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

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

Salwane Agassoussi

Université de Montréal

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ayoub Atanane

Collaborating Alumni - Université du Québec à Rimouski

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

Paul Bertin

PhD - Université de Montréal

Ghait Boukachab

Collaborating Alumni - UQAR

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

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Eric Elmoznino

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Léna Ezzine

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Leo Feng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Ivan Grega

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Pietro Greiner

PhD

Mohsin Hasan

PhD - Université de Montréal

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Edward Hu

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Minsu Kim

Research Intern - Université de Montréal

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Alex Hernandez

Yaroslav KIVVA

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Michał Koziarski

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Salem Lahlou

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Seanie Lee

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Zhen Liu

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Liam Paull

Kanika Madan

PhD - Université de Montréal

Mohammed Mahfoud

Collaborating Alumni - 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 :

David Rolnick

Nassim Rahaman

Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

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

Victor Schmidt

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Marcin Sendera

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Dounia Shaaban Kabakibo

Research Intern - 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 :

Collaborating researcher - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Zichao Yan

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Omar G. Younis

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

Dinghuai Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Mathieu Blanchette

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

An End-to-End Framework for Molecular Conformation Generation via Bilevel Programming

Minkai Xu

Wujie Wang

Shitong Luo

Chence Shi

Rafael G'omez-bombarelli

Jian Tang

Predicting molecular conformations (or 3D structures) from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in many applications. Most existing app… (see more)roaches are usually divided into two steps by first predicting the distances between atoms and then generating a 3D structure through optimizing a distance geometry problem. However, the distances predicted with such two-stage approaches may not be able to consistently preserve the geometry of local atomic neighborhoods, making the generated structures unsatisfying. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for molecular conformation prediction called ConfVAE based on the conditional variational autoencoder framework. Specifically, the molecular graph is first encoded in a latent space, and then the 3D structures are generated by solving a principled bilevel optimization program. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/MinkaiXu/ConfVAE-ICML21.

2021-07-01

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Deep learning for AI

Yann LeCun

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Yann LeCun

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Yann LeCun

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Variational Causal Networks: Approximate Bayesian Inference over Causal Structures

Yashas Annadani

Jonas Rothfuss

Alexandre Lacoste

Nino Scherrer

Anirudh Goyal

Stefan Bauer

Learning the causal structure that underlies data is a crucial step towards robust real-world decision making. The majority of existing work… (see more) in causal inference focuses on determining a single directed acyclic graph (DAG) or a Markov equivalence class thereof. However, a crucial aspect to acting intelligently upon the knowledge about causal structure which has been inferred from finite data demands reasoning about its uncertainty. For instance, planning interventions to find out more about the causal mechanisms that govern our data requires quantifying epistemic uncertainty over DAGs. While Bayesian causal inference allows to do so, the posterior over DAGs becomes intractable even for a small number of variables. Aiming to overcome this issue, we propose a form of variational inference over the graphs of Structural Causal Models (SCMs). To this end, we introduce a parametric variational family modelled by an autoregressive distribution over the space of discrete DAGs. Its number of parameters does not grow exponentially with the number of variables and can be tractably learned by maximising an Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed variational posterior is able to provide a good approximation of the true posterior.

2021-06-14

ArXiv (preprint)

Comparative Study of Learning Outcomes for Online Learning Platforms

Francois St-Hilaire

Nathan J. Burns

Robert Belfer

Muhammad Shayan

Ariella Smofsky

Dung D. Vu

Antoine Frau

Joseph Potochny

Farid Faraji

Vincent Pavero

Neroli Ko

Ansona Onyi Ching

Sabina Elkins

A. Stepanyan

Adela Matajova

Laurent Charlin

Iulian V. Serban

Ekaterina Kochmar

2021-06-12

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (published)

SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit

Mirco Ravanelli

Titouan Parcollet

Peter William VanHarn Plantinga

Aku Rouhe

Samuele Cornell

Loren Lugosch

Cem Subakan

Nauman Dawalatabad

Abdelwahab HEBA

Jianyuan Zhong

Ju-Chieh Chou

Sung-Lin Yeh

Szu-Wei Fu

Chien-Feng Liao

E. Rastorgueva

Franccois Grondin

William Aris

Hwidong Na

Yan Gao

Renato De Mori … (see 1 more)

SpeechBrain is an open-source and all-in-one speech toolkit. It is designed to facilitate the research and development of neural speech proc… (see more)essing technologies by being simple, flexible, user-friendly, and well-documented. This paper describes the core architecture designed to support several tasks of common interest, allowing users to naturally conceive, compare and share novel speech processing pipelines. SpeechBrain achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of speech benchmarks. It also provides training recipes, pretrained models, and inference scripts for popular speech datasets, as well as tutorials which allow anyone with basic Python proficiency to familiarize themselves with speech technologies.

