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
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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
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Mohammed Abukalam
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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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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Chenghao Liu
Collaborating Alumni
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Zhen Liu
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Liam Paull
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
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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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Marco Stock
Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich
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Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Hugo Larochelle
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Github
Ivan Titov
Independent visiting researcher
Principal supervisor :
Siva Reddy
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Alex Tong
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
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Github
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Donna Vakalis
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
David Rolnick
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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
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Tianyu Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
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Nicole Zhang
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Mathieu Blanchette
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Dinghuai Zhang
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Aaron Courville
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Harry Zhao
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Doina Precup
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Publications

The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities
Yoshua Bengio
Tegan Maharaj
Luke Ong
Stuart Russell
Dawn Song
Max Tegmark
Lan Xue
Ya-Qin Zhang
Stephen Casper
Wan Sie Lee
Sören Mindermann
Vanessa Wilfred
Vidhisha Balachandran
Fazl Barez
Michael Belinsky
Imane Bello
Malo Bourgon
Mark Brakel
Sim'eon Campos
Duncan Cass-Beggs … (see 67 more)
Jiahao Chen
Rumman Chowdhury
Kuan Chua Seah
Jeff Clune
Juntao Dai
Agnès Delaborde
Nouha Dziri
Francisco Eiras
Joshua Engels
Jinyu Fan
Adam Gleave
Noah D. Goodman
Fynn Heide
Johannes Heidecke
Dan Hendrycks
Cyrus Hodes
Bryan Low Kian Hsiang
Minlie Huang
Sami Jawhar
Jingyu Wang
Adam Tauman Kalai
Meindert Kamphuis
Mohan S. Kankanhalli
Subhash Kantamneni
Mathias Bonde Kirk
Thomas Kwa
Jeffrey Ladish
Kwok-Yan Lam
Wan Lee Sie
Taewhi Lee
Xiaojian Li
Jiajun Liu
Chaochao Lu
Yifan Mai
Richard Mallah
Julian Michael
Nick Moës
Simon Möller
Kihyuk Nam
Kwan Yee Ng
Mark Nitzberg
Besmira Nushi
Sean O hEigeartaigh
Alejandro Ortega
Pierre Peigné
James Petrie
Benjamin Prud'homme
Reihaneh Rabbany
Nayat Sanchez-Pi
Sarah Schwettmann
Buck Shlegeris
Saad Siddiqui
Aradhana Sinha
Martín Soto
Cheston Tan
Dong Ting
William-Chandra Tjhi
Robert Trager
Brian Tse
H. AnthonyTungK.
John Willes
Denise Wong
W. Xu
Rongwu Xu
Yi Zeng
HongJiang Zhang
Djordje Zikelic
Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to en… (see more)sure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy, reliable, and secure. Building a trusted ecosystem is therefore essential – it helps people embrace AI with confidence and gives maximal space for innovation while avoiding backlash. This requires policymakers, industry, researchers and the broader public to collectively work toward securing positive outcomes from AI’s development. AI safety research is a key dimension. Given that the state of science today for building trustworthy AI does not fully cover all risks, accelerated investment in research is required to keep pace with commercially driven growth in system capabilities. Goals: The 2025 Singapore Conference on AI (SCAI): International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety aims to support research in this important space by bringing together AI scientists across geographies to identify and synthesise research priorities in AI safety. The result, The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities, builds on the International AI Safety Report-A (IAISR) chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by 33 governments. By adopting a defence-in-depth model, this document organises AI safety research domains into three types: challenges with creating trustworthy AI systems (Development), challenges with evaluating their risks (Assessment), and challenges with monitoring and intervening after deployment (Control). Through the Singapore Consensus, we hope to globally facilitate meaningful conversations between AI scientists and AI policymakers for maximally beneficial outcomes. Our goal is to enable more impactful R&D efforts to rapidly develop safety and evaluation mechanisms and foster a trusted ecosystem where AI is harnessed for the public good.
