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
Scientific Director, Leadership Team
Observer, Board of Directors, Mila

Biography

*For media requests, please write to medias@mila.quebec.

For more information please contact Julie Mongeau, executive assistant at julie.mongeau@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 director 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 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

Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
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Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Université Paris-Saclay
Principal supervisor :
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - MIT
PhD - École Polytechnique Montréal Fédérale de Lausanne
Research Intern - Université du Québec à Rimouski
Collaborating researcher
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
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Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
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Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - Technical University Munich (TUM)
Independent visiting researcher - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)
DESS - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - UQAR
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - Technical University of Munich
Research Intern - Imperial College London
PhD - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
PhD - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
PhD - McGill University
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Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher - Université de Montréal
Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Valence
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PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
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PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Independent visiting researcher
Co-supervisor :
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - McGill University
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)
Principal supervisor :
Undergraduate - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Research Intern - Université de Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Professional Master's - Université de Montréal
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Publications

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change
Shiva Madadkhani
Olivia Mendivil Ramos
Millie Chapman
Jesse Dunietz
Arthur Ouaknine
Machine learning and information theory concepts towards an AI Mathematician
Nikolay Malkin
The current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence is impressive, especially in terms of mastery of language, but not so much in terms … (see more)of mathematical reasoning. What could be missing? Can we learn something useful about that gap from how the brains of mathematicians go about their craft? This essay builds on the idea that current deep learning mostly succeeds at system 1 abilities -- which correspond to our intuition and habitual behaviors -- but still lacks something important regarding system 2 abilities -- which include reasoning and robust uncertainty estimation. It takes an information-theoretical posture to ask questions about what constitutes an interesting mathematical statement, which could guide future work in crafting an AI mathematician. The focus is not on proving a given theorem but on discovering new and interesting conjectures. The central hypothesis is that a desirable body of theorems better summarizes the set of all provable statements, for example by having a small description length while at the same time being close (in terms of number of derivation steps) to many provable statements.
Efficient Causal Graph Discovery Using Large Language Models
Thomas Jiralerspong
Xiaoyin Chen
Yash More
Vedant Shah
Towards DNA-Encoded Library Generation with GFlowNets
Michał Koziarski
Mohammed Abukalam
Vedant Shah
Louis Vaillancourt
Doris Alexandra Schuetz
Moksh J. Jain
Almer M. van der Sloot
Mathieu Bourgey
Anne Marinier
Sources of richness and ineffability for phenomenally conscious states
Xu Ji
Eric Elmoznino
George Deane
Axel Constant
Jonathan Simon
Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows
Dinghuai Zhang
Ling Pan
Ricky T. Q. Chen
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating com… (see more)plex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from reinforcement learning, the current GFlowNet framework is relatively limited in its applicability and cannot handle stochasticity in the reward function. In this work, we adopt a distributional paradigm for GFlowNets, turning each flow function into a distribution, thus providing more informative learning signals during training. By parameterizing each edge flow through their quantile functions, our proposed \textit{quantile matching} GFlowNet learning algorithm is able to learn a risk-sensitive policy, an essential component for handling scenarios with risk uncertainty. Moreover, we find that the distributional approach can achieve substantial improvement on existing benchmarks compared to prior methods due to our enhanced training algorithm, even in settings with deterministic rewards.
Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Girish Sastry
Lennart Heim
Haydn Belfield
Markus Anderljung
Miles Brundage
Julian Hazell
Cullen C. O'keefe
Gillian K. Hadfield
Richard Ngo
Konstantin Pilz
George Gor
Emma Bluemke
Sarah Shoker
Janet Egan
Robert F. Trager
Shahar Avin
Adrian Weller
Diane Coyle
