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

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.

Blog Posts

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

February 22, 2024

Skipper: Combining Spatial and Temporal Abstraction for Better Generalization

by

Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

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Scaling in the service of reasoning & model-based ML

April 4, 2023

Scaling in the Service of Reasoning & Model-Based ML

by

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A collaboration between Mila and Relation Therapeutics to discover novel synergistic combinations of drugs in vitro

March 23, 2022

A collaboration between Mila and Relation Therapeutics to discover novel synergistic combinations of drugs in vitro

by

Jake P. Taylor-King

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Generative Flow Networks

March 15, 2022

Generative Flow Networks

by

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Publications

Language Models Can Reduce Asymmetry in Information Markets

Nasim Rahaman

Manuel Wuthrich

Erran L. Li

Christopher Pal

Bernhard Schölkopf

2024-03-20

ArXiv (preprint)

Improving and Generalizing Flow-Based Generative Models with Minibatch Optimal Transport

Guillaume Huguet

Yanlei Zhang

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) are an attractive generative modeling technique, but they have been held back by limitations in their si… (see more)mulation-based maximum likelihood training. We introduce the generalized \textit{conditional flow matching} (CFM) technique, a family of simulation-free training objectives for CNFs. CFM features a stable regression objective like that used to train the stochastic flow in diffusion models but enjoys the efficient inference of deterministic flow models. In contrast to both diffusion models and prior CNF training algorithms, CFM does not require the source distribution to be Gaussian or require evaluation of its density. A variant of our objective is optimal transport CFM (OT-CFM), which creates simpler flows that are more stable to train and lead to faster inference, as evaluated in our experiments. Furthermore, OT-CFM is the first method to compute dynamic OT in a simulation-free way. Training CNFs with CFM improves results on a variety of conditional and unconditional generation tasks, such as inferring single cell dynamics, unsupervised image translation, and Schrödinger bridge inference.

2024-03-10

TMLR (accepted)

Integrating Generative and Experimental Platforms or Biomolecular Design

Cheng-Hao Liu

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Jason Yim

Soojung Yang

Sidney Lisanza

Francesca-Zhoufan Li

Pranam Chatterjee

Tommi Jaakkola

Regina Barzilay

David Baker

Frances H. Arnold

2024-03-07

ICLR.cc/2024/Workshop_Proposals (published)

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change

Shiva Madadkhani

Olivia Mendivil Ramos

Millie Chapman

Jesse Dunietz

Arthur Ouaknine

2024-03-07

ICLR.cc/2024/Workshop_Proposals (published)

Efficient Causal Graph Discovery Using Large Language Models

Thomas Jiralerspong

Yash More

2024-03-04

ICLR.cc/2024/Workshop/AGI (poster)

Towards DNA-Encoded Library Generation with GFlowNets

Michał Koziarski

Mohammed Abukalam

Louis Vaillancourt

Doris Alexandra Schuetz

Almer Van Der Sloot

Mathieu Bourgey

Anne Marinier

2024-03-03

GEM @ International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)

Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows

Ricky T. Q. Chen

Aaron Courville

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating com… (see more)plex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from reinforcement learning, the current GFlowNet framework is relatively limited in its applicability and cannot handle stochasticity in the reward function. In this work, we adopt a distributional paradigm for GFlowNets, turning each flow function into a distribution, thus providing more informative learning signals during training. By parameterizing each edge flow through their quantile functions, our proposed \textit{quantile matching} GFlowNet learning algorithm is able to learn a risk-sensitive policy, an essential component for handling scenarios with risk uncertainty. Moreover, we find that the distributional approach can achieve substantial improvement on existing benchmarks compared to prior methods due to our enhanced training algorithm, even in settings with deterministic rewards.

2024-02-15

TMLR (accepted)

Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Girish Sastry

Lennart Heim

Haydn Belfield

Markus Anderljung

Miles Brundage

Julian Hazell

Cullen C. O'keefe

Gillian K. Hadfield

Richard Ngo

Konstantin Pilz

George Gor

Emma Bluemke

Sarah Shoker

Janet Egan

Robert Trager

Shahar Avin

Adrian Weller

Diane Coyle

Computing power, or"compute,"is crucial for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. As a result, govern… (see more)ments and companies have started to leverage compute as a means to govern AI. For example, governments are investing in domestic compute capacity, controlling the flow of compute to competing countries, and subsidizing compute access to certain sectors. However, these efforts only scratch the surface of how compute can be used to govern AI development and deployment. Relative to other key inputs to AI (data and algorithms), AI-relevant compute is a particularly effective point of intervention: it is detectable, excludable, and quantifiable, and is produced via an extremely concentrated supply chain. These characteristics, alongside the singular importance of compute for cutting-edge AI models, suggest that governing compute can contribute to achieving common policy objectives, such as ensuring the safety and beneficial use of AI. More precisely, policymakers could use compute to facilitate regulatory visibility of AI, allocate resources to promote beneficial outcomes, and enforce restrictions against irresponsible or malicious AI development and usage. However, while compute-based policies and technologies have the potential to assist in these areas, there is significant variation in their readiness for implementation. Some ideas are currently being piloted, while others are hindered by the need for fundamental research. Furthermore, naive or poorly scoped approaches to compute governance carry significant risks in areas like privacy, economic impacts, and centralization of power. We end by suggesting guardrails to minimize these risks from compute governance.

2024-02-12

ArXiv (preprint)

Amortizing Intractable Inference in Large Language Models

Edward J. Hu

Younesse Kaddar

Guillaume Lajoie

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This l… (see more)imits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (oral)

Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Harry Zhao 0001

Mingde Zhao

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstracti… (see more)ons to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into smaller, more manageable subtasks, and thus enables sparse decision-making and focused computation on the relevant parts of the environment. The decomposition relies on the extraction of an abstracted proxy problem represented as a directed graph, in which vertices and edges are learned end-to-end from hindsight. Our theoretical analyses provide performance guarantees under appropriate assumptions and establish where our approach is expected to be helpful. Generalization-focused experiments validate Skipper's significant advantage in zero-shot generalization, compared to some existing state-of-the-art hierarchical planning methods.

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Cycle Consistency Driven Object Discovery

Aniket Didolkar

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. … (see more)Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Delta-AI: Local Objectives for Amortized Inference in Sparse Graphical Models

Jean-Pierre Falet

Hae Beom Lee

Chen Sun

Dragos Secrieru

Guillaume Lajoie

We present a new algorithm for amortized inference in sparse probabilistic graphical models (PGMs), which we call …

2024-01-15

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)