Yoshua Bengio

Biography

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

For more information please contact Cassidy MacNeil, Senior Assistant and Operation Lead at cassidy.macneil@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 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

Shahana Chatterjee

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

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 :

Minsu Kim

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Song LIU

Collaborating researcher - s.o.

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

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

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

PhD - Université de Montréal

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Julie Hussin

Divya Sharma

Postdoctorate

Co-supervisor :

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Collaborating Alumni - 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 - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Skipper: Combining Spatial and Temporal Abstraction for Better Generalization

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

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

Towards equilibrium molecular conformation generation with GFlowNets

Alexandra Volokhova

Michał Koziarski

Cheng-Hao Liu

Santiago Miret

Pablo Lemos

Luca Thiede

Zichao Yan

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

Sampling diverse, thermodynamically feasible molecular conformations plays a crucial role in predicting properties of a molecule. In this pa… (see more)per we propose to use GFlowNet for sampling conformations of small molecules from the Boltzmann distribution, as determined by the molecule's energy. The proposed approach can be used in combination with energy estimation methods of different fidelity and discovers a diverse set of low-energy conformations for highly flexible drug-like molecules. We demonstrate that GFlowNet can reproduce molecular potential energy surfaces by sampling proportionally to the Boltzmann distribution.

2023-10-26

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

Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress

Geoffrey Hinton

Andrew Yao

Dawn Song

Pieter Abbeel

Yuval Noah Harari

Trevor Darrell

Ya-Qin Zhang

Lan Xue

Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Gillian Hadfield

Jeff Clune

Tegan Maharaj

Frank Hutter

Atilim Güneş Baydin

Sheila McIlraith

Qiqi Gao

Ashwin Acharya

David Krueger

Anca Dragan … (see 5 more)

Philip Torr

Stuart Russell

Daniel Kahneman

Jan Brauner

Sören Mindermann

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly, and companies are shifting their focus to developing generalist AI systems that can aut… (see more)onomously act and pursue goals. Increases in capabilities and autonomy may soon massively amplify AI's impact, with risks that include large-scale social harms, malicious uses, and an irreversible loss of human control over autonomous AI systems. Although researchers have warned of extreme risks from AI, there is a lack of consensus about how exactly such risks arise, and how to manage them. Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems. In this short consensus paper, we describe extreme risks from upcoming, advanced AI systems. Drawing on lessons learned from other safety-critical technologies, we then outline a comprehensive plan combining technical research and development with proactive, adaptive governance mechanisms for a more commensurate preparation.

2023-10-25

Science (published)

Causal machine learning for single-cell genomics

Alejandro Tejada-Lapuerta

Paul Bertin

Stefan Bauer

Hananeh Aliee

Fabian J. Theis

2023-10-22

ArXiv (preprint)

A cry for help: Early detection of brain injury in newborns

Charles Onu

Samantha Latremouille

Arsenii Gorin

Junhao Wang

Uchenna Ekwochi

P. Ubuane

O. Kehinde

Muhammad A. Salisu

Datonye Briggs

Doina Precup

2023-10-11

ArXiv (preprint)

Crystal-GFN: sampling crystals with desirable properties and constraints

Mila AI4Science

Yasmine Benabed

Gian-Marco Rignanese

Pierre-Paul De Breuck

Paulette Clancy

Accelerating material discovery holds the potential to greatly help mitigate the climate crisis. Discovering new solid-state materials such … (see more)as electrocatalysts, super-ionic conductors or photovoltaic materials can have a crucial impact, for instance, in improving the efficiency of renewable energy production and storage. In this paper, we introduce Crystal-GFN, a generative model of crystal structures that sequentially samples structural properties of crystalline materials, namely the space group, composition and lattice parameters. This domain-inspired approach enables the flexible incorporation of physical and structural hard constraints, as well as the use of any available predictive model of a desired physicochemical property as an objective function. To design stable materials, one must target the candidates with the lowest formation energy. Here, we use as objective the formation energy per atom of a crystal structure predicted by a new proxy machine learning model trained on MatBench. The results demonstrate that Crystal-GFN is able to sample highly diverse crystals with low (median -3.1 eV/atom) predicted formation energy.

2023-10-06

arXiv (preprint)

Causal Inference 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.

