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
Website
Google Scholar

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
Github
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Mohammed Abukalam
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Github
Berkes Anaïs
Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University
Principal supervisor :
David Rolnick
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Rim Assouel
PhD - Université de Montréal
Stefan Bauer
Independent visiting researcher
Co-supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
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Paul Bertin
PhD - Université de Montréal
Joyce Chai
Independent visiting researcher
Principal supervisor :
Siva Reddy
Shahana Chatterjee
Collaborating researcher - N/A
Principal supervisor :
David Rolnick
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Xiaoyin Chen
PhD - Université de Montréal
Sanghyeok Choi
Collaborating researcher - KAIST
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Tristan Deleu
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Aniket Didolkar
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Abdessamad EL KABID
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Loubna Benabbou
Desmond Elliott
Independent visiting researcher
Principal supervisor :
Siva Reddy
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Eric Elmoznino
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
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Léna Ezzine
PhD - Université de Montréal
Jean-Pierre Falet
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Leo Feng
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Pietro Greiner
PhD
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Mohsin Hasan
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Edward Hu
PhD - Université de Montréal
Moksh Jain
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Thomas Jiralerspong
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
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Younesse Kaddar
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Hyeonah Kim
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
Salem Lahlou
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Tabitha Edith Lee
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Glen Berseth
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Zhen Liu
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Liam Paull
Chenghao Liu
Collaborating Alumni
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Kanika Madan
PhD - Université de Montréal
Nikolay Malkin
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Cristian Dragos Manta
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Dhanya Sridhar
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Sarthak Mittal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
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Jama Mohamud
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Mirco Ravanelli
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Cyrus Neary
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Glen Berseth
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Phong Nguyen
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Padideh Nouri
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
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Ali Parviz
Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
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Lena Podina
Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo
Principal supervisor :
David Rolnick
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Nassim Rahaman
Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Amine RAZIG
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Loubna Benabbou
Website
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
PhD - Université de Montréal
Danyal REHMAN
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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James Requeima
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Oli RICHARDSON
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Camille Rochefort-Boulanger
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Julie Hussin
Github
Abhik Roychoudhury Roychoudhury
Independent visiting researcher
Principal supervisor :
Siva Reddy
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Luca Scimeca
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Dragos Secrieru
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Marcin Sendera
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Github
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Divya Sharma
Postdoctorate
Co-supervisor :
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
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Github
Marco Stock
Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich
Github
Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Hugo Larochelle
Website
Github
Ivan Titov
Independent visiting researcher
Principal supervisor :
Siva Reddy
Website
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Alex Tong
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Donna Vakalis
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
David Rolnick
Website
Github
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Siddarth Venkatraman
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Glen Berseth
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Omar G. Younis
Collaborating researcher
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Taeyoung YUN
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Github
Dinghuai Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Aaron Courville
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Tianyu Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Nicole Zhang
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Mathieu Blanchette
Website
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Harry Zhao
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
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Publications

A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits
Walter Senn
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
Benjamin Ellenberger
Jakob Jordan
Yoshua Bengio
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 minimizes the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For output neurons, the principle implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies the 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 input and the motor feedback during the ongoing sensory-motor transform. Online 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 laws for global real-time computation and learning in the brain.
2024-09-23
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits
Walter Senn
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
Benjamin Ellenberger
Jakob Jordan
Yoshua Bengio
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 minimizes the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For output neurons, the principle implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies the 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 input and the motor feedback during the ongoing sensory-motor transform. Online 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 laws for global real-time computation and learning in the brain.
2024-09-23
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits
Walter Senn
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
Benjamin Ellenberger
Jakob Jordan
Yoshua Bengio
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 minimizes the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For output neurons, the principle implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies the 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 input and the motor feedback during the ongoing sensory-motor transform. Online 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 laws for global real-time computation and learning in the brain.
