Yoshua Bengio

jamal.abouhaibeh@mila.quebec

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

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

berkes.anais@mila.quebec

sanghyeok.choi@mila.quebec

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

assouelr@mila.quebec

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

xiaoyin.chen@mila.quebec

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

aniket.didolkar@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

eric.elmoznino@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

lena-nehale.ezzine@mila.quebec

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

jean-pierre.falet@mila.quebec

PhD

pietro.greiner@mila.quebec

Mohsin Hasan

PhD - Université de Montréal

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

thomas.jiralerspong@mila.quebec

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

younesse.kaddar@mila.quebec

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Alex Hernández-García

hyeonah.kim@mila.quebec

Minsu Kim

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

minsu.kim@mila.quebec

Collaborating researcher - KOREA ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

jeongjae.lee@mila.quebec

cristian-dragos.manta@mila.quebec

Song LIU

Collaborating researcher - s.o.

Collaborating researcher

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sarthak Mittal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

nguyenph@mila.quebec

Ali Parviz

Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

ali.parviz@mila.quebec

Lena Podina

Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

elena.podina@mila.quebec

jarrid.rector-brooks@mila.quebec

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

PhD - Université de Montréal

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

danyal.rehman@mila.quebec

oliver.richardson@mila.quebec

Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Alex Hernández-García

divya.sharma@mila.quebec

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Alex Tong

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Collaborating researcher - University of Cambridge

oszkar.urban@mila.quebec

donna.vakalis@mila.quebec

Donna Vakalis

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

David Rolnick

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Glen Berseth

siddarth.venkatraman@mila.quebec

Collaborating researcher

joseph.viviano2@mila.quebec

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

esmeralda.whitammer@mila.quebec

Collaborating Alumni

omar.younis@mila.quebec

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

taeyoung.yun@mila.quebec

Nicole Zhang

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

tianyu.zhang@mila.quebec

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

CAMAP: Artificial neural networks unveil the role of codon arrangement in modulating MHC-I peptides presentation

Tariq Daouda

Maude Dumont-Lagacé

Albert Feghaly

Yahya Benslimane

Rebecca Panes

Mathieu Courcelles

Mohamed Benhammadi

Lea Harrington

Pierre Thibault

François Major

Étienne Gagnon

Sébastien Lemieux

Claude Perreault

MHC-I associated peptides (MAPs) are small fragments of intracellular proteins presented at the surface of cells and used by the immune syst… (see more)em to detect and eliminate cancerous or virus-infected cells. While it is theoretically possible to predict which portions of the intracellular proteins will be naturally processed by the cells to ultimately reach the surface, current methodologies have prohibitively high false discovery rates. Here we introduce an artificial neural network called Codon Arrangement MAP Predictor (CAMAP) which integrates information from mRNA-to-protein translation to other factors regulating MAP biogenesis (e.g. MAP ligand score and transcript expression levels) to improve MAP prediction accuracy. While most MAP predictive approaches focus on MAP sequences per se, CAMAP’s novelty is to analyze the MAP-flanking mRNA sequences, thereby providing completely independent information for MAP prediction. We show on several datasets that the integration of CAMAP scores with other known factors involved in MAP presentation (i.e. MAP ligand score and mRNA expression) significantly improves MAP prediction accuracy, and further validate CAMAP learned features using anin-vitroassay. These findings may have major implications for the design of vaccines against cancers and viruses, and in times of pandemics could accelerate the identification of relevant MAPs of viral origins.

