Yoshua Bengio

Biography

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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

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

Attention Based Pruning for Shift Networks

Ghouthi Boukli Hacene

Carlos Lassance

Vincent Gripon

Matthieu Courbariaux

In many application domains such as computer vision, Convolutional Layers (CLs) are key to the accuracy of deep learning methods. However, i… (see more)t is often required to assemble a large number of CLs, each containing thousands of parameters, in order to reach state-of-the-art accuracy, thus resulting in complex and demanding systems that are poorly fitted to resource-limited devices. Recently, methods have been proposed to replace the generic convolution operator by the combination of a shift operation and a simpler

2021-01-10

2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

An Analysis of the Adaptation Speed of Causal Models

Rémi LE PRIOL

Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh

Simon Lacoste-Julien

2021-01-01

AISTATS (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

arxiv.org

C AUSAL R: Causal Reasoning over Natural Language Rulebases

Jason Weston

Antoine Bordes

Sumit Chopra

Thomas Wolf

Lysandre Debut

Julien Victor Sanh

Clement Chaumond

Anthony Delangue

Pier-339 Moi

Tim ric Cistac

R´emi Rault

Morgan Louf

Funtow-900 Joe

Sam Davison

Patrick Shleifer

Von Platen

Clara Ma

Yacine Jernite

Julien Plu

Canwen Xu … (see 6 more)

Zhilin Yang

Peng Qi

Saizheng Zhang

William W Cohen

Russ Salakhutdinov

Transformers have been shown to be able to 001 perform deductive reasoning on a logical rule-002 base containing rules and statements writte… (see more)n 003 in natural language. Recent works show that 004 such models can also produce the reasoning 005 steps (i.e., the proof graph ) that emulate the 006 model’s logical reasoning process. But these 007 models behave as a black-box unit that emu-008 lates the reasoning process without any causal 009 constraints in the reasoning steps, thus ques-010 tioning the faithfulness. In this work, we frame 011 the deductive logical reasoning task as a causal 012 process by defining three modular components: 013 rule selection, fact selection, and knowledge 014 composition. The rule and fact selection steps 015 select the candidate rule and facts to be used 016 and then the knowledge composition combines 017 them to generate new inferences. This ensures 018 model faithfulness by assured causal relation 019 from the proof step to the inference reasoning. 020 To test our causal reasoning framework, we 021 propose C AUSAL R where the above three com-022 ponents are independently modeled by trans-023 formers. We observe that C AUSAL R is robust 024 to novel language perturbations, and is com-025 petitive with previous works on existing rea-026 soning datasets. Furthermore, the errors made 027 by C AUSAL R are more interpretable due to 028 the multi-modular approach compared to black-029 box generative models. 1 030

BabyAI 1.1

David Y. T. Hui

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

Dzmitry Bahdanau

The BabyAI platform is designed to measure the sample efﬁciency of training an agent to follow grounded-language instructions. BabyAI 1.0 … (see more)presents baseline results of an agent trained by deep imitation or reinforcement learning. BabyAI 1.1 improves the agent’s architecture in three minor ways. This increases reinforcement learning sample efﬁciency by up to 3 × and improves imitation learning performance on the hardest level from 77% to 90 . 4% . We hope that these improvements increase the computational efﬁciency of BabyAI experiments and help users design better agents.

2021-01-01

(published)

www.semanticscholar.org

BabyAI 1.1

David Y. T. Hui

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

Dzmitry Bahdanau

CAMAP: Artificial neural networks unveil the role of 1 codon arrangement in modulating MHC-I peptides 2 presentation

