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

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

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

Data-Driven Approach to Encoding and Decoding 3-D Crystal Structures

Jordan Hoffmann

Louis Maestrati

Yoshihide Sawada

Jian Tang

Jean Michel Sellier

Generative models have achieved impressive results in many domains including image and text generation. In the natural sciences, generative … (see more)models have led to rapid progress in automated drug discovery. Many of the current methods focus on either 1-D or 2-D representations of typically small, drug-like molecules. However, many molecules require 3-D descriptors and exceed the chemical complexity of commonly used dataset. We present a method to encode and decode the position of atoms in 3-D molecules from a dataset of nearly 50,000 stable crystal unit cells that vary from containing 1 to over 100 atoms. We construct a smooth and continuous 3-D density representation of each crystal based on the positions of different atoms. Two different neural networks were trained on a dataset of over 120,000 three-dimensional samples of single and repeating crystal structures, made by rotating the single unit cells. The first, an Encoder-Decoder pair, constructs a compressed latent space representation of each molecule and then decodes this description into an accurate reconstruction of the input. The second network segments the resulting output into atoms and assigns each atom an atomic number. By generating compressed, continuous latent spaces representations of molecules we are able to decode random samples, interpolate between two molecules, and alter known molecules.

2019-09-03

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net

Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning

Vikas Verma

Kenji Kawaguchi

Alex Lamb

Juho Kannala

David Lopez-Paz

Arno Solin

2019-08-10

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Combined Reinforcement Learning via Abstract Representations

Vincent Francois-Lavet

Doina Precup

Joelle Pineau

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this p… (see more)aper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional learned encoding of the environment, meant to capture summarizing abstractions. We show that the modularity brought by this approach leads to good generalization while being computationally efficient, with planning happening in a smaller latent state space. In addition, this approach recovers a sufficient low-dimensional representation of the environment, which opens up new strategies for interpretable AI, exploration and transfer learning.

2019-07-17

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Towards Non-saturating Recurrent Units for Modelling Long-term Dependencies

Sarath Chandar

Chinnadhurai Sankar

Eugene Vorontsov

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Modelling long-term dependencies is a challenge for recurrent neural networks. This is primarily due to the fact that gradients vanish durin… (see more)g training, as the sequence length increases. Gradients can be attenuated by transition operators and are attenuated or dropped by activation functions. Canonical architectures like LSTM alleviate this issue by skipping information through a memory mechanism. We propose a new recurrent architecture (Non-saturating Recurrent Unit; NRU) that relies on a memory mechanism but forgoes both saturating activation functions and saturating gates, in order to further alleviate vanishing gradients. In a series of synthetic and real world tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed model is the only model that performs among the top 2 models across all tasks with and without long-term dependencies, when compared against a range of other architectures.

2019-07-17

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study

Chinnadhurai Sankar

Sandeep Subramanian

Chris Pal

Sarath Chandar

Neural generative models have been become increasingly popular when building conversational agents. They offer flexibility, can be easily ad… (see more)apted to new domains, and require minimal domain engineering. A common criticism of these systems is that they seldom understand or use the available dialog history effectively. In this paper, we take an empirical approach to understanding how these models use the available dialog history by studying the sensitivity of the models to artificially introduced unnatural changes or perturbations to their context at test time. We experiment with 10 different types of perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets and find that commonly used neural dialog architectures like recurrent and transformer-based seq2seq models are rarely sensitive to most perturbations such as missing or reordering utterances, shuffling words, etc. Also, by open-sourcing our code, we believe that it will serve as a useful diagnostic tool for evaluating dialog systems in the future.

2019-07-01

Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (published)

On the interplay between noise and curvature and its effect on optimization and generalization

Valentin Thomas

Fabian Pedregosa

Bart van Merriënboer

Pierre-Antoine Mangazol

Nicolas Le Roux

The speed at which one can minimize an expected loss using stochastic methods depends on two properties: the curvature of the loss and the v… (see more)ariance of the gradients. While most previous works focus on one or the other of these properties, we explore how their interaction affects optimization speed. Further, as the ultimate goal is good generalization performance, we clarify how both curvature and noise are relevant to properly estimate the generalization gap. Realizing that the limitations of some existing works stems from a confusion between these matrices, we also clarify the distinction between the Fisher matrix, the Hessian, and the covariance matrix of the gradients.