2020-12-31

PLoS Computational Biology (published)

doi.org

CAMAP: Artificial neural networks unveil the role of 1 codon arrangement in modulating MHC-I peptides 2 presentation discovery of minor histocompatibility with

Tariq Daouda

Maude Dumont-Lagacé

Albert Feghaly

Yahya Benslimane

6. Rébecca

Panes

Mathieu Courcelles

Mohamed Benhammadi

Lea Harrington

Pierre Thibault

François Major

Étienne Gagnon

S. Lemieux

Claude Perreault

30 MHC-I associated peptides (MAPs) play a central role in the elimination of virus-infected and 31 neoplastic cells by CD8 T cells. However… (see more), accurately predicting the MAP repertoire remains 32 difficult, because only a fraction of the transcriptome generates MAPs. In this study, we 33 investigated whether codon arrangement (usage and placement) regulates MAP biogenesis. We 34 developed an artificial neural network called Codon Arrangement MAP Predictor (CAMAP), 35 predicting MAP presentation solely from mRNA sequences flanking the MAP-coding codons 36 (MCCs), while excluding the MCC per se . CAMAP predictions were significantly more accurate 37 when using original codon sequences than shuffled codon sequences which reflect amino acid 38 usage. Furthermore, predictions were independent of mRNA expression and MAP binding affinity 39 to MHC-I molecules and applied to several cell types and species. Combining MAP ligand scores, 40 transcript expression level and CAMAP scores was particularly useful to increaser MAP prediction 41 accuracy. Using an in vitro assay, we showed that varying the synonymous codons in the regions 42 flanking the MCCs (without changing the amino acid sequence) resulted in significant modulation 43 of MAP presentation at the cell surface. Taken together, our results demonstrate the role of codon 44 arrangement in the regulation of MAP presentation and support integration of both translational 45 and post-translational events in predictive algorithms to ameliorate modeling of the 46 immunopeptidome. 47 48 49 they modulated the levels of SIINFEKL presentation in both constructs, but enhanced translation efficiency could only be detected for OVA-RP. These data show that codon arrangement can modulate MAP presentation strength without any changes in the amino

2020-12-31

(published)

CAMAP: Artificial neural networks unveil the role of 1 codon arrangement in modulating MHC-I peptides 2 presentation

Tariq Daouda

Maude Dumont-Lagacé

Albert Feghaly

Yahya Benslimane

6. Rébecca

Panes

Mathieu Courcelles

Mohamed Benhammadi

Lea Harrington

Pierre Thibault

François Major

Étienne Gagnon

S. Lemieux

Claude Perreault

2020-12-31

(published)

Cooperative Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning of Machine Reading Comprehension

Oliver Bender

Franz Josef Och

R´ejean Ducharme

P Vincent

Kevin Clark

Quoc Minh-Thang Luong

V. Le

Jacob Devlin

Ming-Wei Chang

Kenton Lee

Adam Fisch

Alon Talmor

Robin Jia

Minjoon Seo

Michael R. Glass

A. Gliozzo

Rishav Chakravarti

Ian J Goodfellow

Jean Pouget-Abadie … (see 39 more)

