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

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Master's Research - Université de Montréal

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Research Intern - Université de Montréal

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Master's Research - Université de Montréal

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Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

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alexander.tong@mila.quebec

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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

Supplementary Material for MixupE

Yingtian Zou

Vikas Verma

Sarthak Mittal

Wai Hoh Tang

Hieu Pham

Juho Kannala

Arno Solin

Kenji Kawaguchi

We denote by z = (x,y) the input and output pair where x ∈ X ⊆ R and y ∈ Y ⊆ R . Let fθ(x) ∈ R be the output of the logits (i.e.,… (see more) the last layer before the softmax or sigmoid) of the model parameterized by θ. We use l(θ, z) = h(fθ(x)) − yfθ(x) to denote the loss function. Let g(·) be the activation function. We use x(i) to index i-th element of the vector x and xj to represent j-th variable in a set. The notation list is:

2023-01-01

(published)

www.semanticscholar.org

Synergies between Disentanglement and Sparsity: Generalization and Identifiability in Multi-Task Learning

Sébastien Lachapelle

Tristan Deleu

Divyat Mahajan

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Quentin Bertrand

Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding … (see more)is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse task-specific predictors improve generalization. In the context of multi-task learning, we prove a new identifiability result that provides conditions under which maximally sparse predictors yield disentangled representations. Motivated by this theoretical result, we propose a practical approach to learn disentangled representations based on a sparsity-promoting bi-level optimization problem. Finally, we explore a meta-learning version of this algorithm based on group Lasso multiclass SVM predictors, for which we derive a tractable dual formulation. It obtains competitive results on standard few-shot classification benchmarks, while each task is using only a fraction of the learned representations.

2023-01-01

ICML (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Synergies between Disentanglement and Sparsity: Generalization and Identifiability in Multi-Task Learning

Sébastien Lachapelle

Tristan Deleu

Divyat Mahajan

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Simon Lacoste-Julien

Quentin Bertrand

Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding … (see more)is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse base-predictors improve generalization. In the context of multi-task learning, we prove a new identifiability result that provides conditions under which maximally sparse base-predictors yield disentangled representations. Motivated by this theoretical result, we propose a practical approach to learn disentangled representations based on a sparsity-promoting bi-level optimization problem. Finally, we explore a meta-learning version of this algorithm based on group Lasso multiclass SVM base-predictors, for which we derive a tractable dual formulation. It obtains competitive results on standard few-shot classification benchmarks, while each task is using only a fraction of the learned representations.

2023-01-01

ICML (published)

A theory of continuous generative flow networks

Salem Lahlou

Tristan Deleu

Pablo Lemos

Dinghuai Zhang

Alexandra Volokhova

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Lena Nehale Ezzine

Nikolay Malkin

2023-01-01

ICML (published)

A theory of continuous generative flow networks

Salem Lahlou

Tristan Deleu

Pablo Lemos

Dinghuai Zhang

Alexandra Volokhova

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Lena Nehale Ezzine

Nikolay Malkin

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are amortized variational inference algorithms that are trained to sample from unnormalized target dist… (see more)ributions over compositional objects. A key limitation of GFlowNets until this time has been that they are restricted to discrete spaces. We present a theory for generalized GFlowNets, which encompasses both existing discrete GFlowNets and ones with continuous or hybrid state spaces, and perform experiments with two goals in mind. First, we illustrate critical points of the theory and the importance of various assumptions. Second, we empirically demonstrate how observations about discrete GFlowNets transfer to the continuous case and show strong results compared to non-GFlowNet baselines on several previously studied tasks. This work greatly widens the perspectives for the application of GFlowNets in probabilistic inference and various modeling settings.

2023-01-01

ICML (published)

Bayesian learning of Causal Structure and Mechanisms with GFlowNets and Variational Bayes

Mizu Nishikawa-Toomey

Tristan Deleu

Jithendaraa Subramanian

Laurent Charlin

Bayesian causal structure learning aims to learn a posterior distribution over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and the mechanisms that defin… (see more)e the relationship between parent and child variables. By taking a Bayesian approach, it is possible to reason about the uncertainty of the causal model. The notion of modelling the uncertainty over models is particularly crucial for causal structure learning since the model could be unidentifiable when given only a finite amount of observational data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to jointly learn the structure and mechanisms of the causal model using Variational Bayes, which we call Variational Bayes-DAG-GFlowNet (VBG). We extend the method of Bayesian causal structure learning using GFlowNets to learn not only the posterior distribution over the structure, but also the parameters of a linear-Gaussian model. Our results on simulated data suggest that VBG is competitive against several baselines in modelling the posterior over DAGs and mechanisms, while offering several advantages over existing methods, including the guarantee to sample acyclic graphs, and the flexibility to generalize to non-linear causal mechanisms.

