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
Website
Github
Google Scholar
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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Github
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Tristan Deleu
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Website
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Aniket Didolkar
PhD - Université de Montréal
Website
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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
Website
Github
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Léna Ezzine
PhD - Université de Montréal
Jean-Pierre Falet
PhD - Université de Montréal
Website
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Leo Feng
PhD - Université de Montréal
Website
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Pietro Greiner
PhD
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Mohsin Hasan
PhD - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
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Edward Hu
PhD - Université de Montréal
Moksh Jain
PhD - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Thomas Jiralerspong
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
Website
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Younesse Kaddar
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
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
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Chenghao Liu
Collaborating Alumni
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Zhen Liu
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Liam Paull
Kanika Madan
PhD - Université de Montréal
Nikolay Malkin
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Cristian Dragos Manta
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Dhanya Sridhar
Github
Sarthak Mittal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Guillaume Lajoie
Website
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Jama Mohamud
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Mirco Ravanelli
Website
Github
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Cyrus Neary
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Glen Berseth
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Phong Nguyen
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Padideh Nouri
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Ali Parviz
Collaborating researcher - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Google Scholar
Lena Podina
Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo
Principal supervisor :
David Rolnick
Google Scholar
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
Website
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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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Google Scholar
Dragos Secrieru
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Marcin Sendera
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Github
Google Scholar
Divya Sharma
Postdoctorate
Co-supervisor :
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
Website
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
Google Scholar
Alex Tong
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Donna Vakalis
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
David Rolnick
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Siddarth Venkatraman
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Glen Berseth
Website
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Google Scholar
Omar G. Younis
Collaborating researcher
Website
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Taeyoung YUN
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
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Tianyu Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Nicole Zhang
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Mathieu Blanchette
Website
Github
Google Scholar
Dinghuai Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Aaron Courville
Website
Harry Zhao
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
Website
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Publications

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
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
Cell Morphology-Guided Small Molecule Generation with GFlowNets
Stephen Zhewen Lu
Ziqing Lu
Ehsan Hajiramezanali
Tommaso Biancalani
Yoshua Bengio
Gabriele Scalia
Michał Koziarski
High-content phenotypic screening, including high-content imaging (HCI), has gained popularity in the last few years for its ability to char… (see more)acterize novel therapeutics without prior knowledge of the protein target. When combined with deep learning techniques to predict and represent molecular-phenotype interactions, these advancements hold the potential to significantly accelerate and enhance drug discovery applications. This work focuses on the novel task of HCI-guided molecular design. Generative models for molecule design could be guided by HCI data, for example with a supervised model that links molecules to phenotypes of interest as a reward function. However, limited labeled data, combined with the high-dimensional readouts, can make training these methods challenging and impractical. We consider an alternative approach in which we leverage an unsupervised multimodal joint embedding to define a latent similarity as a reward for GFlowNets. The proposed model learns to generate new molecules that could produce phenotypic effects similar to those of the given image target, without relying on pre-annotated phenotypic labels. We demonstrate that the proposed method generates molecules with high morphological and structural similarity to the target, increasing the likelihood of similar biological activity, as confirmed by an independent oracle model.
2024-08-09
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
AI-Assisted Generation of Difficult Math Questions
Vedant Shah
Dingli Yu
Kaifeng Lyu
Simon Park
Nan Rosemary Ke
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Sanjeev Arora
Anirudh Goyal
Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet dem… (see more)and for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core"skills"from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an"out of distribution"task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH
2024-07-30
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
AI-Assisted Generation of Difficult Math Questions
Vedant Shah
Dingli Yu
Kaifeng Lyu
Simon Park
Nan Rosemary Ke
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Sanjeev Arora
Anirudh Goyal
Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet dem… (see more)and for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core"skills"from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an"out of distribution"task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH
2024-07-30
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
AI-Assisted Generation of Difficult Math Questions
Vedant Shah
Dingli Yu
Kaifeng Lyu
Simon Park
Nan Rosemary Ke
Michael Curtis Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Sanjeev Arora
Anirudh Goyal
Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet dem… (see more)and for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core"skills"from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an"out of distribution"task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH
2024-07-30
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org