Mehdi Mirza

Serhii Havrylov

Ivan Titov. 2017

Emergence

Jun-Tao He

Jiatao Gu

Jiajun Shen

Marc’Aurelio

Matthew Henderson

I. Casanueva

Nikola Mrkˇsi´c

Pei-hao Su

Tsung-Hsien Wen

Ivan Vuli´c

Yikang Shen

Yi Tay

Che Zheng

Dara Bahri

Donald

Metzler Aaron

Courville

Structformer

Ashish Vaswani

Noam M. Shazeer

Niki Parmar

Thomas Wolf

Lysandre Debut

Julien Victor Sanh

Clement Chaumond

Anthony Delangue

Pier-339 Moi

Tim ric Cistac

R´emi Rault

Morgan Louf

Qizhe Xie

Eduard H. Hovy

Silei Xu

Sina Jandaghi Semnani

Giovanni Campagna

Pretrained language models have signiﬁcantly 001 improved the performance of down-stream 002 language understanding tasks, including ex-00… (see more)3 tractive question answering, by providing 004 high-quality contextualized word embeddings. 005 However, training question answering models 006 still requires large amounts of annotated data 007 for speciﬁc domains. In this work, we pro-008 pose a cooperative, self-play learning frame-009 work, REGEX, for automatically generating 010 more non-trivial question-answer pairs to im-011 prove model performance. REGEX is built 012 upon a masked answer extraction task with an 013 interactive learning environment containing an 014 answer entity REcognizer, a question Gener-015 ator, and an answer EXtractor. Given a pas-016 sage with a masked entity, the generator gen-017 erates a question around the entity, and the 018 extractor is trained to extract the masked en-019 tity with the generated question and raw texts. 020 The framework allows the training of question 021 generation and answering models on any text 022 corpora without annotation. We further lever-023 age a reinforcement learning technique to re-024 ward generating high-quality questions and to 025 improve the answer extraction model’s perfor-026 mance. Experiment results show that REGEX 027 outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-028 trained language models and transfer learning 029 approaches on standard question-answering 030 benchmarks, and yields the new SOTA per-031 formance under given model size and transfer 032 learning settings. 033

2020-12-31

(published)

Episodes Meta Sequence S 2 Fast Update Slow Update Fast Update Slow Update

Kanika Madan

Nan Rosemary Ke

Anirudh Goyal

Bernhard Schölkopf

Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when there are changes in distribution. A learning age… (see more)nt interacting with its environment is likely to be faced with situations requiring novel combinations of existing pieces of knowledge. We hypothesize that such a decomposition of knowledge is particularly relevant for being able to generalize in a systematic manner to out-of-distribution changes. To study these ideas, we propose a particular training framework in which we assume that the pieces of knowledge an agent needs and its reward function are stationary and can be re-used across tasks. An attention mechanism dynamically selects which modules can be adapted to the current task, and the parameters of the selected modules are allowed to change quickly as the learner is confronted with variations in what it experiences, while the parameters of the attention mechanisms act as stable, slowly changing, metaparameters.We focus on pieces of knowledge captured by an ensemble of modules sparsely communicating with each other via a bottleneck of attention. We find that meta-learning the modular aspects of the proposed system greatly helps in achieving faster adaptation in a reinforcement learning setup involving navigation in a partially observed grid world with image-level input. We also find that reversing the role of parameters and meta-parameters does not work nearly as well, suggesting a particular role for fast adaptation of the dynamically selected modules.

2020-12-31

(published)

Explaining by Analogy: Case-based Abductive Natural Language Inference

Ruben Cartuyvels

Graham Spinks

Marie Francine

Peter Clark

Isaac Cowhey

Oren Etzioni

Tushar Khot

Rajarshi Das

Ameya Godbole

Shehzaad Dhuliawala

Manzil Zaheer

Andrew McCallum

Dung Ngoc Thai

Ameya

Ethan Godbole

Jay-Yoon Perez

Lee

Lizhen

Ramón López De Mántaras

David Mcsherry … (see 37 more)

David Bridge

Barry Leake

Susan Smyth

Craw.

