Portrait de Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur titulaire, Université de Montréal
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Causalité
Modèles génératifs
Modèles probabilistes
Modélisation moléculaire
Neurosciences computationnelles
Raisonnement
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Réseaux de neurones récurrents
Théorie de l'apprentissage automatique
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

*Pour toute demande média, veuillez écrire à medias@mila.quebec.

Pour plus d’information, contactez Cassidy MacNeil, adjointe principale et responsable des opérations cassidy.macneil@mila.quebec.

Reconnu comme une sommité mondiale en intelligence artificielle, Yoshua Bengio s’est surtout distingué par son rôle de pionnier en apprentissage profond, ce qui lui a valu le prix A. M. Turing 2018, le « prix Nobel de l’informatique », avec Geoffrey Hinton et Yann LeCun. Il est professeur titulaire à l’Université de Montréal, fondateur et conseiller scientifique de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, et codirige en tant que senior fellow le programme Apprentissage automatique, apprentissage biologique de l'Institut canadien de recherches avancées (CIFAR). Il occupe également la fonction de conseiller spécial et directeur scientifique fondateur d’IVADO.

En 2018, il a été l’informaticien qui a recueilli le plus grand nombre de nouvelles citations au monde. En 2019, il s’est vu décerner le prestigieux prix Killam. Depuis 2022, il détient le plus grand facteur d’impact (h-index) en informatique à l’échelle mondiale. Il est fellow de la Royal Society de Londres et de la Société royale du Canada, et officier de l’Ordre du Canada.

Soucieux des répercussions sociales de l’IA et de l’objectif que l’IA bénéficie à tous, il a contribué activement à la Déclaration de Montréal pour un développement responsable de l’intelligence artificielle.

