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

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborating researcher - Cambridge University

Principal supervisor :

Rim Assouel

PhD - Université de Montréal

Stefan Bauer

Independent visiting researcher

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Lajoie

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

Xiaoyin Chen

PhD - Université de Montréal

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborating researcher - KAIST

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

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

Leo Feng

PhD - Université de Montréal

PhD

PhD - Université de Montréal

Edward Hu

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

Salem Lahlou

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Tabitha Edith Lee

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

Nikolay Malkin

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Cristian Dragos Manta

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Dhanya Sridhar

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

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

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

Abhik Roychoudhury Roychoudhury

Independent visiting researcher

Principal supervisor :

Siva Reddy

Luca Scimeca

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Marcin Sendera

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Divya Sharma

Postdoctorate

Co-supervisor :

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Marco Stock

Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Hugo Larochelle

Ivan Titov

Independent visiting researcher

Principal supervisor :

Siva Reddy

Alex Tong

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Postdoctorate - 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

Systematic Evaluation of Causal Discovery in Visual Model Based Reinforcement Learning

Nan Rosemary Ke

Aniket Rajiv Didolkar

Danilo Jimenez Rezende

Michael Curtis Mozer

Chris Pal

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise tha… (see more)t the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make sense of their environment, the only observables are low-level variables like pixels in images. To generalize well, an agent must induce high-level variables, particularly those which are causal or are affected by causal variables. A central goal for AI and causality is thus the joint discovery of abstract representations and causal structure. However, we note that existing environments for studying causal induction are poorly suited for this objective because they have complicated task-specific causal graphs which are impossible to manipulate parametrically (e.g., number of nodes, sparsity, causal chain length, etc.). In this work, our goal is to facilitate research in learning representations of high-level variables as well as causal structures among them. In order to systematically probe the ability of methods to identify these variables and structures, we design a suite of benchmarking RL environments. We evaluate various representation learning algorithms from the literature and find that explicitly incorporating structure and modularity in models can help causal induction in model-based reinforcement learning.

2021-10-11

NeurIPS.cc/2021/Track/Datasets_and_Benchmarks/Round2 (published)

openreview.net

FloW: A Dataset and Benchmark for Floating Waste Detection in Inland Waters

Yuwei Cheng

Jiannan Zhu

Mengxin Jiang

Jie Fu

Changsong Pang

Peidong Wang

Kris Sankaran

Olawale Moses Onabola

Yimin Liu

Dianbo Liu

Marine debris is severely threatening the marine lives and causing sustained pollution to the whole ecosystem. To prevent the wastes from ge… (see more)tting into the ocean, it is helpful to clean up the floating wastes in inland waters using the autonomous cleaning devices like unmanned surface vehicles. The cleaning efficiency relies on a high-accurate and robust object detection system. However, the small size of the target, the strong light reflection over water surface, and the reflection of other objects on bank-side all bring challenges to the vision-based object detection system. To promote the practical application for autonomous floating wastes cleaning, we present FloW†, the first dataset for floating waste detection in inland water areas. The dataset consists of an image sub-dataset FloW-Img and a multimodal sub-dataset FloW-RI which contains synchronized millimeter wave radar data and images. Accurate annotations for images and radar data are provided, supporting floating waste detection strategies based on image, radar data, and the fusion of two sensors. We perform several baseline experiments on our dataset, including vision-based and radar-based detection methods. The results show that, the detection accuracy is relatively low and floating waste detection still remains a challenging task.

2021-10-01

IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (published)

Learning Neural Causal Models with Active Interventions

Nino Scherrer

Olexa Bilaniuk

Yashas Annadani

Anirudh Goyal

Patrick Schwab

Bernhard Schölkopf

Michael Curtis Mozer

Stefan Bauer

Nan Rosemary Ke

Discovering causal structures from data is a challenging inference problem of fundamental importance in all areas of science. The appealing … (see more)scaling properties of neural networks have recently led to a surge of interest in differentiable neural network-based methods for learning causal structures from data. So far, differentiable causal discovery has focused on static datasets of observational or interventional origin. In this work, we introduce an active intervention-targeting mechanism which enables quick identification of the underlying causal structure of the data-generating process. Our method significantly reduces the required number of interactions compared with random intervention targeting and is applicable for both discrete and continuous optimization formulations of learning the underlying directed acyclic graph (DAG) from data. We examine the proposed method across multiple frameworks in a wide range of settings and demonstrate superior performance on multiple benchmarks from simulated to real-world data.

2021-09-06

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net

Problems in the deployment of machine-learned models in health care

Joseph Paul Cohen

Tianshi Cao

Joseph D Viviano

Chinwei Huang

Michael Fralick

Marzyeh Ghassemi

M. Mamdani

R. Greiner

2021-08-30

Canadian Medical Association Journal (published)

Exploration-Driven Representation Learning in Reinforcement Learning

Akram Erraqabi

Harry Zhao

Mingde Zhao

Marlos C. Machado

Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Ludovic Denoyer

Alessandro Lazaric

Learning reward-agnostic representations is an emerging paradigm in reinforcement learning. These representations can be leveraged for sever… (see more)al purposes ranging from reward shaping to skill discovery. Nevertheless, in order to learn such representations, existing methods often rely on assuming uniform access to the state space. With such a privilege, the agent’s coverage of the environment can be limited which hurts the quality of the learned representations. In this work, we introduce a method that explicitly couples representation learning with exploration when the agent is not provided with a uniform prior over the state space. Our method learns representations that constantly drive exploration while the data generated by the agent’s exploratory behavior drives the learning of better representations. We empirically validate our approach in goal-achieving tasks, demonstrating that the learned representation captures the dynamics of the environment, leads to more accurate value estimation, and to faster credit assignment, both when used for control and for reward shaping. Finally, the exploratory policy that emerges from our approach proves to be successful at continuous navigation tasks with sparse rewards.

2021-07-22

ICML.cc/2021/Workshop/URL (poster)

openreview.net

Combating False Negatives in Adversarial Imitation Learning

Konrad Żołna

Chitwan Saharia

Léonard Boussioux

David Y. T. Hui

Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert

Dzmitry Bahdanau

In adversarial imitation learning, a discriminator is trained to differentiate agent episodes from expert demonstrations representing the de… (see more)sired behavior. However, as the trained policy learns to be more successful, the negative examples (the ones produced by the agent) become increasingly similar to expert ones. Despite the fact that the task is successfully accomplished in some of the agent's trajectories, the discriminator is trained to output low values for them. We hypothesize that this inconsistent training signal for the discriminator can impede its learning, and consequently leads to worse overall performance of the agent. We show experimental evidence for this hypothesis and that the ‘False Negatives’ (i.e. successful agent episodes) significantly hinder adversarial imitation learning, which is the first contribution of this paper. Then, we propose a method to alleviate the impact of false negatives and test it on the BabyAI environment. This method consistently improves sample efficiency over the baselines by at least an order of magnitude.

2021-07-18

2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding la… (see more)nguage?

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding la… (see more)nguage?

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)

Deep learning for AI

Geoffrey Hinton

How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding la… (see more)nguage?

2021-06-21

Communications of the ACM (published)