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 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

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Paul Bertin

PhD - Université de Montréal

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Oussama Boussif

PhD - Université de Montréal

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David Rolnick

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

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Leo Feng

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Research Intern - Barcelona University

Piotr Gainski

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Ivan Grega

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Pietro Greiner

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Mohsin Hasan

PhD - Université de Montréal

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Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

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Edward Hu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Minsu Kim

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni

Zhen Liu

PhD - Université de Montréal

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Liam Paull

Matt MacDermott

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

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Sarthak Mittal

PhD - Université de Montréal

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PhD - Université de Montréal

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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

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Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal

Ali Parviz

Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Lena Podina

PhD - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

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

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Postdoctorate - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

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PhD - Université de Montréal

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

Principal supervisor :

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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

Nicole Zhang

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Mathieu Blanchette

Dinghuai Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Tianyu Zhang

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

Adaptive teachers for amortized samplers

Minsu Kim

Sanghyeok Choi

Taeyoung Yun

Emmanuel Bengio

Leo Feng

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Sungsoo Ahn

Jinkyoo Park

Nikolay Malkin

Amortized inference is the task of training a parametric model, such as a neural network, to approximate a distribution with a given unnorma… (see more)lized density where exact sampling is intractable. When sampling is implemented as a sequential decision-making process, reinforcement learning (RL) methods, such as generative flow networks, can be used to train the sampling policy. Off-policy RL training facilitates the discovery of diverse, high-reward candidates, but existing methods still face challenges in efficient exploration. We propose to use an adaptive training distribution (the Teacher) to guide the training of the primary amortized sampler (the Student) by prioritizing high-loss regions. The Teacher, an auxiliary behavior model, is trained to sample high-error regions of the Student and can generalize across unexplored modes, thereby enhancing mode coverage by providing an efficient training curriculum. We validate the effectiveness of this approach in a synthetic environment designed to present an exploration challenge, two diffusion-based sampling tasks, and four biochemical discovery tasks demonstrating its ability to improve sample efficiency and mode coverage.

2024-10-02

ArXiv (preprint)

Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model's Lifetime

Jin Hwa Lee

Thomas Jiralerspong

Lei Yu

Emily Cheng

Compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression is constructed from the meaning of its parts and syntactic rules, permits the… (see more) infinite productivity of human language. For the first time, artificial language models (LMs) are able to match human performance in a number of compositional generalization tasks. However, much remains to be understood about the representational mechanisms underlying these abilities. We take a high-level geometric approach to this problem by relating the degree of compositionality in a dataset to the intrinsic dimensionality of its representations under an LM, a measure of feature complexity. We find not only that the degree of dataset compositionality is reflected in representations' intrinsic dimensionality, but that the relationship between compositionality and geometric complexity arises due to learned linguistic features over training. Finally, our analyses reveal a striking contrast between linear and nonlinear dimensionality, showing that they respectively encode formal and semantic aspects of linguistic composition.

2024-10-02

ArXiv (preprint)

HarmAug: Effective Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation of Safety Guard Models

Seanie Lee

Haebin Seong

Dong Bok Lee

Minki Kang

Xiaoyin Chen

Dominik Wagner

Juho Lee

Sung Ju Hwang

Safety guard models that detect malicious queries aimed at large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring the secure and responsibl… (see more)e deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. However, deploying existing safety guard models with billions of parameters alongside LLMs on mobile devices is impractical due to substantial memory requirements and latency. To reduce this cost, we distill a large teacher safety guard model into a smaller one using a labeled dataset of instruction-response pairs with binary harmfulness labels. Due to the limited diversity of harmful instructions in the existing labeled dataset, naively distilled models tend to underperform compared to larger models. To bridge the gap between small and large models, we propose HarmAug, a simple yet effective data augmentation method that involves jailbreaking an LLM and prompting it to generate harmful instructions. Given a prompt such as,"Make a single harmful instruction prompt that would elicit offensive content", we add an affirmative prefix (e.g.,"I have an idea for a prompt:") to the LLM's response. This encourages the LLM to continue generating the rest of the response, leading to sampling harmful instructions. Another LLM generates a response to the harmful instruction, and the teacher model labels the instruction-response pair. We empirically show that our HarmAug outperforms other relevant baselines. Moreover, a 435-million-parameter safety guard model trained with HarmAug achieves an F1 score comparable to larger models with over 7 billion parameters, and even outperforms them in AUPRC, while operating at less than 25% of their computational cost.

2024-10-02

ArXiv (preprint)

Were RNNs All We Needed?

