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 Alumni - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - KAIST
Independent visiting researcher
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - KAIST
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - 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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Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
PhD - University of Waterloo
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Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Research Intern - 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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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate
Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher
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PhD - McGill University
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Publications

GFlowNet Foundations
Salem Lahlou
Tristan Deleu
Edward J. Hu
Mo Tiwari
GFlowNet Foundations
Salem Lahlou
Tristan Deleu
Edward J Hu
Mo Tiwari
GFlowNets for AI-Driven Scientific Discovery
Moksh J. Jain
Tristan Deleu
Jason Hartford
Cheng-Hao Liu
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
Tackling the most pressing problems for humanity, such as the climate crisis and the threat of global pandemics, requires accelerating the p… (see more)ace of scientific discovery. While science has traditionally relied...
GFlowOut: Dropout with Generative Flow Networks
Dianbo Liu
Moksh J. Jain
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Qianli Shen
Salem Lahlou
Anirudh Goyal
Nikolay Malkin
Chris Emezue
Dinghuai Zhang
Nadhir Hassen
Xu Ji
Kenji Kawaguchi
GFlowOut: Dropout with Generative Flow Networks
Dianbo Liu
Moksh J. Jain
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Qianli Shen
Salem Lahlou
Anirudh Goyal
Nikolay Malkin
Chris Emezue
Dinghuai Zhang
Nadhir Hassen
Xu Ji
Kenji Kawaguchi
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
Learning GFlowNets from partial episodes for improved convergence and stability
Kanika Madan
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Maksym Korablyov
Moksh J. Jain
Andrei Cristian Nica
Tom Bosc
Nikolay Malkin
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a family of algorithms for training a sequential sampler of discrete objects under an unnormalized … (see more)target density and have been successfully used for various probabilistic modeling tasks. Existing training objectives for GFlowNets are either local to states or transitions, or propagate a reward signal over an entire sampling trajectory. We argue that these alternatives represent opposite ends of a gradient bias-variance tradeoff and propose a way to exploit this tradeoff to mitigate its harmful effects. Inspired by the TD(
MixupE: Understanding and improving Mixup from directional derivative perspective
Vikas Verma
Yingtian Zou
Sarthak Mittal
Wai Hoh Tang
Hieu Pham
Juho Kannala
Arno Solin
Kenji Kawaguchi
MixupE: Understanding and Improving Mixup from Directional Derivative Perspective
Vikas Verma
Yingtian Zou
Sarthak Mittal
Wai Hoh Tang
Hieu Pham
Juho Kannala
Arno Solin
Kenji Kawaguchi
Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique for training deep neural networks where additional samples are generated by linearly interpol… (see more)ating pairs of inputs and their labels. This technique is known to improve the generalization performance in many learning paradigms and applications. In this work, we first analyze Mixup and show that it implicitly regularizes infinitely many directional derivatives of all orders. Based on this new insight, we propose an improved version of Mixup, theoretically justified to deliver better generalization performance than the vanilla Mixup. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments across various domains such as images, tabular data, speech, and graphs. Our results show that the proposed method improves Mixup across multiple datasets using a variety of architectures, for instance, exhibiting an improvement over Mixup by 0.8% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy.
Neural Causal Structure Discovery from Interventions
Nan Rosemary Ke
Olexa Bilaniuk
Anirudh Goyal
Stefan Bauer
Bernhard Schölkopf
Michael Curtis Mozer
Recent promising results have generated a surge of interest in continuous optimization methods for causal discovery from observational data.… (see more) However, there are theoretical limitations on the identifiability of underlying structures obtained solely from observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, provides richer information about the underlying data-generating process. Nevertheless, extending and applying methods designed for observational data to include interventions is a challenging problem. To address this issue, we propose a general framework based on neural networks to develop models that incorporate both observational and interventional data. Notably, our method can handle the challenging and realistic scenario where the identity of the intervened upon variable is unknown. We evaluate our proposed approach in the context of graph recovery, both de novo and from a partially-known edge set. Our method achieves strong benchmark results on various structure learning tasks, including structure recovery of synthetic graphs as well as standard graphs from the Bayesian Network Repository
NEURAL NETWORK-BASED SOLVERS FOR PDES
M. Cameron
Ian G Goodfellow
(1) N (x; θ) = Ll+1 ○ σl ○Ll ○ σl−1 ○ . . . ○ σ1 ○L1. The symbol Lk denotes the k’s affine operator of the form Lk(x) = … (see more)Akx + bk, while σk denotes a nonlinear function called an activation function. The activation functions are chosen by the user. The matrices Ak and shift vectors (or bias vectors) bk are encoded into the argument θ: θ = {Ak, bk} l+1 k=1. The term training neural network means finding {Ak, bk} l+1 k=1 such that N (x; θ) satisfies certain conditions. These conditions are described by the loss function chosen by the user. For example, one might want the neural network to assume certain values fj at certain points xj , j = 1, . . . ,N . These points x are called the training data. In this case, a common choice of the loss function is the least squares error:
Stochastic Generative Flow Networks
Ling Pan
Dinghuai Zhang
Moksh J. Jain
Longbo Huang