Yoshua Bengio

Biography

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

For more information please contact Marie-Josée Beauchamp, Administrative Assistant at marie-josee.beauchamp@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

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Junyeob BAEK

Independent visiting researcher - KAIST

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 :

Collaborating Alumni - 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

Collaborating Alumni

Zhen Liu

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Liam Paull

Kanika Madan

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

Amine RAZIG

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

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

Luca Scimeca

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

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

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

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

Nikolay Malkin

Moksh J. Jain

Emmanuel Bengio

Chen Sun

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a method for learning a stochastic policy for generating compositional objects, such as graphs or s… (see more)trings, from a given unnormalized density by sequences of actions, where many possible action sequences may lead to the same object. We find previously proposed learning objectives for GFlowNets, flow matching and detailed balance, which are analogous to temporal difference learning, to be prone to inefficient credit propagation across long action sequences. We thus propose a new learning objective for GFlowNets, trajectory balance, as a more efficient alternative to previously used objectives. We prove that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution. In experiments on four distinct domains, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectory balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

openreview.net

Unifying Likelihood-free Inference with Black-box Optimization and Beyond

Dinghuai Zhang

Jie Fu

Aaron Courville

Black-box optimization formulations for biological sequence design have drawn recent attention due to their promising potential impact on th… (see more)e pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we propose to unify two seemingly distinct worlds: likelihood-free inference and black-box optimization, under one probabilistic framework. In tandem, we provide a recipe for constructing various sequence design methods based on this framework. We show how previous optimization approaches can be"reinvented"in our framework, and further propose new probabilistic black-box optimization algorithms. Extensive experiments on sequence design application illustrate the benefits of the proposed methodology.

2022-01-01

ICLR (published)

openreview.net

Weakly Supervised Representation Learning with Sparse Perturbations

Kartik Ahuja

Jason Hartford

The theory of representation learning aims to build methods that provably invert the data generating process with minimal domain knowledge o… (see more)r any source of supervision. Most prior approaches require strong distributional assumptions on the latent variables and weak supervision (auxiliary information such as timestamps) to provide provable identification guarantees. In this work, we show that if one has weak supervision from observations generated by sparse perturbations of the latent variables--e.g. images in a reinforcement learning environment where actions move individual sprites--identification is achievable under unknown continuous latent distributions. We show that if the perturbations are applied only on mutually exclusive blocks of latents, we identify the latents up to those blocks. We also show that if these perturbation blocks overlap, we identify latents up to the smallest blocks shared across perturbations. Consequently, if there are blocks that intersect in one latent variable only, then such latents are identified up to permutation and scaling. We propose a natural estimation procedure based on this theory and illustrate it on low-dimensional synthetic and image-based experiments.

openreview.net

Multi-Domain Balanced Sampling Improves Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Chest X-ray Pathology Prediction Models

Enoch Amoatey Tetteh

Joseph D Viviano

David Scott Krueger

Joseph Paul Cohen

Learning models that generalize under different distribution shifts in medical imaging has been a long-standing research challenge. There ha… (see more)ve been several proposals for efficient and robust visual representation learning among vision research practitioners, especially in the sensitive and critical biomedical domain. In this paper, we propose an idea for out-of-distribution generalization of chest X-ray pathologies that uses a simple balanced batch sampling technique. We observed that balanced sampling between the multiple training datasets improves the performance over baseline models trained without balancing.

2021-12-27

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Generative Adversarial Networks

Ian G Goodfellow

Jean Pouget-Abadie

Mehdi Mirza

Bing Xu

David Warde-Farley

Sherjil Ozair

Aaron Courville

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a type of deep learning techniques that have shown remarkable success in generating realistic ima… (see more)ges, videos, and other types of data. This paper provides a comprehensive guide to GANs, covering their architecture, loss functions, training methods, applications, evaluation metrics, challenges, and future directions. We begin with an introduction to GANs and their historical development, followed by a review of the background and related work. We then provide a detailed overview of the GAN architecture, including the generator and discriminator networks, and discuss the key design choices and variations. Next, we review the loss functions utilized in GANs, including the original minimax objective, as well as more recent approaches s.a. Wasserstein distance and gradient penalty. We then delve into the training of GANs, discussing common techniques s.a. alternating optimization, minibatch discrimination, and spectral normalization. We also provide a survey of the various applications of GANs across domains. In addition, we review the evaluation metrics utilized to assess the diversity and quality of GAN-produced data. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and open issues in GANs, including mode collapse, training instability, and ethical considerations. Finally, we provide a glimpse into the future directions of GAN research, including improving scalability, developing new architectures, incorporating domain knowledge, and exploring new applications. Overall, this paper serves as a comprehensive guide to GANs, providing both theoretical and practical insights for researchers and practitioners in the field.

2021-12-15

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Effect of diversity in Meta-Learning

Ramnath Kumar

Tristan Deleu