2023-10-04

ArXiv (preprint)

Leveraging Diffusion Disentangled Representations to Mitigate Shortcuts in Underspecified Visual Tasks

Luca Scimeca

Alexander Rubinstein

Armand Mihai Nicolicioiu

Damien Teney

Spurious correlations in the data, where multiple cues are predictive of the target labels, often lead to shortcut learning phenomena, where… (see more) a model may rely on erroneous, easy-to-learn, cues while ignoring reliable ones. In this work, we propose an ensemble diversification framework exploiting the generation of synthetic counterfactuals using Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs). We discover that DPMs have the inherent capability to represent multiple visual cues independently, even when they are largely correlated in the training data. We leverage this characteristic to encourage model diversity and empirically show the efficacy of the approach with respect to several diversification objectives. We show that diffusion-guided diversification can lead models to avert attention from shortcut cues, achieving ensemble diversity performance comparable to previous methods requiring additional data collection.

2023-10-02

ArXiv (preprint)

AI and Catastrophic Risk

2023-09-30

Journal of Democracy (published)

RECOVER identifies synergistic drug combinations in vitro through sequential model optimization

Paul Bertin

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Deepak Sharma

Thomas Gaudelet

Andrew Anighoro

Torsten Gross

Francisco Martínez-Peña

Eileen L. Tang

M.S. Suraj

Cristian Regep

Jeremy B.R. Hayter

Maksym Korablyov

Nicholas Valiante

Almer Van Der Sloot

Mike Tyers

Charles E.S. Roberts

Michael M. Bronstein

Luke L. Lairson

Jake P. Taylor-King

2023-09-30

Cell Reports Methods (published)

GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring

Alexandre Lacoste

Nils Lehmann

Pau Rodríguez

Evan David Sherwin

Hannah Kerner

Björn Lütjens

Jeremy Irvin

David Dao

Hamed Alemohammad

Mehmet Gunturkun

Dava Newman

Stefano Ermon

Xiao Xiang Zhu

Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to subst… (see more)antial increases in generalization to downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models. We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.

2023-09-24

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Track/Datasets_and_Benchmarks (poster)

Contrastive Retrospection: honing in on critical steps for rapid learning and generalization in RL

Chen Sun

Wannan Yang

Thomas Jiralerspong

Dane Malenfant

Benjamin Alsbury-Nealy

Blake Richards

In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. T… (see more)hese critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods that rely on the Bellman equation for credit assignment. Here, we present a new RL algorithm that uses offline contrastive learning to hone in on these critical steps. This algorithm, which we call Contrastive Retrospection (ConSpec), can be added to any existing RL algorithm. ConSpec learns a set of prototypes for the critical steps in a task by a novel contrastive loss and delivers an intrinsic reward when the current state matches one of the prototypes. The prototypes in ConSpec provide two key benefits for credit assignment: (i) They enable rapid identification of all the critical steps. (ii) They do so in a readily interpretable manner, enabling out-of-distribution generalization when sensory features are altered. Distinct from other contemporary RL approaches to credit assignment, ConSpec takes advantage of the fact that it is easier to retrospectively identify the small set of steps that success is contingent upon (and ignoring other states) than it is to prospectively predict reward at every taken step. ConSpec greatly improves learning in a diverse set of RL tasks. The code is available at the link: https://github.com/sunchipsster1/ConSpec

2023-09-20

Neural Information Processing Systems (poster)

DynGFN: Towards Bayesian Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with GFlowNets

Lazar Atanackovic

Alexander Tong

Jason Hartford

Leo J. Lee

Bo Wang

One of the grand challenges of cell biology is inferring the gene regulatory network (GRN) which describes interactions between genes and th… (see more)eir products that control gene expression and cellular function. We can treat this as a causal discovery problem but with two non-standard challenges: (1) regulatory networks are inherently cyclic so we should not model a GRN as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and (2) observations have significant measurement noise, so for typical sample sizes there will always be a large equivalence class of graphs that are likely given the data, and we want methods that capture this uncertainty. Existing methods either focus on challenge (1), identifying cyclic structure from dynamics, or on challenge (2) learning complex Bayesian posteriors over DAGs, but not both. In this paper we leverage the fact that it is possible to estimate the "velocity" of gene expression with RNA velocity techniques to develop an approach that addresses both challenges. Because we have access to velocity information, we can treat the Bayesian structure learning problem as a problem of sparse identification of a dynamical system, capturing cyclic feedback loops through time. Since our objective is to model uncertainty over discrete structures, we leverage Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to estimate the posterior distribution over the combinatorial space of possible sparse dependencies. Our results indicate that our method learns posteriors that better encapsulate the distributions of cyclic structures compared to counterpart state-of-the-art Bayesian structure learning approaches.

2023-09-20

NeurIPS.cc/2023/Conference (poster)