Boi

Maryalice Faltings

Michael T Maher

Ken-552 Cox

Dorottya Demszky

Kelvin Guu

Percy Liang

Jacob Devlin

Ming-Wei Chang

Kenton Lee

Daniel Fried

Peter Jansen

Gus Hahn-Powell

Higher-575

Rebecca Emilie Sharp

M. Surdeanu

Zhengnan Xie

Sebastian Thiem

Jaycie Ryrholm Martin

Eliz-721 abeth Wainwright

Steven Marmorstein

Wenhan Xiong

Xiang Lorraine Li

Srini Iyer

Jingfei Du

Vikas Yadav

Steven Bethard

Zhilin Yang

Peng Qi

Saizheng Zhang

William W Cohen

Russ Salakhutdinov

Existing accounts of explanation emphasise 001 the role of prior experience and analogy in 002 the solution of new problems. However, most 0… (see more)03 of the contemporary models for multi-hop tex-004 tual inference construct explanations consider-005 ing each test case in isolation. This paradigm 006 is known to suffer from semantic drift, which 007 causes the construction of spurious explana-008 tions leading to wrong predictions. In con-009 trast, we propose an abductive framework for 010 multi-hop inference that adopts the retrieve - 011 reuse - revise paradigm largely studied in case-012 based reasoning . Speciﬁcally, we present 013 ETNA ( E xplana t io n by A nalogy), a novel 014 model that addresses unseen inference prob-015 lems by retrieving and adapting prior expla-016 nations from similar training examples. We 017 empirically evaluate the case-based abductive 018 framework on downstream commonsense and 019 scientiﬁc reasoning tasks. Our experiments 020 demonstrate that ETNA can be effectively in-021 tegrated with sparse and dense encoding mech-022 anisms or downstream transformers, achiev-023 ing strong performance when compared to ex-024 isting explainable approaches. Moreover, we 025 study the impact of the retrieve - reuse - revise 026 paradigm on explainability and semantic drift, 027 showing that it boosts the quality of the con-028 structed explanations, resulting in improved 029 downstream inference performance. 030

2020-12-31

(published)

Exploring the Wasserstein metric for survival analysis

Tristan Sylvain

Margaux Luck

Joseph Paul Cohen

Heloise Cardinal

Andrea Lodi

2020-12-31

Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization: a Methodological Tour d'Horizon

Andrea Lodi

Antoine Prouvost

This paper surveys the recent attempts, both from the machine learning and operations research communities, at leveraging machine learning t… (see more)o solve combinatorial optimization problems. Given the hard nature of these problems, state-of-the-art algorithms rely on handcrafted heuristics for making decisions that are otherwise too expensive to compute or mathematically not well defined. Thus, machine learning looks like a natural candidate to make such decisions in a more principled and optimized way. We advocate for pushing further the integration of machine learning and combinatorial optimization and detail a methodology to do so. A main point of the paper is seeing generic optimization problems as data points and inquiring what is the relevant distribution of problems to use for learning on a given task.

2020-12-31

Eur. J. Oper. Res. (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Multimodal Audio-textual Architecture for Robust Spoken Language Understanding

Dmitriy Serdyuk

Yongqiang Wang

Christian Fue-730

Anuj Kumar

Baiyang Liu

Edwin Simonnet

Sahar Ghannay

Nathalie Camelin

Tandem spoken language understanding 001 (SLU) systems suffer from the so-called 002 automatic speech recognition (ASR) error 003 propagatio… (see more)n problem. Additionally, as the 004 ASR is not optimized to extract semantics, but 005 solely the linguistic content, relevant semantic 006 cues might be left out of its transcripts. In 007 this work, we propose a multimodal language 008 understanding (MLU) architecture to mitigate 009 these problems. Our solution is based on 010 two compact unidirectional long short-term 011 memory (LSTM) models that encode speech 012 and text information. A fusion layer is also 013 used to fuse audio and text embeddings. 014 Two fusion strategies are explored: a simple 015 concatenation of these embeddings and a 016 cross-modal attention mechanism that learns 017 the contribution of each modality. The ﬁrst 018 approach showed to be the optimal solution 019 to robustly extract semantic information from 020 audio-textual data. We found that attention 021 is less effective at testing time when the text 022 modality is corrupted. Our model is evaluated 023 on three SLU datasets and robustness is tested 024 using ASR outputs from three off-the-shelf 025 ASR engines. Results show that the proposed 026 approach effectively mitigates the ASR error 027 propagation problem for all datasets. 028

2020-12-31

(published)

Optimization of Artificial Neural Network Hyperparameters For Processing Retrospective Information

A. Rogachev

F. Scholle

Yann Lecun

I. L. Kashirin

M. Demchenko

. Justification of the selection of the architecture and hyperparameters of artificial neural networks (ANN), focused on solving various cla… (see more)sses of applied problems, is a scientific and methodological problem. Optimizing the selection of ANN hyperparameters allows you to improve the quality and speed of ANN training. Various methods of optimizing the selection of ANN hyper-parameters are known – the use of evolutionary calculations, genetic algorithms, etc., but they require the use of additional software. To optimize the process of selecting ANN hyperparameters, Google Research has developed the KerasTuner software tool. It is a platform for automated search of a set of optimal combinations of hyperparameters. In Kerastuner, you can use various methods - random search, Bayesian optimization, or Hyperband. In the numerical experiments conducted by the author, 14 hyperparameters were varied, including the number of blocks of convolutional layers and the filters forming them, the type of activation function, the parameters of the "dropout" layers, and others. The studied tools demonstrated high efficiency while simultaneously varying more than a dozen optimized parameters of the convolutional network. The calculation time on the Colaboratory platform for the various combined ANN architectures studied, including recurrent RNN networks, was several hours, even with the use of GPU graphics accelerators. For ANN, focused on the processing and recognition of retrospective information, an increase in the quality of recognition was achieved to 80 ... 95%.

