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

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

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

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

Desmond Elliott

Independent visiting researcher

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Jean-Pierre Falet

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD

PhD - Université de Montréal

Moksh Jain

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Tabitha Edith Lee

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sarthak Mittal

PhD - 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

Collaborating researcher - University of Waterloo

Principal supervisor :

David Rolnick

Nassim Rahaman

Collaborating Alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

Amine RAZIG

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Loubna Benabbou

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

PhD - Université de Montréal

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Julie Hussin

Dragos Secrieru

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Divya Sharma

Postdoctorate

Co-supervisor :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Vincent Taboga

Collaborating Alumni - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Hugo Larochelle

Ivan Titov

Collaborating researcher

Principal supervisor :

Siva Reddy

Alex Tong

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Skipper: Combining Spatial and Temporal Abstraction for Better Generalization

Harry Zhao

Collaborating Alumni - 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

Introduction to NIPS 2017 Competition Track

Sergio Escalera

Markus Weimer

Mikhail Burtsev

Valentin Malykh

Varvara Logacheva

Ryan Lowe

Iulian V. Serban

Alexander Rudnicky

Alan W. Black

Shrimai Prabhumoye

Łukasz Kidziński

Sharada Prasanna Mohanty

Carmichael F. Ong

Jennifer L. Hicks

Sergey Levine

Marcel Salathé

Scott Delp

Iker Huerga

Alexander Grigorenko … (see 19 more)

Leifur Thorbergsson

Anasuya Das

Kyla Nemitz

Jenna Sandker

Stephen King

Alexander S. Ecker

Leon A. Gatys

Matthias Bethge

Jordan Boyd-Graber

Shi Feng

Pedro Rodriguez

Mohit Iyyer

He He

Hal Daumé III

Sean McGregor

Amir Banifatemi

Alexey Kurakin

Ian G Goodfellow

Samy Bengio

2018-09-27

The NIPS '17 Competition: Building Intelligent Systems (published)

doi.org

The First Conversational Intelligence Challenge

Mikhail Burtsev

Varvara Logacheva

Valentin Malykh

Iulian V. Serban

Ryan Lowe

Shrimai Prabhumoye

Alan W. Black

Alexander Rudnicky

2018-09-27

The NIPS '17 Competition: Building Intelligent Systems (published)

doi.org

Convergence Properties of Deep Neural Networks on Separable Data

Remi Tachet des Combes

Mohammad Pezeshki

Samira Shabanian

Aaron Courville

While a lot of progress has been made in recent years, the dynamics of learning in deep nonlinear neural networks remain to this day largely… (see more) misunderstood. In this work, we study the case of binary classification and prove various properties of learning in such networks under strong assumptions such as linear separability of the data. Extending existing results from the linear case, we confirm empirical observations by proving that the classification error also follows a sigmoidal shape in nonlinear architectures. We show that given proper initialization, learning expounds parallel independent modes and that certain regions of parameter space might lead to failed training. We also demonstrate that input norm and features’ frequency in the dataset lead to distinct convergence speeds which might shed some light on the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks. We provide a comparison between the dynamics of learning with cross-entropy and hinge losses, which could prove useful to understand recent progress in the training of generative adversarial networks. Finally, we identify a phenomenon that we baptize gradient starvation where the most frequent features in a dataset prevent the learning of other less frequent but equally informative features.

2018-09-26

(published)

Deep Graph Infomax

Petar Veličković

William Fedus

William L. Hamilton

Pietro Lio

R Devon Hjelm

We present Deep Graph Infomax (DGI), a general approach for learning node representations within graph-structured data in an unsupervised ma… (see more)nner. DGI relies on maximizing mutual information between patch representations and corresponding high-level summaries of graphs---both derived using established graph convolutional network architectures. The learnt patch representations summarize subgraphs centered around nodes of interest, and can thus be reused for downstream node-wise learning tasks. In contrast to most prior approaches to unsupervised learning with GCNs, DGI does not rely on random walk objectives, and is readily applicable to both transductive and inductive learning setups. We demonstrate competitive performance on a variety of node classification benchmarks, which at times even exceeds the performance of supervised learning.

2018-09-26

ArXiv (preprint)

DEFactor: Differentiable Edge Factorization-based Probabilistic Graph Generation

Rim Assouel

Mohamed Ahmed

Marwin Segler

Amir Saffari

Generating novel molecules with optimal properties is a crucial step in many industries such as drug discovery. Recently, deep generative mo… (see more)dels have shown a promising way of performing de-novo molecular design. Although graph generative models are currently available they either have a graph size dependency in their number of parameters, limiting their use to only very small graphs or are formulated as a sequence of discrete actions needed to construct a graph, making the output graph non-differentiable w.r.t the model parameters, therefore preventing them to be used in scenarios such as conditional graph generation. In this work we propose a model for conditional graph generation that is computationally efficient and enables direct optimisation of the graph. We demonstrate favourable performance of our model on prototype-based molecular graph conditional generation tasks.

2018-09-26

ArXiv (preprint)

EnGAN: Latent Space MCMC and Maximum Entropy Generators for Energy-based Models

2018-09-26

(published)

Learning powerful policies and better dynamics models by encouraging consistency

2018-09-26

(published)

Learning of Sophisticated Curriculums by viewing them as Graphs over Tasks

Lucas Willems

2018-09-26

(published)

Modeling the Long Term Future in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Nan Rosemary Ke

Amanpreet Singh

Ahmed Touati

Anirudh Goyal

Devi Parikh

Dhruv Batra

2018-09-26

International Conference on Learning Representations (published)

Probabilistic Planning with Sequential Monte Carlo Methods

Alexandre Piché

Valentin Thomas

Cyril Ibrahim

Chris Pal

2018-09-26

International Conference on Learning Representations (published)

Reinforced Imitation Learning from Observations

Pedro O. Pinheiro

2018-09-26

(published)

Towards the Latent Transcriptome

Assya Trofimov

Francis Dutil

Claude Perreault

S. Lemieux

Joseph Paul Cohen

In this work we propose a method to compute continuous embeddings for kmers from raw RNA-seq data, in a reference-free fashion. We report th… (see more)at our model captures information of both DNA sequence similarity as well as DNA sequence abundance in the embedding latent space. We confirm the quality of these vectors by comparing them to known gene sub-structures and report that the latent space recovers exon information from raw RNA-Seq data from acute myeloid leukemia patients. Furthermore we show that this latent space allows the detection of genomic abnormalities such as translocations as well as patient-specific mutations, making this representation space both useful for visualization as well as analysis.

2018-09-26

ArXiv (preprint)