts to formalize generalization in the context of GFlowNets, to link generalization with stability, and also to design experiments that assess the capacity of these models to uncover unseen parts of the reward function. The experiments will focus on length generalization meaning generalization to states that can be constructed only by longer trajectories than those seen in training.

2024-07-03

ArXiv (preprint)

Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold

Lazar Atanackovic

Xi Zhang

Brandon Amos

Mathieu Blanchette

Leo J Lee

Alexander Tong

Kirill Neklyudov

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynam… (see more)ics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across novel samples and unseen environments. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level - they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We argue that multiple processes in natural sciences have to be represented as vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold of probability densities. That is, the change of the population at any moment in time depends on the population itself due to the interactions between samples. In particular, this is crucial for personalized medicine where the development of diseases and their respective treatment response depends on the microenvironment of cells specific to each patient. We propose Meta Flow Matching (MFM), a practical approach to integrating along these vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold by amortizing the flow model over the initial populations. Namely, we embed the population of samples using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and use these embeddings to train a Flow Matching model. This gives MFM the ability to generalize over the initial distributions unlike previously proposed methods. We demonstrate the ability of MFM to improve prediction of individual treatment responses on a large scale multi-patient single-cell drug screen dataset.

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/GRaM (published)

Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold

Lazar Atanackovic

Xi Zhang

Brandon Amos

Mathieu Blanchette

Leo J Lee

Alexander Tong

Kirill Neklyudov

Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting samples evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynami… (see more)cs of communicating cells or physical particles. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level --- they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We propose

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/GRaM (published)