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 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

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Zhen Liu

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

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

Luca Scimeca

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

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

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

Multi-Task Self-Supervised Learning for Robust Speech Recognition

Mirco Ravanelli

Jianyuan Zhong

Santiago Pascual

Pawel Swietojanski

Joao Monteiro

Jan Trmal

Despite the growing interest in unsupervised learning, extracting meaningful knowledge from unlabelled audio remains an open challenge. To t… (see more)ake a step in this direction, we recently proposed a problem-agnostic speech encoder (PASE), that combines a convolutional encoder followed by multiple neural networks, called workers, tasked to solve self-supervised problems (i.e., ones that do not require manual annotations as ground truth). PASE was shown to capture relevant speech information, including speaker voice-print and phonemes. This paper proposes PASE+, an improved version of PASE for robust speech recognition in noisy and reverberant environments. To this end, we employ an online speech distortion module, that contaminates the input signals with a variety of random disturbances. We then propose a revised encoder that better learns short- and long-term speech dynamics with an efficient combination of recurrent and convolutional networks. Finally, we refine the set of workers used in self-supervision to encourage better cooperation.Results on TIMIT, DIRHA and CHiME-5 show that PASE+ significantly outperforms both the previous version of PASE as well as common acoustic features. Interestingly, PASE+ learns transferable representations suitable for highly mismatched acoustic conditions.

2020-05-04

ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (published)

Continual Weight Updates and Convolutional Architectures for Equilibrium Propagation

Maxence Ernoult

Julie Grollier

Damien Querlioz

Benjamin Scellier

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically inspired alternative algorithm to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks. It appli… (see more)es to RNNs fed by a static input x that settle to a steady state, such as Hopfield networks. EP is similar to BP in that in the second phase of training, an error signal propagates backwards in the layers of the network, but contrary to BP, the learning rule of EP is spatially local. Nonetheless, EP suffers from two major limitations. On the one hand, due to its formulation in terms of real-time dynamics, EP entails long simulation times, which limits its applicability to practical tasks. On the other hand, the biological plausibility of EP is limited by the fact that its learning rule is not local in time: the synapse update is performed after the dynamics of the second phase have converged and requires information of the first phase that is no longer available physically. Our work addresses these two issues and aims at widening the spectrum of EP from standard machine learning models to more bio-realistic neural networks. First, we propose a discrete-time formulation of EP which enables to simplify equations, speed up training and extend EP to CNNs. Our CNN model achieves the best performance ever reported on MNIST with EP. Using the same discrete-time formulation, we introduce Continual Equilibrium Propagation (C-EP): the weights of the network are adjusted continually in the second phase of training using local information in space and time. We show that in the limit of slow changes of synaptic strengths and small nudging, C-EP is equivalent to BPTT (Theorem 1). We numerically demonstrate Theorem 1 and C-EP training on MNIST and generalize it to the bio-realistic situation of a neural network with asymmetric connections between neurons.

2020-04-29

ArXiv (preprint)

Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims

Miles Brundage

Shahar Avin

Jasmine Wang

Haydn Belfield

Gretchen Krueger

Gillian K. Hadfield

Heidy Khlaaf

Jingying Yang

H. Toner

Ruth Catherine Fong

Tegan Maharaj

Pang Wei Koh

Sara Hooker

Jade Leung

Andrew John Trask

Emma Bluemke

Jonathan Lebensbold

Cullen C. O'keefe

Mark Koren

Th'eo Ryffel … (see 39 more)

JB Rubinovitz

Tamay Besiroglu

Federica Carugati

Jack Clark

Peter Eckersley

Sarah de Haas

Maritza L. Johnson

Ben Laurie

Alex Ingerman

Igor Krawczuk

Amanda Askell

Rosario Cammarota

A. Lohn

David Scott Krueger

Charlotte Stix

Peter Mark Henderson

Logan Graham

Carina E. A. Prunkl

Bianca Martin

Elizabeth Seger

Noa Zilberman

Sean O hEigeartaigh

Frens Kroeger

Girish Sastry

R. Kagan

Adrian Weller

Brian Shek-kam Tse

Elizabeth Barnes

Allan Dafoe

Paul D. Scharre

Ariel Herbert-Voss

Martijn Rasser

Shagun Sodhani

Carrick Flynn

Thomas Krendl Gilbert

Lisa Dyer

Saif M. Khan

Markus Anderljung

2020-04-15

ArXiv (preprint)

Establishing an evaluation metric to quantify climate change image realism

Sharon Zhou

Alexandra Luccioni

Gautier Cosne

Michael S. Bernstein

2020-04-07

Machine Learning: Science and Technology (published)