2025-06-25
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100x Speedup via Parallel Sparse Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limit… (see more)s their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD) offers a promising solution by combining diffusion with tree-based search, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex planning problems. Despite its strengths, our analysis shows that MCTD incurs substantial computational overhead due to the sequential nature of tree search and the cost of iterative denoising. To address this, we propose Fast-MCTD, a more efficient variant that preserves the strengths of MCTD while significantly improving its speed and scalability. Fast-MCTD integrates two techniques: Parallel MCTD, which enables parallel rollouts via delayed tree updates and redundancy-aware selection; and Sparse MCTD, which reduces rollout length through trajectory coarsening. Experiments show that Fast-MCTD achieves up to 100x speedup over standard MCTD while maintaining or improving planning performance. Remarkably, it even outperforms Diffuser in inference speed on some tasks, despite Diffuser requiring no search and yielding weaker solutions. These results position Fast-MCTD as a practical and scalable solution for diffusion-based inference-time reasoning.
2025-06-11
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100x Speedup via Parallel Sparse Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limit… (see more)s their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD) offers a promising solution by combining diffusion with tree-based search, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex planning problems. Despite its strengths, our analysis shows that MCTD incurs substantial computational overhead due to the sequential nature of tree search and the cost of iterative denoising. To address this, we propose Fast-MCTD, a more efficient variant that preserves the strengths of MCTD while significantly improving its speed and scalability. Fast-MCTD integrates two techniques: Parallel MCTD, which enables parallel rollouts via delayed tree updates and redundancy-aware selection; and Sparse MCTD, which reduces rollout length through trajectory coarsening. Experiments show that Fast-MCTD achieves up to 100x speedup over standard MCTD while maintaining or improving planning performance. Remarkably, it even outperforms Diffuser in inference speed on some tasks, despite Diffuser requiring no search and yielding weaker solutions. These results position Fast-MCTD as a practical and scalable solution for diffusion-based inference-time reasoning.
2025-06-11
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100x Speedup via Parallel Sparse Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limit… (see more)s their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD) offers a promising solution by combining diffusion with tree-based search, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex planning problems. Despite its strengths, our analysis shows that MCTD incurs substantial computational overhead due to the sequential nature of tree search and the cost of iterative denoising. To address this, we propose Fast-MCTD, a more efficient variant that preserves the strengths of MCTD while significantly improving its speed and scalability. Fast-MCTD integrates two techniques: Parallel MCTD, which enables parallel rollouts via delayed tree updates and redundancy-aware selection; and Sparse MCTD, which reduces rollout length through trajectory coarsening. Experiments show that Fast-MCTD achieves up to 100x speedup over standard MCTD while maintaining or improving planning performance. Remarkably, it even outperforms Diffuser in inference speed on some tasks, despite Diffuser requiring no search and yielding weaker solutions. These results position Fast-MCTD as a practical and scalable solution for diffusion-based inference-time reasoning.
2025-06-11
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
FORT: Forward-Only Regression Training of Normalizing Flows
Danyal REHMAN
Oscar Davis
Jiarui Lu
Jian Tang
Michael M. Bronstein
Yoshua Bengio
Alexander Tong
Joey Bose
Simulation-free training frameworks have been at the forefront of the generative modelling revolution in continuous spaces, leading to neura… (see more)l dynamical systems that encompass modern large-scale diffusion and flow matching models. Despite the scalability of training, the generation of high-quality samples and their corresponding likelihood under the model requires expensive numerical simulation -- inhibiting adoption in numerous scientific applications such as equilibrium sampling of molecular systems. In this paper, we revisit classical normalizing flows as one-step generative models with exact likelihoods and propose a novel, scalable training objective that does not require computing the expensive change of variable formula used in conventional maximum likelihood training. We propose Forward-Only Regression Training (FORT), a simple
2025-06-11
ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/GenBio (spotlight)
doi.org
openreview.net
Torsional-GFN: a conditional conformation generator for small molecules
Alexandra Volokhova
Lena Nehale Ezzine
Piotr Gainski
Luca Scimeca
Emmanuel Bengio
Prudencio Tossou
Yoshua Bengio
Alex Hernandez-Garcia
2025-06-11
ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/GenBio (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Bringing SAM to new heights: Leveraging elevation data for tree crown segmentation from drone imagery
Mélisande Teng
Arthur Ouaknine
Etienne Lalibert'e
Yoshua Bengio
David Rolnick
Hugo Larochelle
Information on trees at the individual level is crucial for monitoring forest ecosystems and planning forest management. Current monitoring … (see more)methods involve ground measurements, requiring extensive cost, time and labor. Advances in drone remote sensing and computer vision offer great potential for mapping individual trees from aerial imagery at broad-scale. Large pre-trained vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), represent a particularly compelling choice given limited labeled data. In this work, we compare methods leveraging SAM for the task of automatic tree crown instance segmentation in high resolution drone imagery in three use cases: 1) boreal plantations, 2) temperate forests and 3) tropical forests. We also study the integration of elevation data into models, in the form of Digital Surface Model (DSM) information, which can readily be obtained at no additional cost from RGB drone imagery. We present BalSAM, a model leveraging SAM and DSM information, which shows potential over other methods, particularly in the context of plantations. We find that methods using SAM out-of-the-box do not outperform a custom Mask R-CNN, even with well-designed prompts. However, efficiently tuning SAM end-to-end and integrating DSM information are both promising avenues for tree crown instance segmentation models.
