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 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

Research Intern - McGill University

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

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Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ayoub Atanane

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Paul Bertin

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PhD - Université de Montréal

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Mohsin Hasan

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Minsu Kim

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Seanie Lee

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Zhen Liu

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Liam Paull

Matt MacDermott

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Mohammed Mahfoud

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Nikolay Malkin

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Dhanya Sridhar

Sören Mindermann

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Sarthak Mittal

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PhD - Université de Montréal

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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

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Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Ali Parviz

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Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

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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

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Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

PhD - Université de Montréal

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Julie Hussin

Victor Schmidt

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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

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Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

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Pierre-Luc Bacon

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alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

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Omar Younis

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PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

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Mathieu Blanchette

Dinghuai Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

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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

Generative Augmented Flow Networks

Ling Pan

Dinghuai Zhang

Aaron Courville

Longbo Huang

The Generative Flow Network is a probabilistic framework where an agent learns a stochastic policy for object generation, such that the prob… (see more)ability of generating an object is proportional to a given reward function. Its effectiveness has been shown in discovering high-quality and diverse solutions, compared to reward-maximizing reinforcement learning-based methods. Nonetheless, GFlowNets only learn from rewards of the terminal states, which can limit its applicability. Indeed, intermediate rewards play a critical role in learning, for example from intrinsic motivation to provide intermediate feedback even in particularly challenging sparse reward tasks. Inspired by this, we propose Generative Augmented Flow Networks (GAFlowNets), a novel learning framework to incorporate intermediate rewards into GFlowNets. We specify intermediate rewards by intrinsic motivation to tackle the exploration problem in sparse reward environments. GAFlowNets can leverage edge-based and state-based intrinsic rewards in a joint way to improve exploration. Based on extensive experiments on the GridWorld task, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GAFlowNet in terms of convergence, performance, and diversity of solutions. We further show that GAFlowNet is scalable to a more complex and large-scale molecule generation domain, where it achieves consistent and significant performance improvement.

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (notable)

GFlowNets and variational inference

Nikolay Malkin

Salem Lahlou

Tristan Deleu

Xu Ji

Edward J Hu

Katie E Everett

Dinghuai Zhang

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically us… (see more)ed to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which have been used for distributions over discrete structures such as graphs. We demonstrate that, in certain cases, VI algorithms are equivalent to special cases of GFlowNets in the sense of equality of expected gradients of their learning objectives. We then point out the differences between the two families and show how these differences emerge experimentally. Notably, GFlowNets, which borrow ideas from reinforcement learning, are more amenable than VI to off-policy training without the cost of high gradient variance induced by importance sampling. We argue that this property of GFlowNets can provide advantages for capturing diversity in multimodal target distributions.

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Latent Bottlenecked Attentive Neural Processes

Leo Feng

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Neural Processes (NPs) are popular methods in meta-learning that can estimate predictive uncertainty on target datapoints by conditioning on… (see more) a context dataset. Previous state-of-the-art method Transformer Neural Processes (TNPs) achieve strong performance but require quadratic computation with respect to the number of context datapoints, significantly limiting its scalability. Conversely, existing sub-quadratic NP variants perform significantly worse than that of TNPs. Tackling this issue, we propose Latent Bottlenecked Attentive Neural Processes (LBANPs), a new computationally efficient sub-quadratic NP variant, that has a querying computational complexity independent of the number of context datapoints. The model encodes the context dataset into a constant number of latent vectors on which self-attention is performed. When making predictions, the model retrieves higher-order information from the context dataset via multiple cross-attention mechanisms on the latent vectors. We empirically show that LBANPs achieve results competitive with the state-of-the-art on meta-regression, image completion, and contextual multi-armed bandits. We demonstrate that LBANPs can trade-off the computational cost and performance according to the number of latent vectors. Finally, we show LBANPs can scale beyond existing attention-based NP variants to larger dataset settings.