Combating False Negatives in Adversarial Imitation Learning (Student Abstract)

Konrad Żołna

Chitwan Saharia

Léonard Boussioux

David Y. T. Hui

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

Dzmitry Bahdanau

2020-04-03

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Pruning for efficient hardware implementations of deep neural networks

Ghouthi Boukli Hacene

Vincent Gripon

Matthieu Arzel

Nicolas Farrugia

Continuous Domain Adaptation with Variational Domain-Agnostic Feature Replay

Qicheng Lao

Xiang Jiang

Mohammad Havaei

Learning in non-stationary environments is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning. Non-stationarity can be caused by either task … (see more)drift, i.e., the drift in the conditional distribution of labels given the input data, or the domain drift, i.e., the drift in the marginal distribution of the input data. This paper aims to tackle this challenge in the context of continuous domain adaptation, where the model is required to learn new tasks adapted to new domains in a non-stationary environment while maintaining previously learned knowledge. To deal with both drifts, we propose variational domain-agnostic feature replay, an approach that is composed of three components: an inference module that filters the input data into domain-agnostic representations, a generative module that facilitates knowledge transfer, and a solver module that applies the filtered and transferable knowledge to solve the queries. We address the two fundamental scenarios in continuous domain adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach for practical usage.

2020-03-09

ArXiv (preprint)

On the Morality of Artificial Intelligence

Alexandra Luccioni

Examines ethical principles and guidelines that surround machine learning and artificial intelligence.

2020-03-01

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (published)

On Catastrophic Interference in Atari 2600 Games

William Fedus

Dibya Ghosh

John D. Martin

Marc Gendron-Bellemare

Hugo Larochelle

Model-free deep reinforcement learning is sample inefficient. One hypothesis -- speculated, but not confirmed -- is that catastrophic interf… (see more)erence within an environment inhibits learning. We test this hypothesis through a large-scale empirical study in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) and, indeed, find supporting evidence. We show that interference causes performance to plateau; the network cannot train on segments beyond the plateau without degrading the policy used to reach there. By synthetically controlling for interference, we demonstrate performance boosts across architectures, learning algorithms and environments. A more refined analysis shows that learning one segment of a game often increases prediction errors elsewhere. Our study provides a clear empirical link between catastrophic interference and sample efficiency in reinforcement learning.

2020-02-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Neural Bayes: A Generic Parameterization Method for Unsupervised Representation Learning

Devansh Arpit

Huan Wang

Caiming Xiong

Richard Socher

2020-02-20

ArXiv (preprint)

HighRes-net: Recursive Fusion for Multi-Frame Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery

Michel Deudon

Alfredo Kalaitzis

Israel Goytom

Md Rifat Arefin

Zhichao Lin

Kris Sankaran

Vincent Michalski

Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Julien Cornebise

Generative deep learning has sparked a new wave of Super-Resolution (SR) algorithms that enhance single images with impressive aesthetic res… (see more)ults, albeit with imaginary details. Multi-frame Super-Resolution (MFSR) offers a more grounded approach to the ill-posed problem, by conditioning on multiple low-resolution views. This is important for satellite monitoring of human impact on the planet -- from deforestation, to human rights violations -- that depend on reliable imagery. To this end, we present HighRes-net, the first deep learning approach to MFSR that learns its sub-tasks in an end-to-end fashion: (i) co-registration, (ii) fusion, (iii) up-sampling, and (iv) registration-at-the-loss. Co-registration of low-resolution views is learned implicitly through a reference-frame channel, with no explicit registration mechanism. We learn a global fusion operator that is applied recursively on an arbitrary number of low-resolution pairs. We introduce a registered loss, by learning to align the SR output to a ground-truth through ShiftNet. We show that by learning deep representations of multiple views, we can super-resolve low-resolution signals and enhance Earth Observation data at scale. Our approach recently topped the European Space Agency's MFSR competition on real-world satellite imagery.

2020-02-15

ArXiv (preprint)

Modeling Cloud Reflectance Fields using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Victor Schmidt

Mustafa Alghali

Kris Sankaran

Tianle Yuan

We introduce a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) approach to generate cloud reflectance fields (CRFs) conditioned on large s… (see more)cale meteorological variables such as sea surface temperature and relative humidity. We show that our trained model can generate realistic CRFs from the corresponding meteorological observations, which represents a step towards a data-driven framework for stochastic cloud parameterization.

2020-02-10

ArXiv (preprint)