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 director 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 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

Research Intern - McGill University

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

Salwane Agassoussi

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ayoub Atanane

Collaborating Alumni - Université du Québec à Rimouski

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Paul Bertin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ghait Boukachab

Collaborating Alumni - UQAR

Oussama Boussif

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating researcher - N/A

Principal supervisor :

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Eric Elmoznino

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Léna Nehale Ezzine

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Leo Feng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Research Intern - Barcelona University

Piotr Gainski

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Ivan Grega

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Pietro Greiner

Research Intern

Mohsin Hasan

PhD - Université de Montréal

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Edward Hu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Minsu Kim

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Zhen Liu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Collaborating Alumni - Imperial College London

PhD - Université de Montréal

Mohammed Mahfoud

Collaborating Alumni - 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

Ali Parviz

Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

Nassim Rahaman

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

Dounia Shaaban Kabakibo

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Vedant Shah

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni

Marco Stock

Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

marco.stock@tum.de

Vincent Taboga

Postdoctorate - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Principal supervisor :

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Zichao Yan

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Omar Younis

Collaborating researcher

Taeyoung YUN

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Mathieu Blanchette

Dinghuai Zhang

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

Object centric architectures enable efficient causal representation learning

Amin Mansouri

Jason Hartford

Yan Zhang

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees… (see more) (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

PhyloGFN: Phylogenetic inference with generative flow networks

Ming Yang Zhou

Zichao Yan

Elliot Layne

Nikolay Malkin

Dinghuai Zhang

Moksh J. Jain

Mathieu Blanchette

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks

Ling Pan

Moksh J. Jain

Kanika Madan

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects fr… (see more)om a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

Tree Cross Attention

Leo Feng

Frederick Tung

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Cross Attention is a popular method for retrieving information from a set of context tokens for making predictions. At inference time, for e… (see more)ach prediction, Cross Attention scans the full set of

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

PhAST: Physics-Aware, Scalable, and Task-specific GNNs for Accelerated Catalyst Design

Alexandre AGM Duval

Victor Schmidt

Santiago Miret

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Simulation-Free Schrödinger Bridges via Score and Flow Matching

Alexander Tong

Nikolay Malkin

Kilian FATRAS

Lazar Atanackovic

Yanlei Zhang

Guillaume Huguet

Guy Wolf

We present simulation-free score and flow matching ([SF]…

2024-01-01

AISTATS (published)

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Geometric GNNs for 3D Atomic Systems

Alexandre AGM Duval

Simon V. Mathis

Chaitanya K. Joshi

Victor Schmidt

Santiago Miret

Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Taco Cohen

Pietro Lio’

Michael M. Bronstein

2023-12-12

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Improving Gradient-guided Nested Sampling for Posterior Inference

Pablo Lemos

Will Handley

Nikolay Malkin

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

Yashar Hezaveh

We present a performant, general-purpose gradient-guided nested sampling algorithm, …

2023-12-06

ArXiv (preprint)

Unlearning via Sparse Representations

Vedant Shah

Frederik Träuble

Ashish Malik

Hugo Larochelle

Michael Curtis Mozer

Sanjeev Arora

Anirudh Goyal

2023-11-26

ArXiv (preprint)

Mitigating Biases with Diverse Ensembles and Diffusion Models

Luca Scimeca

Alexander Rubinstein

Damien Teney

Seong Joon Oh

Armand Nicolicioiu

Spurious correlations in the data, where multiple cues are predictive of the target labels, often lead to a phenomenon known as shortcut lea… (see more)rning, where a model relies on erroneous, easy-to-learn cues while ignoring reliable ones. In this work, we propose an ensemble diversification framework exploiting Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) to mitigate this form of bias. We show that at particular training intervals, DPMs can generate images with novel feature combinations, even when trained on samples displaying correlated input features. We leverage this crucial property to generate synthetic counterfactuals to increase model diversity via ensemble disagreement. We show that DPM-guided diversification is sufficient to remove dependence on primary shortcut cues, without a need for additional supervised signals. We further empirically quantify its efficacy on several diversification objectives, and finally show improved generalization and diversification performance on par with prior work that relies on auxiliary data collection.

2023-11-23

ArXiv (preprint)

arxiv.org

Learning from unexpected events in the neocortical microcircuit

Colleen J Gillon

Jason E. Pina

Jérôme A. Lecoq

Ruweida Ahmed

Yazan N. Billeh

Shiella Caldejon

Peter Groblewski

Timothy M. Henley

India Kato

Eric Lee

Jennifer Luviano

Kyla Mace

Chelsea Nayan

Thuyanh V. Nguyen

Kat North

Jed Perkins

Sam Seid

Matthew T. Valley

Ali Williford

Yoshua Bengio … (see 3 more)

Timothy P. Lillicrap

Blake Richards

Joel Zylberberg

2023-11-21

Journal of Neuroscience (published)

Responses to Pattern-Violating Visual Stimuli Evolve Differently Over Days in Somata and Distal Apical Dendrites

Colleen J Gillon

Jason E. Pina

Jérôme A. Lecoq

Ruweida Ahmed

Yazan N. Billeh

Shiella Caldejon

Peter Groblewski

Timothy M. Henley

India Kato

Eric Lee

Jennifer Luviano

Kyla Mace

Chelsea Nayan

Thuyanh V. Nguyen

Kat North

Jed Perkins

Sam Seid

Matthew T. Valley

Ali Williford

Yoshua Bengio … (see 3 more)

Timothy P. Lillicrap

Blake Richards

Joel Zylberberg

Scientists have long conjectured that the neocortex learns patterns in sensory data to generate top-down predictions of upcoming stimuli. In… (see more) line with this conjecture, different responses to pattern-matching vs pattern-violating visual stimuli have been observed in both spiking and somatic calcium imaging data. However, it remains unknown whether these pattern-violation signals are different between the distal apical dendrites, which are heavily targeted by top-down signals, and the somata, where bottom-up information is primarily integrated. Furthermore, it is unknown how responses to pattern-violating stimuli evolve over time as an animal gains more experience with them. Here, we address these unanswered questions by analyzing responses of individual somata and dendritic branches of layer 2/3 and layer 5 pyramidal neurons tracked over multiple days in primary visual cortex of awake, behaving female and male mice. We use sequences of Gabor patches with patterns in their orientations to create pattern-matching and pattern-violating stimuli, and two-photon calcium imaging to record neuronal responses. Many neurons in both layers show large differences between their responses to pattern-matching and pattern-violating stimuli. Interestingly, these responses evolve in opposite directions in the somata and distal apical dendrites, with somata becoming less sensitive to pattern-violating stimuli and distal apical dendrites more sensitive. These differences between the somata and distal apical dendrites may be important for hierarchical computation of sensory predictions and learning, since these two compartments tend to receive bottom-up and top-down information, respectively.

2023-11-21

Journal of Neuroscience (published)