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Latent State Marginalization as a Low-cost Approach for Improving Exploration

Dinghuai Zhang

Aaron Courville

Qinqing Zheng

Amy Zhang

Ricky T. Q. Chen

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

OCIM : Object-centric Compositional Imagination for Visual Abstract Reasoning

Rim Assouel

Pau Rodriguez

Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

A long-sought property of machine learning systems is the ability to compose learned concepts in novel ways that would enable them to m… (see more)ake sense of new situations. Such capacity for imagination -- a core aspect of human intelligence -- is not yet attained for machines. In this work, we show that object-centric inductive biases can be leveraged to derive an imagination-based learning framework that achieves compositional generalization on a series of tasks. Our method, denoted Object-centric Compositional IMagination (OCIM), decomposes visual reasoning tasks into a series of primitives applied to objects without using a domain-specific language. We show that these primitives can be recomposed to generate new imaginary tasks. By training on such imagined tasks, the model learns to reuse the previously-learned concepts to systematically generalize at test time. We test our model on a series of arithmetic tasks where the model has to infer the sequence of operations (programs) applied to a series of inputs. We find that imagination is key for the model to find the correct solution for unseen combinations of operations.

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (rejected)

P REDICTIVE I NFERENCE WITH F EATURE C ONFORMAL P REDICTION

Jiaye Teng

Chuan Wen

Dinghuai Zhang

Yang Gao

Yang Yuan

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Robust and Controllable Object-Centric Learning through Energy-based Models

Ruixiang ZHANG

Tong Che

Boris Ivanovic

Renhao Wang

Marco Pavone

Liam Paull

Humans are remarkably good at understanding and reasoning about complex visual scenes. The capability of decomposing low-level observations … (see more)into discrete objects allows us to build a grounded abstract representation and identify the compositional structure of the world. Thus it is a crucial step for machine learning models to be capable of inferring objects and their properties from visual scene without explicit supervision. However, existing works on object-centric representation learning are either relying on tailor-made neural network modules or assuming sophisticated models of underlying generative and inference processes. In this work, we present EGO, a conceptually simple and general approach to learning object-centric representation through energy-based model. By forming a permutation-invariant energy function using vanilla attention blocks that are readily available in Transformers, we can infer object-centric latent variables via gradient-based MCMC methods where permutation equivariance is automatically guaranteed. We show that EGO can be easily integrated into existing architectures, and can effectively extract high-quality object-centric representations, leading to better segmentation accuracy and competitive downstream task performance. We empirically evaluate the robustness of the learned representation from EGO against distribution shift. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EGO in systematic compositional generalization, by recomposing learned energy functions for novel scene generation and manipulation.

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Stateful active facilitator: Coordination and Environmental Heterogeneity in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Dianbo Liu

Vedant Shah

Oussama Boussif

Cristian Meo

Anirudh Goyal

Tianmin Shu

Michael Curtis Mozer

Nicolas Heess

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Leveraging the Third Dimension in Contrastive Learning

Sumukh K Aithal

Anirudh Goyal

Alex Lamb

Michael Curtis Mozer

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods operate on unlabeled data to learn robust representations useful for downstream tasks. Most SSL metho… (see more)ds rely on augmentations obtained by transforming the 2D image pixel map. These augmentations ignore the fact that biological vision takes place in an immersive three-dimensional, temporally contiguous environment, and that low-level biological vision relies heavily on depth cues. Using a signal provided by a pretrained state-of-the-art monocular RGB-to-depth model (the \emph{Depth Prediction Transformer}, Ranftl et al., 2021), we explore two distinct approaches to incorporating depth signals into the SSL framework. First, we evaluate contrastive learning using an RGB+depth input representation. Second, we use the depth signal to generate novel views from slightly different camera positions, thereby producing a 3D augmentation for contrastive learning. We evaluate these two approaches on three different SSL methods -- BYOL, SimSiam, and SwAV -- using ImageNette (10 class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet-100 and ImageNet-1k datasets. We find that both approaches to incorporating depth signals improve the robustness and generalization of the baseline SSL methods, though the first approach (with depth-channel concatenation) is superior. For instance, BYOL with the additional depth channel leads to an increase in downstream classification accuracy from 85.3\% to 88.0\% on ImageNette and 84.1\% to 87.0\% on ImageNet-C.

2023-01-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Regeneration Learning: A Learning Paradigm for Data Generation

Xu Tan

Tao Qin

Jiang Bian

Tie-Yan Liu