2020-12-31

(published)

Seeing things or seeing scenes: Investigating the capabilities of V&L models to align scene descriptions to images

M. D. Anderson

Erich W Graf

James H Elder

Peter Anderson

Xiaodong He

Chris Buehler

Mark Teney

Stephen Johnson

Gould Lei

Emily M. Bender

Timnit Gebru

Angelina McMillan-575

Alexander Koller. 2020

Climb-582

Yonatan Bisk

Ari Holtzman

Jesse Thomason

Joyce Chai

Angeliki Lazaridou … (see 32 more)

Jonathan May

Aleksandr

Thomas Unterthiner

Mostafa Dehghani

Georg Minderer

Sylvain Heigold

Jakob Gelly

Uszkoreit Neil

Houlsby. 2020

Lisa Anne Hendricks

Gabriel Ilharco

Rowan Zellers

Ali Farhadi

John M. Henderson

Contextual

Thomas L. Grifﬁths. 2021

Are Convolutional

Neu-827

Melissa L.-H. Võ

Jeremy M. Wolfe

Differen-830

Jianfeng Wang

Xiaowei Hu

Xiu-834 Pengchuan Zhang

Roy Schwartz

Bolei Zhou

Àgata Lapedriza

Jianxiong Xiao

Hang Zhao

Xavier Puig

Sanja Fidler

Images can be described in terms of the objects 001 they contain, or in terms of the types of scene 002 or place that they instantiate. In t… (see more)his paper we 003 address to what extent pretrained Vision and 004 Language models can learn to align descrip-005 tions of both types with images. We com-006 pare 3 state-of-the-art models, VisualBERT, 007 LXMERT and CLIP. We ﬁnd that (i) V&L 008 models are susceptible to stylistic biases ac-009 quired during pretraining; (ii) only CLIP per-010 forms consistently well on both object-and 011 scene-level descriptions. A follow-up ablation 012 study shows that CLIP uses object-level infor-013 mation in the visual modality to align with 014 scene-level textual descriptions

2020-12-31

(published)

A Simple and Effective Model for Multi-Hop Question Generation

Jimmy Lei Ba

Jamie Ryan Kiros

Geoffrey E Hin-602

Peter W. Battaglia

Jessica Blake

Chandler Hamrick

Vic-613 tor Bapst

Alvaro Sanchez

Vinicius Zambaldi

M. Malinowski

Andrea Tacchetti

David Raposo

Tom B. Brown

Benjamin Mann

Nick Ryder

Melanie Subbiah

Jared Kaplan

Prafulla Dhariwal

Arvind Neelakantan

Pranav Shyam … (see 72 more)

Girish Sastry

William L. Hamilton

Clutrr

Nitish Srivastava

Geoffrey Hinton

Alex Krizhevsky

Ilya Sutskever

Ruslan Salakhutdinov. 2014

Gabriel Stanovsky

Julian Michael

Luke Zettlemoyer

Dan Su

Yan Xu

Wenliang Dai

Ziwei Ji

Tiezheng Yu

Minghao Tu

Kevin Huang

Guangtao Wang

Jing Huang

Ashish Vaswani

Noam M. Shazeer

Niki Parmar

Jakob Uszkoreit

Llion Jones

Aidan N. Gomez

Łukasz Kaiser

Illia Polosukhin. 2017

Attention

Petar Veliˇckovi´c

Guillem Cucurull

Arantxa Casanova

Adriana Romero

Pietro Lio’