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

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Paul Bertin

PhD - Université de Montréal

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

PhD - Université de Montréal

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

Eric Elmoznino

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Leo Feng

PhD - Université de Montréal

leo.feng@mila.quebec

Ivan Grega

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

PhD

PhD - Université de Montréal

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Edward Hu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Minsu Kim

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Alex Hernandez

Yaroslav KIVVA

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Salem Lahlou

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Tabitha Edith Lee

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Zhen Liu

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

PhD - Université de Montréal

Nikolay Malkin

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sören Mindermann

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Sarthak Mittal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Postdoctorate - 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

PhD - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

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

Victor Schmidt

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Marcin Sendera

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Vedant Shah

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate

Marco Stock

Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

marco.stock@tum.de

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Hugo Larochelle

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Omar G. Younis

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

Nicole Zhang

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

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

AI For Global Climate Cooperation 2023 Competition Proceedings

Prateek Arun Gupta

Lu Li

Soham R. Phade

Sunil Srinivasa

andrew williams

Tianyu Zhang

Yangtian Zhang

Stephan Tao Zheng

The international community must collaborate to mitigate climate change and sustain economic growth. However, collaboration is hard to achie… (see more)ve, partly because no global authority can ensure compliance with international climate agreements. Combining AI with climate-economic simulations offers a promising solution to design international frameworks, including negotiation protocols and climate agreements, that promote and incentivize collaboration. In addition, these frameworks should also have policy goals fulfillment, and sustained commitment, taking into account climate-economic dynamics and strategic behaviors. These challenges require an interdisciplinary approach across machine learning, economics, climate science, law, policy, ethics, and other fields. Towards this objective, we organized AI for Global Climate Cooperation, a Mila competition in which teams submitted proposals and analyses of international frameworks, based on (modifications of) RICE-N, an AI-driven integrated assessment model (IAM). In particular, RICE-N supports modeling regional decision-making using AI agents. Furthermore, the IAM then models the climate-economic impact of those decisions into the future. Whereas the first track focused only on performance metrics, the proposals submitted to the second track were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative evaluation focused on a combination of (i) the degree of mitigation of global temperature rise and (ii) the increase in economic productivity. On the other hand, an interdisciplinary panel of human experts in law, policy, sociology, economics and environmental science, evaluated the solutions qualitatively. In particular, the panel considered the effectiveness, simplicity, feasibility, ethics, and notions of climate justice of the protocols. In the third track, the participants were asked to critique and improve RICE-N.

2023-07-10

ArXiv (preprint)

International Institutions for Advanced AI

Lewis Ho

Joslyn N. Barnhart

Robert Frederic Trager

Miles Brundage

Allison Sovey Carnegie

Rumman Chowdhury

Allan Dafoe

Gillian K. Hadfield

Margaret Levi

D. Snidal

2023-07-10

ArXiv (preprint)

Generative Flow Networks: a Markov Chain Perspective

Tristan Deleu

2023-07-04

ArXiv (preprint)

Better Training of GFlowNets with Local Credit and Incomplete Trajectories

Ling Pan

Nikolay Malkin

Dinghuai Zhang

Generative Flow Networks or GFlowNets are related to Monte-Carlo Markov chain methods (as they sample from a distribution specified by an en… (see more)ergy function), reinforcement learning (as they learn a policy to sample composed objects through a sequence of steps), generative models (as they learn to represent and sample from a distribution) and amortized variational methods (as they can be used to learn to approximate and sample from an otherwise intractable posterior, given a prior and a likelihood). They are trained to generate an object

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Discrete Key-Value Bottleneck

Frederik Träuble

Anirudh Goyal

Nasim Rahaman

Michael Curtis Mozer

Kenji Kawaguchi

Bernhard Schölkopf

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

Equivariance with Learned Canonicalization Functions

Sékou-Oumar Kaba

Arnab Kumar Mondal

Yan Zhang

Siamak Ravanbakhsh

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

David Rolnick

Applications of machine learning techniques for materials modeling typically involve functions known to be equivariant or invariant to speci… (see more)fic symmetries. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven successful in such tasks, they enforce symmetries via the model architecture, which often reduces their expressivity, scalability and comprehensibility. In this paper, we introduce (1) a flexible framework relying on stochastic frame-averaging (SFA) to make any model E(3)-equivariant or invariant through data transformations. (2) FAENet: a simple, fast and expressive GNN, optimized for SFA, that processes geometric information without any symmetrypreserving design constraints. We prove the validity of our method theoretically and empirically demonstrate its superior accuracy and computational scalability in materials modeling on the OC20 dataset (S2EF, IS2RE) as well as common molecular modeling tasks (QM9, QM7-X). A package implementation is available at https://faenet.readthedocs.io.

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

GFlowNet-EM for Learning Compositional Latent Variable Models

Edward J Hu

Nikolay Malkin

Moksh J. Jain

Katie E Everett

Alexandros Graikos

Latent variable models (LVMs) with discrete compositional latents are an important but challenging setting due to a combinatorially large nu… (see more)mber of possible configurations of the latents. A key tradeoff in modeling the posteriors over latents is between expressivity and tractable optimization. For algorithms based on expectation-maximization (EM), the E-step is often intractable without restrictive approximations to the posterior. We propose the use of GFlowNets, algorithms for sampling from an unnormalized density by learning a stochastic policy for sequential construction of samples, for this intractable E-step. By training GFlowNets to sample from the posterior over latents, we take advantage of their strengths as amortized variational inference algorithms for complex distributions over discrete structures. Our approach, GFlowNet-EM, enables the training of expressive LVMs with discrete compositional latents, as shown by experiments on non-context-free grammar induction and on images using discrete variational autoencoders (VAEs) without conditional independence enforced in the encoder.

2023-07-03

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution

Eric Nguyen

Michael Poli

Marjan Faizi

Armin W Thomas

Callum Birch-Sykes

Michael Wornow

Aman Patel

Clayton M. Rabideau

Stefano Massaroli

Stefano Ermon

Stephen Baccus

Christopher Re

Genomic (DNA) sequences encode an enormous amount of information for gene regulation and protein synthesis. Similar to natural language mode… (see more)ls, researchers have proposed foundation models in genomics to learn generalizable features from unlabeled genome data that can then be fine-tuned for downstream tasks such as identifying regulatory elements. Due to the quadratic scaling of attention, previous Transformer-based genomic models have used 512 to 4k tokens as context (0.001% of the human genome), significantly limiting the modeling of long-range interactions in DNA. In addition, these methods rely on toke

2023-06-27

ArXiv (preprint)

HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution

Eric Nguyen

Michael Poli

Marjan Faizi

Armin W Thomas

Callum Birch-Sykes

Michael Wornow

Aman Patel

Clayton M. Rabideau

Stefano Massaroli

Stefano Ermon

Stephen Baccus

Christopher Re

2023-06-27

ArXiv (preprint)

HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution

Eric Nguyen

Michael Poli

Marjan Faizi

Armin W Thomas

Callum Birch-Sykes

Michael Wornow

Aman Patel

Clayton M. Rabideau

Stefano Massaroli

Stefano Ermon

Stephen Baccus

Christopher Re

2023-06-27

ArXiv (preprint)

HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution

Eric Nguyen

Michael Poli

Marjan Faizi

Armin W Thomas

Callum Birch-Sykes

Michael Wornow

Aman Patel

Clayton M. Rabideau

Stefano Massaroli

Stefano Ermon

Stephen Baccus

Christopher Re

2023-06-27

ArXiv (preprint)