Yoshua Bengio

Biography

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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 advisor 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 special advisor and founding 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

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Shahana Chatterjee

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

Desmond Elliott

Independent visiting researcher

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Tabitha Edith Lee

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sarthak Mittal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Padideh Nouri

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Ali Parviz

Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Lena Podina

Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

Nassim Rahaman

Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

Amine RAZIG

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

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

Dragos Secrieru

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Divya Sharma

Postdoctorate

Co-supervisor :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Vincent Taboga

Collaborating Alumni - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Hugo Larochelle

Ivan Titov

Collaborating researcher

Principal supervisor :

Siva Reddy

Alex Tong

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Skipper: Combining Spatial and Temporal Abstraction for Better Generalization

Harry Zhao

Collaborating Alumni - 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

Object-centric architectures enable efficient causal representation learning

Amin Mansouri

Jason Hartford

Yan Zhang

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees… (see more) (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as

2023-10-29

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release

Alistair Knott

Dino Pedreschi

Raja Chatila

Tapabrata Chakraborti

Susan Leavy

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

D. Eyers

Andrew Trotman

Paul D. Teal

Przemyslaw Biecek

Stuart Russell

2023-10-28

Ethics and Information Technology (published)

Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release

Alistair Knott

Dino Pedreschi

Raja Chatila

Tapabrata Chakraborti

Susan Leavy

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

D. Eyers

Andrew Trotman

Paul D. Teal

Przemyslaw Biecek

Stuart Russell

2023-10-28

Ethics and Information Technology (published)

Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release

Alistair Knott

Dino Pedreschi

Raja Chatila

Tapabrata Chakraborti

Susan Leavy

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

D. Eyers

Andrew Trotman

Paul D. Teal

Przemyslaw Biecek

Stuart Russell

2023-10-28

Ethics and Information Technology (published)

Generative AI models should include detection mechanisms as a condition for public release

Alistair Knott

Dino Pedreschi

Raja Chatila

Tapabrata Chakraborti

Susan Leavy

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

D. Eyers

Andrew Trotman

Paul D. Teal

Przemyslaw Biecek

Stuart Russell

2023-10-28

Ethics and Information Technology (published)

OC-NMN: Object-centric Compositional Neural Module Network for Generative Visual Analogical Reasoning

Pau Rodriguez

2023-10-28

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Attention Schema in Neural Agents

Dianbo Liu

Samuele Bolotta

Mike He Zhu

Zahra Sheikhbahaee

Guillaume Dumas

Attention has become a common ingredient in deep learning architectures. It adds a dynamical selection of information on top of the static s… (see more)election of information supported by weights. In the same way, we can imagine a higher-order informational filter built on top of attention: an Attention Schema (AS), namely, a descriptive and predictive model of attention. In cognitive neuroscience, Attention Schema Theory (AST) supports this idea of distinguishing attention from AS. A strong prediction of this theory is that an agent can use its own AS to also infer the states of other agents' attention and consequently enhance coordination with other agents. As such, multi-agent reinforcement learning would be an ideal setting to experimentally test the validity of AST. We explore different ways in which attention and AS interact with each other. Our preliminary results indicate that agents that implement the AS as a recurrent internal control achieve the best performance. In general, these exploratory experiments suggest that equipping artificial agents with a model of attention can enhance their social intelligence.

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/InfoCog (poster)

Baking Symmetry into GFlowNets

George Ma

Emmanuel Bengio

Dinghuai Zhang

GFlowNets have exhibited promising performance in generating diverse candidates with high rewards. These networks generate objects increment… (see more)ally and aim to learn a policy that assigns probability of sampling objects in proportion to rewards. However, the current training pipelines of GFlowNets do not consider the presence of isomorphic actions, which are actions resulting in symmetric or isomorphic states. This lack of symmetry increases the amount of samples required for training GFlowNets and can result in inefficient and potentially incorrect flow functions. As a consequence, the reward and diversity of the generated objects decrease. In this study, our objective is to integrate symmetries into GFlowNets by identifying equivalent actions during the generation process. Experimental results using synthetic data demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed approaches.

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/AI4Science (oral)

Baking Symmetry into GFlowNets

George Ma

Emmanuel Bengio

Dinghuai Zhang

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/AI4Science (oral)

Causal Discovery in Gene Regulatory Networks with GFlowNet: Towards Scalability in Large Systems

Trang Nguyen

Alexander Tong

Kanika Madan

Dianbo Liu

Understanding causal relationships within Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) is essential for unraveling the gene interactions in cellular proc… (see more)esses. However, causal discovery in GRNs is a challenging problem for multiple reasons including the existence of cyclic feedback loops and uncertainty that yields diverse possible causal structures. Previous works in this area either ignore cyclic dynamics (assume acyclic structure) or struggle with scalability. We introduce Swift-DynGFN as a novel framework that enhances causal structure learning in GRNs while addressing scalability concerns. Specifically, Swift-DynGFN exploits gene-wise independence to boost parallelization and to lower computational cost. Experiments on real single-cell RNA velocity and synthetic GRN datasets showcase the advancement in learning causal structure in GRNs and scalability in larger systems.

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/GenBio (poster)

Crystal-GFN: sampling materials with desirable properties and constraints

Mistal

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Alexandre AGM Duval

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/AI4Mat (spotlight)

Discrete, compositional, and symbolic representations through attractor dynamics

Andrew Nam

Chen Sun

Compositionality is an important feature of discrete symbolic systems, such as language and programs, as it enables them to have infinite ca… (see more)pacity despite a finite symbol set. It serves as a useful abstraction for reasoning in both cognitive science and in AI, yet the interface between continuous and symbolic processing is often imposed by fiat at the algorithmic level, such as by means of quantization or a softmax sampling step. In this work, we explore how discretization could be implemented in a more neurally plausible manner through the modeling of attractor dynamics that partition the continuous representation space into basins that correspond to sequences of symbols. Building on established work in attractor networks and introducing novel training methods, we show that imposing structure in the symbolic space can produce compositionality in the attractor-supported representation space of rich sensory inputs. Lastly, we argue that our model exhibits the process of an information bottleneck that is thought to play a role in conscious experience, decomposing the rich information of a sensory input into stable components encoding symbolic information.

2023-10-27

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/InfoCog (oral)