2022-11-04

ArXiv (preprint)

Inductive biases for deep learning of higher-level cognition

Anirudh Goyal

2022-10-12

Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (published)

Lookback for Learning to Branch

Prateek Gupta

Elias Boutros Khalil

Didier Chételat

Maxime Gasse

Andrea Lodi

M. Pawan Kumar

2022-10-10

TMLR (accepted)

Towards Scaling Difference Target Propagation by Learning Backprop Targets

Maxence Ernoult

Fabrice Normandin

Abhinav Moudgil

Sean Spinney

The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to… (see more) scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains. As such, it is important to explore learning algorithms that come with strong theoretical guarantees and can match the performance of backpropagation (BP) on complex tasks. One such algorithm is Difference Target Propagation (DTP), a biologically-plausible learning algorithm whose close relation with Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization has been recently established. However, the conditions under which this connection rigorously holds preclude layer-wise training of the feedback pathway synaptic weights (which is more biologically plausible). Moreover, good alignment between DTP weight updates and loss gradients is only loosely guaranteed and under very specific conditions for the architecture being trained. In this paper, we propose a novel feedback weight training scheme that ensures both that DTP approximates BP and that layer-wise feedback weight training can be restored without sacrificing any theoretical guarantees. Our theory is corroborated by experimental results and we report the best performance ever achieved by DTP on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32

2022-06-28

Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

VIM: Variational Independent Modules for Video Prediction

Rim Assouel

Lluis Castrejon

Aaron Courville

Nicolas Ballas

We introduce a variational inference model called VIM, for Variational Independent Modules, for sequential data that learns and infers laten… (see more)t representations as a set of objects and discovers modular causal mechanisms over these objects. These mechanisms - which we call modules - are independently parametrized, define the stochastic transitions of entities and are shared across entities. At each time step, our model infers from a low-level input sequence a high-level sequence of categorical latent variables to select which transition modules to apply to which high-level object. We evaluate this model in video prediction tasks where the goal is to predict multi-modal future events given previous observations. We demonstrate empirically that VIM can model 2D visual sequences in an interpretable way and is able to identify the underlying dynamically instantiated mechanisms of the generation process. We additionally show that the learnt modules can be composed at test time to generalize to out-of-distribution observations.

2022-06-28

Proceedings of the First Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

On Neural Architecture Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks

Giancarlo Kerg

Sarthak Mittal

Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution generalization performance, but struggle with out-of-distribution generaliz… (see more)ation. This is especially true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing rules in sequences, as we find in many intelligence tests. Recent work has explored how forcing relational representations to remain distinct from sensory representations, as it seems to be the case in the brain, can help artificial systems. Building on this work, we further explore and formalize the advantages afforded by 'partitioned' representations of relations and sensory details, and how this inductive bias can help recompose learned relational structure in newly encountered settings. We introduce a simple architecture based on similarity scores which we name Compositional Relational Network (CoRelNet). Using this model, we investigate a series of inductive biases that ensure abstract relations are learned and represented distinctly from sensory data, and explore their effects on out-of-distribution generalization for a series of relational psychophysics tasks. We find that simple architectural choices can outperform existing models in out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these results show that partitioning relational representations from other information streams may be a simple way to augment existing network architectures' robustness when performing out-of-distribution relational computations.

2022-06-09

ArXiv (preprint)

Temporal Abstractions-Augmented Temporally Contrastive Learning: An Alternative to the Laplacian in RL

Akram Erraqabi

Marlos C. Machado

Harry Zhao

Mingde Zhao

Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Alessandro Lazaric

Ludovic Denoyer

In reinforcement learning, the graph Laplacian has proved to be a valuable tool in the task-agnostic setting, with applications ranging from… (see more) skill discovery to reward shaping. Recently, learning the Laplacian representation has been framed as the optimization of a temporally-contrastive objective to overcome its computational limitations in large (or continuous) state spaces. However, this approach requires uniform access to all states in the state space, overlooking the exploration problem that emerges during the representation learning process. In this work, we propose an alternative method that is able to recover, in a non-uniform-prior setting, the expressiveness and the desired properties of the Laplacian representation. We do so by combining the representation learning with a skill-based covering policy, which provides a better training distribution to extend and refine the representation. We also show that a simple augmentation of the representation objective with the learned temporal abstractions improves dynamics-awareness and helps exploration. We find that our method succeeds as an alternative to the Laplacian in the non-uniform setting and scales to challenging continuous control environments. Finally, even if our method is not optimized for skill discovery, the learned skills can successfully solve difficult continuous navigation tasks with sparse rewards, where standard skill discovery approaches are no so effective.

2022-05-20

auai.org/UAI/2022/Conference (poster)