2021-06-08

ArXiv (preprint)

CMIM: Cross-Modal Information Maximization For Medical Imaging

Tristan Sylvain

Francis Dutil

Tess Berthier

Lisa Di Jorio

Margaux Luck

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

In hospitals, data are siloed to specific information systems that make the same information available under different modalities such as th… (see more)e different medical imaging exams the patient undergoes (CT scans, MRI, PET, Ultrasound, etc.) and their associated radiology reports. This offers unique opportunities to obtain and use at train-time those multiple views of the same information that might not always be available at test-time.In this paper, we propose an innovative framework that makes the most of available data by learning good representations of a multi-modal input that are resilient to modality dropping at test-time, using recent advances in mutual information maximization. By maximizing cross-modal information at train time, we are able to outperform several state-of-the-art baselines in two different settings, medical image classification, and segmentation. In particular, our method is shown to have a strong impact on the inference-time performance of weaker modalities.

2021-06-06

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

Deep Verifier Networks: Verification of Deep Discriminative Models with Deep Generative Models

Tong Che

Xiaofeng Liu

Site Li

Yubin Ge

Ruixiang ZHANG

Caiming Xiong

AI Safety is a major concern in many deep learning applications such as autonomous driving. Given a trained deep learning model, an importan… (see more)t natural problem is how to reliably verify the model's prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel framework --- deep verifier networks (DVN) to detect unreliable inputs or predictions of deep discriminative models, using separately trained deep generative models. Our proposed model is based on conditional variational auto-encoders with disentanglement constraints to separate the label information from the latent representation. We give both intuitive and theoretical justifications for the model. Our verifier network is trained independently with the prediction model, which eliminates the need of retraining the verifier network for a new model. We test the verifier network on both out-of-distribution detection and adversarial example detection problems, as well as anomaly detection problems in structured prediction tasks such as image caption generation. We achieve state-of-the-art results in all of these problems.

2021-05-18

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Meta-learning framework with applications to zero-shot time-series forecasting

Boris Oreshkin

Dmitri Carpov

Nicolas Chapados

Can meta-learning discover generic ways of processing time series (TS) from a diverse dataset so as to greatly improve generalization on new… (see more) TS coming from different datasets? This work provides positive evidence to this using a broad meta-learning framework which we show subsumes many existing meta-learning algorithms. Our theoretical analysis suggests that residual connections act as a meta-learning adaptation mechanism, generating a subset of task-specific parameters based on a given TS input, thus gradually expanding the expressive power of the architecture on-the-fly. The same mechanism is shown via linearization analysis to have the interpretation of a sequential update of the final linear layer. Our empirical results on a wide range of data emphasize the importance of the identified meta-learning mechanisms for successful zero-shot univariate forecasting, suggesting that it is viable to train a neural network on a source TS dataset and deploy it on a different target TS dataset without retraining, resulting in performance that is at least as good as that of state-of-practice univariate forecasting models.

2021-05-18

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Object-Centric Image Generation from Layouts

Tristan Sylvain

Pengchuan Zhang

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

Shikhar Sharma

2021-05-18

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Parameterizing Branch-and-Bound Search Trees to Learn Branching Policies

Giulia Zarpellon

Jason Jo

Andrea Lodi

Branch and Bound (B&B) is the exact tree search method typically used to solve Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problems (MILPs). Learning b… (see more)ranching policies for MILP has become an active research area, with most works proposing to imitate the strong branching rule and specialize it to distinct classes of problems. We aim instead at learning a policy that generalizes across heterogeneous MILPs: our main hypothesis is that parameterizing the state of the B&B search tree can aid this type of generalization. We propose a novel imitation learning framework, and introduce new input features and architectures to represent branching. Experiments on MILP benchmark instances clearly show the advantages of incorporating an explicit parameterization of the state of the search tree to modulate the branching decisions, in terms of both higher accuracy and smaller B&B trees. The resulting policies significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art method for "learning to branch" by effectively allowing generalization to generic unseen instances.

2021-05-18

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)