Computing power, or"compute,"is crucial for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. As a result, govern… (see more)ments and companies have started to leverage compute as a means to govern AI. For example, governments are investing in domestic compute capacity, controlling the flow of compute to competing countries, and subsidizing compute access to certain sectors. However, these efforts only scratch the surface of how compute can be used to govern AI development and deployment. Relative to other key inputs to AI (data and algorithms), AI-relevant compute is a particularly effective point of intervention: it is detectable, excludable, and quantifiable, and is produced via an extremely concentrated supply chain. These characteristics, alongside the singular importance of compute for cutting-edge AI models, suggest that governing compute can contribute to achieving common policy objectives, such as ensuring the safety and beneficial use of AI. More precisely, policymakers could use compute to facilitate regulatory visibility of AI, allocate resources to promote beneficial outcomes, and enforce restrictions against irresponsible or malicious AI development and usage. However, while compute-based policies and technologies have the potential to assist in these areas, there is significant variation in their readiness for implementation. Some ideas are currently being piloted, while others are hindered by the need for fundamental research. Furthermore, naive or poorly scoped approaches to compute governance carry significant risks in areas like privacy, economic impacts, and centralization of power. We end by suggesting guardrails to minimize these risks from compute governance.
A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits
Walter Senn
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
Benjamin Ellenberger
Jakob Jordan
João Sacramento
Mihai A. Petrovici
One of the most fundamental laws of physics is the principle of least action. Motivated by its predictive power, we introduce a neuronal lea… (see more)st-action principle for cortical processing of sensory streams to produce appropriate behavioural outputs in real time. The principle postulates that the voltage dynamics of cortical pyramidal neurons prospectively minimize the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For motor output neurons, it implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies a prospective firing to overcome integration delays and correct for possible output errors right in time. The neuron-specific errors are extracted in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons through a cortical microcircuit that tries to explain away the feedback from the periphery, and correct the trajectory on the fly. Any motor output is in a moving equilibrium with the sensory inputs and the motor feedback during the whole sensory-motor trajectory. Ongoing synaptic plasticity reduces the somato-dendritic mismatch error within each cortical neuron and performs gradient descent on the output cost at any moment in time. The neuronal least-action principle offers an axiomatic framework to derive local neuronal and synaptic dynamics for global real-time computation and learning in the brain and in physical substrates in general.
Iterated Denoising Energy Matching for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities
Tara Akhound-Sadegh
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Joey Bose
Sarthak Mittal
Pablo Lemos
Cheng-Hao Liu
Marcin Sendera
Nikolay Malkin
Alexander Tong
Efficiently generating statistically independent samples from an unnormalized probability distribution, such as equilibrium samples of many-… (see more)body systems, is a foundational problem in science. In this paper, we propose Iterated Denoising Energy Matching (iDEM), an iterative algorithm that uses a novel stochastic score matching objective leveraging solely the energy function and its gradient -- and no data samples -- to train a diffusion-based sampler. Specifically, iDEM alternates between (I) sampling regions of high model density from a diffusion-based sampler and (II) using these samples in our stochastic matching objective to further improve the sampler. iDEM is scalable to high dimensions as the inner matching objective, is simulation-free, and requires no MCMC samples. Moreover, by leveraging the fast mode mixing behavior of diffusion, iDEM smooths out the energy landscape enabling efficient exploration and learning of an amortized sampler. We evaluate iDEM on a suite of tasks ranging from standard synthetic energy functions to invariant
On diffusion models for amortized inference: Benchmarking and improving stochastic control and sampling
Marcin Sendera
Minsu Kim
Sarthak Mittal
Pablo Lemos
Luca Scimeca
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Alexandre Adam
Nikolay Malkin
We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We ben… (see more)chmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational approaches and off-policy methods (continuous generative flow networks). Our results shed light on the relative advantages of existing algorithms while bringing into question some claims from past work. We also propose a novel exploration strategy for off-policy methods, based on local search in the target space with the use of a replay buffer, and show that it improves the quality of samples on a variety of target distributions. Our code for the sampling methods and benchmarks studied is made public at https://github.com/GFNOrg/gfn-diffusion as a base for future work on diffusion models for amortized inference.
Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
Edward J Hu
Moksh J. Jain
Eric Elmoznino
Younesse Kaddar
Nikolay Malkin
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This l… (see more)imits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.
Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Harry Zhao
Mingde Zhao
Safa Alver
Harm van Seijen
Romain Laroche
Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstracti… (see more)ons to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into smaller, more manageable subtasks, and thus enables sparse decision-making and focused computation on the relevant parts of the environment. The decomposition relies on the extraction of an abstracted proxy problem represented as a directed graph, in which vertices and edges are learned end-to-end from hindsight. Our theoretical analyses provide performance guarantees under appropriate assumptions and establish where our approach is expected to be helpful. Generalization-focused experiments validate Skipper’s significant advantage in zero-shot generalization, compared to some existing state-of-the-art hierarchical planning methods.