2025-06-05
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Bringing SAM to new heights: Leveraging elevation data for tree crown segmentation from drone imagery
Mélisande Teng
Arthur Ouaknine
Etienne Lalibert'e
Yoshua Bengio
David Rolnick
Hugo Larochelle
Information on trees at the individual level is crucial for monitoring forest ecosystems and planning forest management. Current monitoring … (see more)methods involve ground measurements, requiring extensive cost, time and labor. Advances in drone remote sensing and computer vision offer great potential for mapping individual trees from aerial imagery at broad-scale. Large pre-trained vision models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), represent a particularly compelling choice given limited labeled data. In this work, we compare methods leveraging SAM for the task of automatic tree crown instance segmentation in high resolution drone imagery in three use cases: 1) boreal plantations, 2) temperate forests and 3) tropical forests. We also study the integration of elevation data into models, in the form of Digital Surface Model (DSM) information, which can readily be obtained at no additional cost from RGB drone imagery. We present BalSAM, a model leveraging SAM and DSM information, which shows potential over other methods, particularly in the context of plantations. We find that methods using SAM out-of-the-box do not outperform a custom Mask R-CNN, even with well-designed prompts. However, efficiently tuning SAM end-to-end and integrating DSM information are both promising avenues for tree crown instance segmentation models.
2025-06-01
arXiv (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model
Can Chen
David Heurtel-Depeiges
Robert M. Vernon
Christopher J. Langmead
Yoshua Bengio
Quentin Fournier
2025-05-22
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Adaptive Cyclic Diffusion for Inference Scaling
Gyubin Lee
Truong Nhat Nguyen Bao
Jaesik Yoon
Dongwoo Lee
Minsu Kim
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
2025-05-20
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Cyclic Diffusion Search
Gyubin Lee
Truong Nhat Nguyen Bao
Jaesik Yoon
Dongwoo Lee
Minsu Kim
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative capabilities across domains ranging from image synthesis to complex reasoning tasks. Ho… (see more)wever, most inference-time scaling methods rely on fixed denoising schedules, limiting their ability to allocate computation based on instance difficulty or task-specific demands adaptively. We introduce the challenge of adaptive inference-time scaling-dynamically adjusting computational effort during inference-and propose Adaptive Bi-directional Cyclic Diffusion (ABCD), a flexible, search-based inference framework. ABCD refines outputs through bi-directional diffusion cycles while adaptively controlling exploration depth and termination. It comprises three components: Cyclic Diffusion Search, Automatic Exploration-Exploitation Balancing, and Adaptive Thinking Time. Experiments show that ABCD improves performance across diverse tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.
2025-05-20
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Cyclic Diffusion Search
Gyubin Lee
Truong Nhat Nguyen Bao
Jaesik Yoon
Dongwoo Lee
Minsu Kim
Yoshua Bengio
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative capabilities across domains ranging from image synthesis to complex reasoning tasks. Ho… (see more)wever, most inference-time scaling methods rely on fixed denoising schedules, limiting their ability to allocate computation based on instance difficulty or task-specific demands adaptively. We introduce the challenge of adaptive inference-time scaling-dynamically adjusting computational effort during inference-and propose Adaptive Bi-directional Cyclic Diffusion (ABCD), a flexible, search-based inference framework. ABCD refines outputs through bi-directional diffusion cycles while adaptively controlling exploration depth and termination. It comprises three components: Cyclic Diffusion Search, Automatic Exploration-Exploitation Balancing, and Adaptive Thinking Time. Experiments show that ABCD improves performance across diverse tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.
2025-05-20
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org