Tariq Daouda

Maude Dumont-Lagacé

Albert Feghaly

Yahya Benslimane

6. Rébecca

Panes

Mathieu Courcelles

Mohamed Benhammadi

Lea Harrington

Pierre Thibault

François Major

Étienne Gagnon

Sébastien Lemieux

Claude Perreault

30 MHC-I associated peptides (MAPs) play a central role in the elimination of virus-infected and 31 neoplastic cells by CD8 T cells. However… (see more), accurately predicting the MAP repertoire remains 32 difficult, because only a fraction of the transcriptome generates MAPs. In this study, we 33 investigated whether codon arrangement (usage and placement) regulates MAP biogenesis. We 34 developed an artificial neural network called Codon Arrangement MAP Predictor (CAMAP), 35 predicting MAP presentation solely from mRNA sequences flanking the MAP-coding codons 36 (MCCs), while excluding the MCC per se . CAMAP predictions were significantly more accurate 37 when using original codon sequences than shuffled codon sequences which reflect amino acid 38 usage. Furthermore, predictions were independent of mRNA expression and MAP binding affinity 39 to MHC-I molecules and applied to several cell types and species. Combining MAP ligand scores, 40 transcript expression level and CAMAP scores was particularly useful to increaser MAP prediction 41 accuracy. Using an in vitro assay, we showed that varying the synonymous codons in the regions 42 flanking the MCCs (without changing the amino acid sequence) resulted in significant modulation 43 of MAP presentation at the cell surface. Taken together, our results demonstrate the role of codon 44 arrangement in the regulation of MAP presentation and support integration of both translational 45 and post-translational events in predictive algorithms to ameliorate modeling of the 46 immunopeptidome. 47 48 49 they modulated the levels of SIINFEKL presentation in both constructs, but enhanced translation efficiency could only be detected for OVA-RP. These data show that codon arrangement can modulate MAP presentation strength without any changes in the amino

CAMAP: Artificial neural networks unveil the role of 1 codon arrangement in modulating MHC-I peptides 2 presentation discovery of minor histocompatibility with

Tariq Daouda

Maude Dumont-Lagacé

Albert Feghaly

Yahya Benslimane

6. Rébecca

Panes

Mathieu Courcelles

Mohamed Benhammadi

Lea Harrington

Pierre Thibault

François Major

Étienne Gagnon

Sébastien Lemieux

Claude Perreault

A Consciousness-Inspired Planning Agent for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Harry Zhao

Mingde Zhao

Zhen Liu

Sitao Luan

Shuyuan Zhang

Doina Precup

We present an end-to-end, model-based deep reinforcement learning agent which dynamically attends to relevant parts of its state during plan… (see more)ning. The agent uses a bottleneck mechanism over a set-based representation to force the number of entities to which the agent attends at each planning step to be small. In experiments, we investigate the bottleneck mechanism with several sets of customized environments featuring different challenges. We consistently observe that the design allows the planning agents to generalize their learned task-solving abilities in compatible unseen environments by attending to the relevant objects, leading to better out-of-distribution generalization performance.

openreview.net

Cooperative Semi-Supervised Transfer Learning of Machine Reading Comprehension

Oliver Bender

Franz Josef Och

R´ejean Ducharme

Pascal Vincent

Kevin Clark

Quoc Minh-Thang Luong

V. Le

Jacob Devlin

Ming-Wei Chang

Kenton Lee

Adam Fisch

Alon Talmor

Robin Jia

Minjoon Seo

Michael R. Glass

A. Gliozzo

Rishav Chakravarti

Ian J Goodfellow

Jean Pouget-Abadie … (see 39 more)

Mehdi Mirza

Serhii Havrylov

Ivan Titov. 2017

Emergence

Jun-Tao He

Jiatao Gu

Jiajun Shen

Marc’Aurelio

Matthew Henderson

I. Casanueva

Nikola Mrkˇsi´c

Pei-hao Su

Tsung-Hsien Wen

Ivan Vuli´c

Yikang Shen

Yi Tay

Che Zheng

Dara Bahri

Donald

Metzler Aaron

Courville

Structformer

Ashish Vaswani

Noam M. Shazeer

Niki Parmar

Thomas Wolf

Lysandre Debut

Julien Victor Sanh

Clement Chaumond

Anthony Delangue

Pier-339 Moi

Tim ric Cistac

R´emi Rault

Morgan Louf

Qizhe Xie

Eduard H. Hovy

Silei Xu

Sina Jandaghi Semnani

Giovanni Campagna

Pretrained language models have signiﬁcantly 001 improved the performance of down-stream 002 language understanding tasks, including ex-00… (see more)3 tractive question answering, by providing 004 high-quality contextualized word embeddings. 005 However, training question answering models 006 still requires large amounts of annotated data 007 for speciﬁc domains. In this work, we pro-008 pose a cooperative, self-play learning frame-009 work, REGEX, for automatically generating 010 more non-trivial question-answer pairs to im-011 prove model performance. REGEX is built 012 upon a masked answer extraction task with an 013 interactive learning environment containing an 014 answer entity REcognizer, a question Gener-015 ator, and an answer EXtractor. Given a pas-016 sage with a masked entity, the generator gen-017 erates a question around the entity, and the 018 extractor is trained to extract the masked en-019 tity with the generated question and raw texts. 020 The framework allows the training of question 021 generation and answering models on any text 022 corpora without annotation. We further lever-023 age a reinforcement learning technique to re-024 ward generating high-quality questions and to 025 improve the answer extraction model’s perfor-026 mance. Experiment results show that REGEX 027 outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-028 trained language models and transfer learning 029 approaches on standard question-answering 030 benchmarks, and yields the new SOTA per-031 formance under given model size and transfer 032 learning settings. 033

