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

Nicole Zhang

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Aaron Courville

Tianyu Zhang

PhD - Université de Montréal

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

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Long-Range Credit Assignment in Recurrent Networks

Nan Rosemary Ke

A major drawback of backpropagation through time (BPTT) is the difficulty of learning long-term dependencies, coming from having to propagat… (see more)e credit information backwards through every single step of the forward computation. This makes BPTT both computationally impractical and biologically implausible. For this reason, full backpropagation through time is rarely used on long sequences, and truncated backpropagation through time is used as a heuristic. However, this usually leads to biased estimates of the gradient in which longer term dependencies are ignored. Addressing this issue, we propose an alternative algorithm, Sparse Attentive Backtracking, which might also be related to principles used by brains to learn long-term dependencies. Sparse Attentive Backtracking learns an attention mechanism over the hidden states of the past and selectively backpropagates through paths with high attention weights. This allows the model to learn long term dependencies while only backtracking for a small number of time steps, not just from the recent past but also from attended relevant past states.

2017-11-07

ArXiv (preprint)

Fraternal Dropout

2017-10-31

ArXiv (preprint)

Graph Attention Networks

Petar Veličković

Guillem Cucurull

Arantxa Casanova

Adriana Romero Soriano

Pietro Lio

Yoshua Bengio

2017-10-30

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

Graph Attention Networks

Petar Veličković

Guillem Cucurull

Arantxa Casanova

Adriana Romero Soriano

Pietro Lio

Yoshua Bengio

2017-10-30

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

Learning Independent Features with Adversarial Nets for Non-linear ICA

Philemon Brakel

Yoshua Bengio

Reliable measures of statistical dependence could potentially be useful tools for learning independent features and performing tasks like so… (see more)urce separation using Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Unfortunately, many of such measures, like the mutual information, are hard to estimate and optimize directly. We propose to learn independent features with adversarial objectives (Goodfellow et al. 2014, Arjovsky et al. 2017) which optimize such measures implicitly. These objectives compare samples from the joint distribution and the product of the marginals without the need to compute any probability densities. We also propose two methods for obtaining samples from the product of the marginals using either a simple resampling trick or a separate parametric distribution. Our experiments show that this strategy can easily be applied to different types of model architectures and solve both linear and non-linear ICA problems.

2017-10-13

ArXiv (preprint)

openreview.net

A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks

Devansh Arpit

Stanisław Jastrzębski

Maxinder S. Kanwal

We examine the role of memorization in deep learning, drawing connections to capacity, generalization, and adversarial robustness. While dee… (see more)p networks are capable of memorizing noise data, our results suggest that they tend to prioritize learning simple patterns first. In our experiments, we expose qualitative differences in gradient-based optimization of deep neural networks (DNNs) on noise vs. real data. We also demonstrate that for appropriately tuned explicit regularization (e.g., dropout) we can degrade DNN training performance on noise datasets without compromising generalization on real data. Our analysis suggests that the notions of effective capacity which are dataset independent are unlikely to explain the generalization performance of deep networks when trained with gradient based methods because training data itself plays an important role in determining the degree of memorization.

2017-07-17

Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks

Devansh Arpit

Stanisław Jastrzębski

Maxinder S. Kanwal

2017-06-16

ArXiv (preprint)

Deep Complex Networks

2017-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Deep Complex Networks

2017-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Deep Complex Networks

2017-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Deep Complex Networks

2017-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Deep Complex Networks

At present, the vast majority of building blocks, techniques, and architectures for deep learning are based on real-valued operations and re… (see more)presentations. However, recent work on recurrent neural networks and older fundamental theoretical analysis suggests that complex numbers could have a richer representational capacity and could also facilitate noise-robust memory retrieval mechanisms. Despite their attractive properties and potential for opening up entirely new neural architectures, complex-valued deep neural networks have been marginalized due to the absence of the building blocks required to design such models. In this work, we provide the key atomic components for complex-valued deep neural networks and apply them to convolutional feed-forward networks and convolutional LSTMs. More precisely, we rely on complex convolutions and present algorithms for complex batch-normalization, complex weight initialization strategies for complex-valued neural nets and we use them in experiments with end-to-end training schemes. We demonstrate that such complex-valued models are competitive with their real-valued counterparts. We test deep complex models on several computer vision tasks, on music transcription using the MusicNet dataset and on Speech Spectrum Prediction using the TIMIT dataset. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on these audio-related tasks.

2017-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)