Leo Feng

Frederick Tung

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

2024-10-02

ArXiv (preprint)

Laurence Perreault-Levasseur

A Data-driven Discovery of the Causal Connection between Galaxy and Black Hole Evolution

Zehao Jin

Mario Pasquato

Benjamin L. Davis

Tristan Deleu

Yu Luo

Changhyun Cho

Pablo Lemos

Xi Kang

Andrea Maccio

Yashar Hezaveh

2024-10-01

ArXiv (preprint)

MAP: Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Front Using Limited Computation

Lu Li

Tianyu Zhang

Zhiqi Bu

Suyuchen Wang

Huan He

Jie Fu

Yonghui Wu

Jiang Bian

Yong Chen

2024-10-01

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Federated_Learning (oral)

Amortizing intractable inference in diffusion models for vision, language, and control

Siddarth Venkatraman

Moksh J. Jain

Luca Scimeca

Minsu Kim

Marcin Sendera

Mohsin Hasan

Luke Rowe

Sarthak Mittal

Pablo Lemos

Emmanuel Bengio

Alexandre Adam

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Glen Berseth

Nikolay Malkin

Diffusion models have emerged as effective distribution estimators in vision, language, and reinforcement learning, but their use as priors … (see more)in downstream tasks poses an intractable posterior inference problem. This paper studies amortized sampling of the posterior over data,

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Improved off-policy training of diffusion samplers

Marcin Sendera

Minsu Kim

Sarthak Mittal

Pablo Lemos

Luca Scimeca

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Alexandre Adam

Nikolay Malkin

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We ben… (see more)chmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational approaches and off-policy methods (continuous generative flow networks). Our results shed light on the relative advantages of existing algorithms while bringing into question some claims from past work. We also propose a novel exploration strategy for off-policy methods, based on local search in the target space with the use of a replay buffer, and show that it improves the quality of samples on a variety of target distributions. Our code for the sampling methods and benchmarks studied is made public at [this link](https://github.com/GFNOrg/gfn-diffusion) as a base for future work on diffusion models for amortized inference.

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Metacognitive Capabilities of LLMs: An Exploration in Mathematical Problem Solving

Aniket Rajiv Didolkar

Anirudh Goyal

Nan Rosemary Ke

Siyuan Guo

Michal Valko

Timothy P Lillicrap

Danilo Jimenez Rezende

Michael Curtis Mozer

Sanjeev Arora

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

RGFN: Synthesizable Molecular Generation Using GFlowNets

Michał Koziarski

Andrei Rekesh

Dmytro Shevchuk

Almer M. van der Sloot

Piotr Gaiński

Cheng-Hao Liu

Mike Tyers

Robert A. Batey

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Trajectory Flow Matching with Applications to Clinical Time Series Modelling

Xi Zhang

Yuan Pu

Yuki Kawamura

Andrew Loza

Dennis Shung

Alexander Tong

Modeling stochastic and irregularly sampled time series is a challenging problem found in a wide range of applications, especially in medici… (see more)ne. Neural stochastic differential equations (Neural SDEs) are an attractive modeling technique for this problem, which parameterize the drift and diffusion terms of an SDE with neural networks. However, current algorithms for training Neural SDEs require backpropagation through the SDE dynamics, greatly limiting their scalability and stability. To address this, we propose **Trajectory Flow Matching** (TFM), which trains a Neural SDE in a *simulation-free* manner, bypassing backpropagation through the dynamics. TFM leverages the flow matching technique from generative modeling to model time series. In this work we first establish necessary conditions for TFM to learn time series data. Next, we present a reparameterization trick which improves training stability. Finally, we adapt TFM to the clinical time series setting, demonstrating improved performance on three clinical time series datasets both in terms of absolute performance and uncertainty prediction.

2024-09-25

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits

Walter Senn

Dominik Dold

Akos F. Kungl

Benjamin Ellenberger

Jakob Jordan

João Sacramento

Mihai A. Petrovici

One of the most fundamental laws of physics is the principle of least action. Motivated by its predictive power, we introduce a neuronal lea… (see more)st-action principle for cortical processing of sensory streams to produce appropriate behavioural outputs in real time. The principle postulates that the voltage dynamics of cortical pyramidal neurons prospectively minimize the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For motor output neurons, it implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies a prospective firing to overcome integration delays and correct for possible output errors right in time. The neuron-specific errors are extracted in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons through a cortical microcircuit that tries to explain away the feedback from the periphery, and correct the trajectory on the fly. Any motor output is in a moving equilibrium with the sensory inputs and the motor feedback during the whole sensory-motor trajectory. Ongoing synaptic plasticity reduces the somato-dendritic mismatch error within each cortical neuron and performs gradient descent on the output cost at any moment in time. The neuronal least-action principle offers an axiomatic framework to derive local neuronal and synaptic dynamics for global real-time computation and learning in the brain and in physical substrates in general.

2024-09-23

bioRxiv (preprint)