Dynamic Inference with Neural Interpreters

Nasim Rahaman

Muhammad Waleed Gondal

Shruti Joshi

Peter Vincent Gehler

Francesco Locatello

Bernhard Schölkopf

Modern neural network architectures can leverage large amounts of data to generalize well within the training distribution. However, they ar… (see more)e less capable of systematic generalization to data drawn from unseen but related distributions, a feat that is hypothesized to require compositional reasoning and reuse of knowledge. In this work, we present Neural Interpreters, an architecture that factorizes inference in a self-attention network as a system of modules, which we call _functions_. Inputs to the model are routed through a sequence of functions in a way that is end-to-end learned. The proposed architecture can flexibly compose computation along width and depth, and lends itself well to capacity extension after training. To demonstrate the versatility of Neural Interpreters, we evaluate it in two distinct settings: image classification and visual abstract reasoning on Raven Progressive Matrices. In the former, we show that Neural Interpreters perform on par with the vision transformer using fewer parameters, while being transferrable to a new task in a sample efficient manner. In the latter, we find that Neural Interpreters are competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art in terms of systematic generalization.

openreview.net

Episodes Meta Sequence S 2 Fast Update Slow Update Fast Update Slow Update

Kanika Madan

Nan Rosemary Ke

Anirudh Goyal

Bernhard Schölkopf

Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when there are changes in distribution. A learning age… (see more)nt interacting with its environment is likely to be faced with situations requiring novel combinations of existing pieces of knowledge. We hypothesize that such a decomposition of knowledge is particularly relevant for being able to generalize in a systematic manner to out-of-distribution changes. To study these ideas, we propose a particular training framework in which we assume that the pieces of knowledge an agent needs and its reward function are stationary and can be re-used across tasks. An attention mechanism dynamically selects which modules can be adapted to the current task, and the parameters of the selected modules are allowed to change quickly as the learner is confronted with variations in what it experiences, while the parameters of the attention mechanisms act as stable, slowly changing, metaparameters.We focus on pieces of knowledge captured by an ensemble of modules sparsely communicating with each other via a bottleneck of attention. We find that meta-learning the modular aspects of the proposed system greatly helps in achieving faster adaptation in a reinforcement learning setup involving navigation in a partially observed grid world with image-level input. We also find that reversing the role of parameters and meta-parameters does not work nearly as well, suggesting a particular role for fast adaptation of the dynamically selected modules.

Explaining by Analogy: Case-based Abductive Natural Language Inference

Ruben Cartuyvels

Graham Spinks

Marie Francine

Peter Clark

Isaac Cowhey

Oren Etzioni

Tushar Khot

Rajarshi Das

Ameya Godbole

Shehzaad Dhuliawala

Manzil Zaheer

Andrew McCallum

Dung Ngoc Thai

Ameya

Ethan Godbole

Jay-Yoon Perez

Lee

Lizhen

Ramón López De Mántaras

David Mcsherry … (see 37 more)

David Bridge

Barry Leake

Susan Smyth

Craw.

Boi

Maryalice Faltings

Michael T Maher

Ken-552 Cox

Dorottya Demszky

Kelvin Guu

Percy Liang

Jacob Devlin

Ming-Wei Chang

Kenton Lee

Daniel Fried

Peter Jansen

Gus Hahn-Powell

Higher-575

Rebecca Emilie Sharp

M. Surdeanu

Zhengnan Xie

Sebastian Thiem

Jaycie Ryrholm Martin

Eliz-721 abeth Wainwright

Steven Marmorstein

Wenhan Xiong

Xiang Lorraine Li

Srini Iyer

Jingfei Du

Vikas Yadav

Steven Bethard

Zhilin Yang

Peng Qi

Saizheng Zhang