2019-06-19

ArXiv (preprint)

Information matrices and generalization

Valentin Thomas

Fabian Pedregosa

Bart van Merriënboer

Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Nicolas Le Roux

This work revisits the use of information criteria to characterize the generalization of deep learning models. In particular, we empirically… (see more) demonstrate the effectiveness of the Takeuchi information criterion (TIC), an extension of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) for misspecified models, in estimating the generalization gap, shedding light on why quantities such as the number of parameters cannot quantify generalization. The TIC depends on both the Hessian of the loss H and the covariance of the gradients C. By exploring the similarities and differences between these two matrices as well as the Fisher information matrix F, we study the interplay between noise and curvature in deep models. We also address the question of whether C is a reasonable approximation to F, as is commonly assumed.

2019-06-18

arXiv.org (preprint)

dblp.uni-trier.de

Information matrices and generalization

Valentin Thomas

Fabian Pedregosa

Bart van Merriënboer

Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Nicolas Le Roux

2019-06-18

arXiv.org (preprint)

dblp.uni-trier.de

Conditional Computation for Continual Learning

Min Lin

Jie Fu

Catastrophic forgetting of connectionist neural networks is caused by the global sharing of parameters among all training examples. In this … (see more)study, we analyze parameter sharing under the conditional computation framework where the parameters of a neural network are conditioned on each input example. At one extreme, if each input example uses a disjoint set of parameters, there is no sharing of parameters thus no catastrophic forgetting. At the other extreme, if the parameters are the same for every example, it reduces to the conventional neural network. We then introduce a clipped version of maxout networks which lies in the middle, i.e. parameters are shared partially among examples. Based on the parameter sharing analysis, we can locate a limited set of examples that are interfered when learning a new example. We propose to perform rehearsal on this set to prevent forgetting, which is termed as conditional rehearsal. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in an online non-stationary setup, where updates are made after each new example and the distribution of the received example shifts over time.

2019-06-16

ArXiv (preprint)

Learning the Arrow of Time

Nasim Rahaman

Steffen Wolf

Anirudh Goyal

Roman Remme

We humans seem to have an innate understanding of the asymmetric progression of time, which we use to efficiently and safely perceive and ma… (see more)nipulate our environment. Drawing inspiration from that, we address the problem of learning an arrow of time in a Markov (Decision) Process. We illustrate how a learned arrow of time can capture meaningful information about the environment, which in turn can be used to measure reachability, detect side-effects and to obtain an intrinsic reward signal. We show empirical results on a selection of discrete and continuous environments, and demonstrate for a class of stochastic processes that the learned arrow of time agrees reasonably well with a known notion of an arrow of time given by the celebrated Jordan-Kinderlehrer-Otto result.

2019-06-12

OpenReview.net/Anonymous_Preprint (unknown)

openreview.net

Learning Powerful Policies by Using Consistent Dynamics Model

Shagun Sodhani

Anirudh Goyal

Tristan Deleu

Sergey Levine

Jian Tang

Model-based Reinforcement Learning approaches have the promise of being sample efficient. Much of the progress in learning dynamics models i… (see more)n RL has been made by learning models via supervised learning. But traditional model-based approaches lead to `compounding errors' when the model is unrolled step by step. Essentially, the state transitions that the learner predicts (by unrolling the model for multiple steps) and the state transitions that the learner experiences (by acting in the environment) may not be consistent. There is enough evidence that humans build a model of the environment, not only by observing the environment but also by interacting with the environment. Interaction with the environment allows humans to carry out experiments: taking actions that help uncover true causal relationships which can be used for building better dynamics models. Analogously, we would expect such interactions to be helpful for a learning agent while learning to model the environment dynamics. In this paper, we build upon this intuition by using an auxiliary cost function to ensure consistency between what the agent observes (by acting in the real world) and what it imagines (by acting in the `learned' world). We consider several tasks - Mujoco based control tasks and Atari games - and show that the proposed approach helps to train powerful policies and better dynamics models.

2019-06-11

ArXiv (preprint)

GMNN: Graph Markov Neural Networks

Meng Qu

Jian Tang

This paper studies semi-supervised object classification in relational data, which is a fundamental problem in relational data modeling. The… (see more) problem has been extensively studied in the literature of both statistical relational learning (e.g. relational Markov networks) and graph neural networks (e.g. graph convolutional networks). Statistical relational learning methods can effectively model the dependency of object labels through conditional random fields for collective classification, whereas graph neural networks learn effective object representations for classification through end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose the Graph Markov Neural Network (GMNN) that combines the advantages of both worlds. A GMNN models the joint distribution of object labels with a conditional random field, which can be effectively trained with the variational EM algorithm. In the E-step, one graph neural network learns effective object representations for approximating the posterior distributions of object labels. In the M-step, another graph neural network is used to model the local label dependency. Experiments on object classification, link classification, and unsupervised node representation learning show that GMNN achieves state-of-the-art results.

2019-05-24

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press