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

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

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

A Walk with SGD

Chen Xing

Devansh Arpit

Christos Tsirigotis

2018-02-24

ArXiv (preprint)

A Walk with SGD

Chen Xing

Devansh Arpit

Christos Tsirigotis

2018-02-24

ArXiv (preprint)

A Walk with SGD

Chen Xing

Devansh Arpit

Christos Tsirigotis

Exploring why stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based optimization methods train deep neural networks (DNNs) that generalize well has become… (see more) an active area of research. Towards this end, we empirically study the dynamics of SGD when training over-parametrized DNNs. Specifically we study the DNN loss surface along the trajectory of SGD by interpolating the loss surface between parameters from consecutive \textit{iterations} and tracking various metrics during training. We find that the loss interpolation between parameters before and after a training update is roughly convex with a minimum (\textit{valley floor}) in between for most of the training. Based on this and other metrics, we deduce that during most of the training, SGD explores regions in a valley by bouncing off valley walls at a height above the valley floor. This 'bouncing off walls at a height' mechanism helps SGD traverse larger distance for small batch sizes and large learning rates which we find play qualitatively different roles in the dynamics. While a large learning rate maintains a large height from the valley floor, a small batch size injects noise facilitating exploration. We find this mechanism is crucial for generalization because the valley floor has barriers and this exploration above the valley floor allows SGD to quickly travel far away from the initialization point (without being affected by barriers) and find flatter regions, corresponding to better generalization.

2018-02-24

ArXiv (preprint)

Generalization in Machine Learning via Analytical Learning Theory

Kenji Kawaguchi

This paper introduces a novel measure-theoretic theory for machine learning that does not require statistical assumptions. Based on this the… (see more)ory, a new regularization method in deep learning is derived and shown to outperform previous methods in CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN. Moreover, the proposed theory provides a theoretical basis for a family of practically successful regularization methods in deep learning. We discuss several consequences of our results on one-shot learning, representation learning, deep learning, and curriculum learning. Unlike statistical learning theory, the proposed learning theory analyzes each problem instance individually via measure theory, rather than a set of problem instances via statistics. As a result, it provides different types of results and insights when compared to statistical learning theory.

2018-02-21

arXiv.org (preprint)

Towards Understanding Generalization via Analytical Learning Theory

Kenji Kawaguchi

2018-02-21

ArXiv (preprint)

Boundary Seeking GANs

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

Athul Jacob

Adam Trischler

Gerry Che

Kyunghyun Cho

2018-02-15

International Conference on Learning Representations (published)

Boundary Seeking GANs

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

Athul Jacob

Adam Trischler

Gerry Che

Kyunghyun Cho

Generative adversarial networks are a learning framework that rely on training a discriminator to estimate a measure of difference between a… (see more) target and generated distributions. GANs, as normally formulated, rely on the generated samples being completely differentiable w.r.t. the generative parameters, and thus do not work for discrete data. We introduce a method for training GANs with discrete data that uses the estimated difference measure from the discriminator to compute importance weights for generated samples, thus providing a policy gradient for training the generator. The importance weights have a strong connection to the decision boundary of the discriminator, and we call our method boundary-seeking GANs (BGANs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with discrete image and character-based natural language generation. In addition, the boundary-seeking objective extends to continuous data, which can be used to improve stability of training, and we demonstrate this on Celeba, Large-scale Scene Understanding (LSUN) bedrooms, and Imagenet without conditioning.

2018-02-15

International Conference on Learning Representations (published)

Combining Model-based and Model-free RL via Multi-step Control Variates

Tong Che

Yuchen Lu

George Tucker

Surya Bhupatiraju

Shane Gu

Sergey Levine

2018-02-15

(published)

Learning Generative Models with Locally Disentangled Latent Factors

Brady Neal

Alex Lamb

Sherjil Ozair

One of the most successful techniques in generative models has been decomposing a complicated generation task into a series of simpler gener… (see more)ation tasks. For example, generating an image at a low resolution and then learning to refine that into a high resolution image often improves results substantially. Here we explore a novel strategy for decomposing generation for complicated objects in which we first generate latent variables which describe a subset of the observed variables, and then map from these latent variables to the observed space. We show that this allows us to achieve decoupled training of complicated generative models and present both theoretical and experimental results supporting the benefit of such an approach.

2018-02-15

(published)

Finding Flatter Minima with SGD

Stanisław Jastrzębski

Zac Kenton

Devansh Arpit

Nicolas Ballas

Asja Fischer

Amos Storkey

2018-02-12

International Conference on Learning Representations (published)

Graph Priors for Deep Neural Networks

Francis Dutil

Joseph Paul Cohen

Martin Weiss

Georgy Derevyanko

In this work we explore how gene-gene interaction graphs can be used as a prior for the representation of a model to construct features base… (see more)d on known interactions between genes. Most existing machine learning work on graphs focuses on building models when data is confined to a graph structure. In this work we focus on using the information from a graph to build better representations in our models. We use the percolate task, determining if a path exists across a grid for a set of node values, as a proxy for gene pathways. We create variants of the percolate task to explore where existing methods fail. We test the limits of existing methods in order to determine what can be improved when applying these methods to a real task. This leads us to propose new methods based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) that use pooling and dropout to deal with noise in the graph prior.

2018-02-12

(published)

SGD S MOOTHS THE S HARPEST D IRECTIONS

Stanisław Jastrzębski

Zac Kenton

Nicolas Ballas

Asja Fischer

Amos Storkey

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is able to find regions that generalize well, even in drastically over-parametrized models such as deep ne… (see more)ural networks. We observe that noise in SGD controls the spectral norm and conditioning of the Hessian throughout the training. We hypothesize the cause of this phenomenon is due to the dynamics of neurons saturating their non-linearity along the largest curvature directions, thus leading to improved conditioning.

2018-02-12

(published)