Portrait of Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio

Core Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Full Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research Department
Founder and Scientific Advisor, Leadership Team
Research Topics
Causality
Computational Neuroscience
Deep Learning
Generative Models
Graph Neural Networks
Machine Learning Theory
Medical Machine Learning
Molecular Modeling
Natural Language Processing
Probabilistic Models
Reasoning
Recurrent Neural Networks
Reinforcement Learning
Representation Learning

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

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher
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Collaborating researcher - N/A
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - KAIST
PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Independent visiting researcher
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo
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Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate
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Collaborating Alumni - Polytechnique Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher
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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - McGill University
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
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Publications

Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Joanna Merckx
Andrew Robert Williams
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Akshay Patel
Yang Zhang
Bernhard Schölkopf
A108 AUTOMATED DETECTION OF ILEOCECAL VALVE, APPENDICEAL ORIFICE, AND POLYP DURING COLONOSCOPY USING A DEEP LEARNING MODEL
Mahsa Taghiakbari
Sina Hamidi Ghalehjegh
E Jehanno
Tess Berthier
Lisa Di Jorio
Alan Barkun
Eric Deslandres
Simon Bouchard
Sacha Sidani
Daniel von Renteln
Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Joanna Merckx
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Akshay Patel
Yang Zhang
Bernhard Schölkopf
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred an unprecedented demand for interventions that can reduce disease spread without excessively restricting d… (see more)aily activity, given negative impacts on mental health and economic outcomes. Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have emerged as a component of the epidemic management toolkit. Existing DCT apps typically recommend quarantine to all digitally-recorded contacts of test-confirmed cases. Over-reliance on testing may, however, impede the effectiveness of such apps, since by the time cases are confirmed through testing, onward transmissions are likely to have occurred. Furthermore, most cases are infectious over a short period; only a subset of their contacts are likely to become infected. These apps do not fully utilize data sources to base their predictions of transmission risk during an encounter, leading to recommendations of quarantine to many uninfected people and associated slowdowns in economic activity. This phenomenon, commonly termed as “pingdemic,” may additionally contribute to reduced compliance to public health measures. In this work, we propose a novel DCT framework, Proactive Contact Tracing (PCT), which uses multiple sources of information (e.g. self-reported symptoms, received messages from contacts) to estimate app users’ infectiousness histories and provide behavioral recommendations. PCT methods are by design proactive, predicting spread before it occurs. We present an interpretable instance of this framework, the Rule-based PCT algorithm, designed via a multi-disciplinary collaboration among epidemiologists, computer scientists, and behavior experts. Finally, we develop an agent-based model that allows us to compare different DCT methods and evaluate their performance in negotiating the trade-off between epidemic control and restricting population mobility. Performing extensive sensitivity analysis across user behavior, public health policy, and virological parameters, we compare Rule-based PCT to i) binary contact tracing (BCT), which exclusively relies on test results and recommends a fixed-duration quarantine, and ii) household quarantine (HQ). Our results suggest that both BCT and Rule-based PCT improve upon HQ, however, Rule-based PCT is more efficient at controlling spread of disease than BCT across a range of scenarios. In terms of cost-effectiveness, we show that Rule-based PCT pareto-dominates BCT, as demonstrated by a decrease in Disability Adjusted Life Years, as well as Temporary Productivity Loss. Overall, we find that Rule-based PCT outperforms existing approaches across a varying range of parameters. By leveraging anonymized infectiousness estimates received from digitally-recorded contacts, PCT is able to notify potentially infected users earlier than BCT methods and prevent onward transmissions. Our results suggest that PCT-based applications could be a useful tool in managing future epidemics.
Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Joanna Merckx
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Akshay Patel
Yang Zhang
David L Buckeridge
Bernhard Schölkopf
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred an unprecedented demand for interventions that can reduce disease spread without excessively restricting d… (see more)aily activity, given negative impacts on mental health and economic outcomes. Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have emerged as a component of the epidemic management toolkit. Existing DCT apps typically recommend quarantine to all digitally-recorded contacts of test-confirmed cases. Over-reliance on testing may, however, impede the effectiveness of such apps, since by the time cases are confirmed through testing, onward transmissions are likely to have occurred. Furthermore, most cases are infectious over a short period; only a subset of their contacts are likely to become infected. These apps do not fully utilize data sources to base their predictions of transmission risk during an encounter, leading to recommendations of quarantine to many uninfected people and associated slowdowns in economic activity. This phenomenon, commonly termed as “pingdemic,” may additionally contribute to reduced compliance to public health measures. In this work, we propose a novel DCT framework, Proactive Contact Tracing (PCT), which uses multiple sources of information (e.g. self-reported symptoms, received messages from contacts) to estimate app users’ infectiousness histories and provide behavioral recommendations. PCT methods are by design proactive, predicting spread before it occurs. We present an interpretable instance of this framework, the Rule-based PCT algorithm, designed via a multi-disciplinary collaboration among epidemiologists, computer scientists, and behavior experts. Finally, we develop an agent-based model that allows us to compare different DCT methods and evaluate their performance in negotiating the trade-off between epidemic control and restricting population mobility. Performing extensive sensitivity analysis across user behavior, public health policy, and virological parameters, we compare Rule-based PCT to i) binary contact tracing (BCT), which exclusively relies on test results and recommends a fixed-duration quarantine, and ii) household quarantine (HQ). Our results suggest that both BCT and Rule-based PCT improve upon HQ, however, Rule-based PCT is more efficient at controlling spread of disease than BCT across a range of scenarios. In terms of cost-effectiveness, we show that Rule-based PCT pareto-dominates BCT, as demonstrated by a decrease in Disability Adjusted Life Years, as well as Temporary Productivity Loss. Overall, we find that Rule-based PCT outperforms existing approaches across a varying range of parameters. By leveraging anonymized infectiousness estimates received from digitally-recorded contacts, PCT is able to notify potentially infected users earlier than BCT methods and prevent onward transmissions. Our results suggest that PCT-based applications could be a useful tool in managing future epidemics.
Proactive Contact Tracing
Prateek Gupta
Nasim Rahaman
Hannah Alsdurf
Nanor Minoyan
Soren Harnois-Leblanc
Joanna Merckx
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Akshay Patel
Yang Zhang
David L Buckeridge
Bernhard Schölkopf
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred an unprecedented demand for interventions that can reduce disease spread without excessively restricting d… (see more)aily activity, given negative impacts on mental health and economic outcomes. Digital contact tracing (DCT) apps have emerged as a component of the epidemic management toolkit. Existing DCT apps typically recommend quarantine to all digitally-recorded contacts of test-confirmed cases. Over-reliance on testing may, however, impede the effectiveness of such apps, since by the time cases are confirmed through testing, onward transmissions are likely to have occurred. Furthermore, most cases are infectious over a short period; only a subset of their contacts are likely to become infected. These apps do not fully utilize data sources to base their predictions of transmission risk during an encounter, leading to recommendations of quarantine to many uninfected people and associated slowdowns in economic activity. This phenomenon, commonly termed as “pingdemic,” may additionally contribute to reduced compliance to public health measures. In this work, we propose a novel DCT framework, Proactive Contact Tracing (PCT), which uses multiple sources of information (e.g. self-reported symptoms, received messages from contacts) to estimate app users’ infectiousness histories and provide behavioral recommendations. PCT methods are by design proactive, predicting spread before it occurs. We present an interpretable instance of this framework, the Rule-based PCT algorithm, designed via a multi-disciplinary collaboration among epidemiologists, computer scientists, and behavior experts. Finally, we develop an agent-based model that allows us to compare different DCT methods and evaluate their performance in negotiating the trade-off between epidemic control and restricting population mobility. Performing extensive sensitivity analysis across user behavior, public health policy, and virological parameters, we compare Rule-based PCT to i) binary contact tracing (BCT), which exclusively relies on test results and recommends a fixed-duration quarantine, and ii) household quarantine (HQ). Our results suggest that both BCT and Rule-based PCT improve upon HQ, however, Rule-based PCT is more efficient at controlling spread of disease than BCT across a range of scenarios. In terms of cost-effectiveness, we show that Rule-based PCT pareto-dominates BCT, as demonstrated by a decrease in Disability Adjusted Life Years, as well as Temporary Productivity Loss. Overall, we find that Rule-based PCT outperforms existing approaches across a varying range of parameters. By leveraging anonymized infectiousness estimates received from digitally-recorded contacts, PCT is able to notify potentially infected users earlier than BCT methods and prevent onward transmissions. Our results suggest that PCT-based applications could be a useful tool in managing future epidemics.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the c… (see more)ore building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.
Stochastic Generative Flow Networks
Moksh J. Jain
Longbo Huang
Generative Flow Networks (or GFlowNets for short) are a family of probabilistic agents that learn to sample complex combinatorial structures… (see more) through the lens of"inference as control". They have shown great potential in generating high-quality and diverse candidates from a given energy landscape. However, existing GFlowNets can be applied only to deterministic environments, and fail in more general tasks with stochastic dynamics, which can limit their applicability. To overcome this challenge, this paper introduces Stochastic GFlowNets, a new algorithm that extends GFlowNets to stochastic environments. By decomposing state transitions into two steps, Stochastic GFlowNets isolate environmental stochasticity and learn a dynamics model to capture it. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Stochastic GFlowNets offer significant advantages over standard GFlowNets as well as MCMC- and RL-based approaches, on a variety of standard benchmarks with stochastic dynamics.