2024-09-23
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: new obligations for media and tech companies
Alistair Knott
Dino Pedreschi
Toshiya Jitsuzumi
Susan Leavy
D. Eyers
Tapabrata Chakraborti
Andrew Trotman
Sundar Sundareswaran
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Przemyslaw Biecek
Adrian Weller
Paul D. Teal
Subhadip Basu
Mehmet Haklidir
Virginia Morini
Stuart Russell
Yoshua Bengio
2024-09-21
Ethics and Information Technology (published)
doi.org
AI content detection in the emerging information ecosystem: new obligations for media and tech companies
Alistair Knott
Dino Pedreschi
Toshiya Jitsuzumi
Susan Leavy
D. Eyers
Tapabrata Chakraborti
Andrew Trotman
Sundar Sundareswaran
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Przemyslaw Biecek
Adrian Weller
Paul D. Teal
Subhadip Basu
Mehmet Haklidir
Virginia Morini
Stuart Russell
Yoshua Bengio
2024-09-21
Ethics and Information Technology (published)
doi.org
A high-throughput phenotypic screen combined with an ultra-large-scale deep learning-based virtual screening reveals novel scaffolds of antibacterial compounds
Gabriele Scalia
Steven T. Rutherford
Ziqing Lu
Kerry R. Buchholz
Nicholas Skelton
Kangway Chuang
Nathaniel Diamant
Jan-Christian Hütter
Jerome-Maxim Luescher
Anh Miu
Jeff Blaney
Leo Gendelev
Elizabeth Skippington
Greg Zynda
Nia Dickson
Michał Koziarski
Yoshua Bengio
Aviv Regev
Man-Wah Tan
Tommasso Biancalani
The proliferation of multi-drug-resistant bacteria underscores an urgent need for novel antibiotics. Traditional discovery methods face chal… (see more)lenges due to limited chemical diversity, high costs, and difficulties in identifying structurally novel compounds. Here, we explore the integration of small molecule high-throughput screening with a deep learning-based virtual screening approach to uncover new antibacterial compounds. Leveraging a diverse library of nearly 2 million small molecules, we conducted comprehensive phenotypic screening against a sensitized Escherichia coli strain that, at a low hit rate, yielded thousands of hits. We trained a deep learning model, GNEprop, to predict antibacterial activity, ensuring robustness through out-of-distribution generalization techniques. Virtual screening of over 1.4 billion compounds identified potential candidates, of which 82 exhibited antibacterial activity, illustrating a 90X improved hit rate over the high-throughput screening experiment GNEprop was trained on. Importantly, a significant portion of these newly identified compounds exhibited high dissimilarity to known antibiotics, indicating promising avenues for further exploration in antibiotic discovery.
2024-09-14
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
A high-throughput phenotypic screen combined with an ultra-large-scale deep learning-based virtual screening reveals novel scaffolds of antibacterial compounds
Gabriele Scalia
Steven T. Rutherford
Ziqing Lu
Kerry R. Buchholz
Nicholas Skelton
Kangway Chuang
Nathaniel Diamant
Jan-Christian Hütter
Jerome-Maxim Luescher
Anh Miu
Jeff Blaney
Leo Gendelev
Elizabeth Skippington
Greg Zynda
Nia Dickson
Michał Koziarski
Yoshua Bengio
Aviv Regev
Man-Wah Tan
Tommaso Biancalani
2024-09-14
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
Meta Flow Matching: Integrating Vector Fields on the Wasserstein Manifold
Lazar Atanackovic
Xi Zhang
Brandon Amos
Mathieu Blanchette
Leo J Lee
Yoshua Bengio
Alexander Tong
Kirill Neklyudov
Numerous biological and physical processes can be modeled as systems of interacting entities evolving continuously over time, e.g. the dynam… (see more)ics of communicating cells or physical particles. Learning the dynamics of such systems is essential for predicting the temporal evolution of populations across novel samples and unseen environments. Flow-based models allow for learning these dynamics at the population level - they model the evolution of the entire distribution of samples. However, current flow-based models are limited to a single initial population and a set of predefined conditions which describe different dynamics. We argue that multiple processes in natural sciences have to be represented as vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold of probability densities. That is, the change of the population at any moment in time depends on the population itself due to the interactions between samples. In particular, this is crucial for personalized medicine where the development of diseases and their respective treatment response depend on the microenvironment of cells specific to each patient. We propose Meta Flow Matching (MFM), a practical approach to integrate along these vector fields on the Wasserstein manifold by amortizing the flow model over the initial populations. Namely, we embed the population of samples using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) and use these embeddings to train a Flow Matching model. This gives MFM the ability to generalize over the initial distributions, unlike previously proposed methods. We demonstrate the ability of MFM to improve the prediction of individual treatment responses on a large-scale multi-patient single-cell drug screen dataset.
2024-08-26
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Andrii Zadaianchuk
Anirudh Goyal
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Georg Martius
Maximilian Seitzer
The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities… (see more). Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.
2024-08-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Andrii Zadaianchuk
Anirudh Goyal
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Georg Martius
Maximilian Seitzer
The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities… (see more). Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.
2024-08-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Andrii Zadaianchuk
Anirudh Goyal
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Georg Martius
Maximilian Seitzer
The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities… (see more). Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.
2024-08-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Andrii Zadaianchuk
Anirudh Goyal
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Georg Martius
Maximilian Seitzer
The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities… (see more). Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.
2024-08-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org