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
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - KAIST
PhD - Université de Montréal
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
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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Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating Alumni
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher - 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
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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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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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Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
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Collaborating researcher - KAIST
PhD - McGill University
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Publications

Interpretable Convolutional Filters with SincNet
Deep learning is currently playing a crucial role toward higher levels of artificial intelligence. This paradigm allows neural networks to l… (see more)earn complex and abstract representations, that are progressively obtained by combining simpler ones. Nevertheless, the internal "black-box" representations automatically discovered by current neural architectures often suffer from a lack of interpretability, making of primary interest the study of explainable machine learning techniques. This paper summarizes our recent efforts to develop a more interpretable neural model for directly processing speech from the raw waveform. In particular, we propose SincNet, a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that encourages the first layer to discover more meaningful filters by exploiting parametrized sinc functions. In contrast to standard CNNs, which learn all the elements of each filter, only low and high cutoff frequencies of band-pass filters are directly learned from data. This inductive bias offers a very compact way to derive a customized filter-bank front-end, that only depends on some parameters with a clear physical meaning. Our experiments, conducted on both speaker and speech recognition, show that the proposed architecture converges faster, performs better, and is more interpretable than standard CNNs.
On Training Recurrent Neural Networks for Lifelong Learning
Shagun Sodhani
Catastrophic forgetting and capacity saturation are the central challenges of any parametric lifelong learning system. In this work, we stud… (see more)y these challenges in the context of sequential supervised learning with emphasis on recurrent neural networks. To evaluate the models in the lifelong learning setting, we propose a curriculum-based, simple, and intuitive benchmark where the models are trained on tasks with increasing levels of difficulty. To measure the impact of catastrophic forgetting, the model is tested on all the previous tasks as it completes any task. As a step towards developing true lifelong learning systems, we unify Gradient Episodic Memory (a catastrophic forgetting alleviation approach) and Net2Net(a capacity expansion approach). Both these models are proposed in the context of feedforward networks and we evaluate the feasibility of using them for recurrent networks. Evaluation on the proposed benchmark shows that the unified model is more suitable than the constituent models for lifelong learning setting.
BabyAI: First Steps Towards Grounded Language Learning With a Human In the Loop
Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert
Salem Lahlou
Lucas Willems
Chitwan Saharia
Thien Huu Nguyen
Allowing humans to interactively train artificial agents to understand language instructions is desirable for both practical and scientific … (see more)reasons, but given the poor data efficiency of the current learning methods, this goal may require substantial research efforts. Here, we introduce the BabyAI research platform to support investigations towards including humans in the loop for grounded language learning. The BabyAI platform comprises an extensible suite of 19 levels of increasing difficulty. The levels gradually lead the agent towards acquiring a combinatorially rich synthetic language which is a proper subset of English. The platform also provides a heuristic expert agent for the purpose of simulating a human teacher. We report baseline results and estimate the amount of human involvement that would be required to train a neural network-based agent on some of the BabyAI levels. We put forward strong evidence that current deep learning methods are not yet sufficiently sample efficient when it comes to learning a language with compositional properties.
Deep Learning. Das umfassende Handbuch
HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering
Zhilin Yang
Peng Qi
Saizheng Zhang
William W. Cohen
Russ Salakhutdinov
Christopher D Manning
Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. We int… (see more)roduce HotpotQA, a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) we provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning, allowing QA systems to reason with strong supervision and explain the predictions; (4) we offer a new type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. We show that HotpotQA is challenging for the latest QA systems, and the supporting facts enable models to improve performance and make explainable predictions.
Introduction to NIPS 2017 Competition Track
Sergio Escalera
Markus Weimer
Mikhail Burtsev
Valentin Malykh
Varvara Logacheva
Ryan Lowe
Iulian V. Serban
Alexander Rudnicky
Alan W. Black
Shrimai Prabhumoye
Łukasz Kidziński
Sharada Prasanna Mohanty
Carmichael F. Ong
Jennifer L. Hicks
Sergey Levine
Marcel Salathé
Scott Delp
Iker Huerga
Alexander Grigorenko … (see 19 more)
Leifur Thorbergsson
Anasuya Das
Kyla Nemitz
Jenna Sandker
Stephen King
Alexander S. Ecker
Leon A. Gatys
Matthias Bethge
Jordan Boyd-Graber
Shi Feng
Pedro Rodriguez
Mohit Iyyer
He He
Hal Daumé III
Sean McGregor
Amir Banifatemi
Alexey Kurakin
Ian G Goodfellow
Samy Bengio
The First Conversational Intelligence Challenge
Mikhail Burtsev
Varvara Logacheva
Valentin Malykh
Iulian V. Serban
Ryan Lowe
Shrimai Prabhumoye
Alan W. Black
Alexander Rudnicky
Deep Graph Infomax
Petar Veličković
William Fedus
William L. Hamilton
Pietro Lio
Deep Graph Infomax
Petar Veličković
William Fedus
William L. Hamilton
Pietro Lio
Modeling the Long Term Future in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Nan Rosemary Ke
Amanpreet Singh
Ahmed Touati
Anirudh Goyal
Devi Parikh
Dhruv Batra
Probabilistic Planning with Sequential Monte Carlo methods
Alexandre Piché
Valentin Thomas
Cyril Ibrahim
Width of Minima Reached by Stochastic Gradient Descent is Influenced by Learning Rate to Batch Size Ratio
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Zac Kenton
Devansh Arpit
Nicolas Ballas
Asja Fischer
Amos Storkey