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KOREA ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - s.o.
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Cambridge
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models
Ruiming Zhu
Zixuan Wang
Kai Hua
Ziniu Li
Haoran Que
Boyi Wei
Zixin Wen
Fan Yin
He Xing
Li Li
Jiajun Shi
Kaijing Ma
Shanda Li
Taylor Kergan
Andrew C. Smith
Xin Qu
Mude Hui
Bohong Wu
Qiyang Min … (voir 13 de plus)
Hongzhi Huang
Xun Zhou
Wei Ye
Jiaheng Liu
Jian Yang 0030
Yunfeng Shi
Chenghua Lin
Enduo Zhao
Tianle Cai
Ge Zhang
Jason K. Eshraghian
Modern LLMs are trained to"think"primarily via explicit text generation, such as chain-of-thought (CoT), which defers reasoning to post-trai… (voir plus)ning and under-leverages pre-training data. We present and open-source Ouro, named after the recursive Ouroboros, a family of pre-trained Looped Language Models (LoopLM) that instead build reasoning into the pre-training phase through (i) iterative computation in latent space, (ii) an entropy-regularized objective for learned depth allocation, and (iii) scaling to 7.7T tokens. Ouro 1.4B and 2.6B models enjoy superior performance that match the results of up to 12B SOTA LLMs across a wide range of benchmarks. Through controlled experiments, we show this advantage stems not from increased knowledge capacity, but from superior knowledge manipulation capabilities. We also show that LoopLM yields reasoning traces more aligned with final outputs than explicit CoT. We hope our results show the potential of LoopLM as a novel scaling direction in the reasoning era. Our model is available here: http://ouro-llm.github.io.
Deep-learning-based virtual screening of antibacterial compounds
Gabriele Scalia
Steven T. Rutherford
Ziqing Lu
Kerry R. Buchholz
Nicholas Skelton
Kangway Chuang
Nathaniel Diamant
Jan-Christian Hütter
Jerome-Maxim Luescher
Anh Miu
Jeff Blaney
Leo Gendelev
Elizabeth Skippington
Greg Zynda
Nia Dickson
Aviv Regev
Man-Wah Tan
Tommaso Biancalani
Surrogate-based quantification of policy uncertainty in generative flow networks
Ram'on Nartallo-Kaluarachchi
Robert Manson-Sawko
Shashanka Ubaru
Dongsung Huh
Malgorzata J. Zimo'n
Lior Horesh
International AI Safety Report 2025: First Key Update: Capabilities and Risk Implications
Stephen Clare
Carina Prunkl
Maksym Andriushchenko
BEN BUCKNALL
Philip Fox
Tiancheng Hu
Cameron Jones
Sam Manning
Nestor Maslej
Vasilios Mavroudis
Conor McGlynn
Malcolm Murray
Charlotte Stix
Lucia Velasco
Nicole Wheeler
Daniel Privitera
Daron Acemoglu … (voir 36 de plus)
Thomas G. Dietterich
Fredrik Heintz
Geoffrey Hinton
Nick Jennings
Susan Leavy
Teresa Ludermir
Vidushi Marda
Helen Margetts
John McDermid
Jane Munga
Arvind Narayanan
Alondra Nelson
Clara Neppel
Sarvapali D. (Gopal) Ramchurn
Stuart Russell
Marietje Schaake
Bernhard Schölkopf
Alvaro Soto
Lee Tiedrich
Andrew Yao
Ya-Qin Zhang
Lambrini Das
Claire Dennis
Arianna Dini
Freya Hempleman
Samuel Kenny
Patrick King
Hannah Merchant
Jamie-Day Rawal
Rose Woolhouse
Jonathan Barry
Benjamin Prud’homme
Since the publication of the first International AI Safety Report, AI capabilities have continued to improve across key domains. New trainin… (voir plus)g techniques that teach AI systems to reason step-by-step and inference-time enhancements have primarily driven these advances, rather than simply training larger models. As a result, general-purpose AI systems can solve more complex problems in a range of domains, from scientific research to software development. Their performance on benchmarks that measure performance in coding, mathematics, and answering expert-level science questions has continued to improve, though reliability challenges persist, with systems excelling on some tasks while failing completely on others. These capability improvements also have implications for multiple risks, including risks from biological weapons and cyber attacks. Finally, they pose new challenges for monitoring and controllability. This update examines how AI capabilities have improved since the first Report, then focuses on key risk areas where substantial new evidence warrants updated assessments.
Learning What Matters: Steering Diffusion via Spectrally Anisotropic Forward Noise
Berton Earnshaw
Jason Hartford
Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion for System 2 Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Doojin Baek
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful tool for planning. However, unlike Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-whose performance nat… (voir plus)urally improves with inference-time computation scaling-standard diffusion-based planners offer only limited avenues for the scalability. In this paper, we introduce Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD), a novel framework that integrates the generative strength of diffusion models with the adaptive search capabilities of MCTS. Our method reconceptualizes denoising as a tree-structured process, allowing partially denoised plans to be iteratively evaluated, pruned, and refined. By selectively expanding promising trajectories while retaining the flexibility to revisit and improve suboptimal branches, MCTD achieves the benefits of MCTS such as controlling exploration-exploitation trade-offs within the diffusion framework. Empirical results on challenging long-horizon tasks show that MCTD outperforms diffusion baselines, yielding higher-quality solutions as inference-time computation increases.
Rejecting Hallucinated State Targets during Planning
Mingde Zhao
Romain Laroche
In planning processes of computational decision-making agents, generative or predictive models are often used as "generators" to propose "ta… (voir plus)rgets" representing sets of expected or desirable states. Unfortunately, learned models inevitably hallucinate infeasible targets that can cause delusional behaviors and safety concerns. We first investigate the kinds of infeasible targets that generators can hallucinate. Then, we devise a strategy to identify and reject infeasible targets by learning a target feasibility evaluator. To ensure that the evaluator is robust and non-delusional, we adopted a design choice combining off-policy compatible learning rule, distributional architecture, and data augmentation based on hindsight relabeling. Attaching to a planning agent, the designed evaluator learns by observing the agent's interactions with the environment and the targets produced by its generator, without the need to change the agent or its generator. Our controlled experiments show significant reductions in delusional behaviors and performance improvements for various kinds of existing agents.
Towards a Formal Theory of Representational Compositionality
HVAC-SPICE: Value-Uncertainty In-Context RL with Thompson Sampling for Zero-Shot HVAC Control
Urban buildings consume 40\% of global energy, yet most rely on inefficient rule-based HVAC systems due to the impracticality of deploying a… (voir plus)dvanced controllers across diverse building stock. In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) offers promise for rapid deployment without per-building training, but standard supervised learning objectives that maximise likelihood of training actions inherit behaviour-policy bias and provide weak exploration under the distribution shifts common when transferring across buildings and climates. We present SPICE (Sampling Policies In-Context with Ensemble uncertainty), a novel ICRL method specifically designed for zero-shot building control that addresses these fundamental limitations. SPICE introduces two key methodological innovations: (i) a propensity-corrected, return-aware training objective that prioritises high-advantage, high-uncertainty actions to enable improvement beyond suboptimal training demonstrations, and (ii) lightweight value ensembles with randomised priors that provide explicit uncertainty estimates for principled episode-level Thompson sampling. At deployment, SPICE samples one value head per episode and acts greedily, resulting in temporally coherent exploration without test-time gradients or building-specific models. We establish a comprehensive experimental protocol using the HOT dataset to evaluate SPICE across diverse building types and climate zones, focusing on the energy efficiency, occupant comfort, and zero-shot transfer capabilities that are critical for urban-scale deployment.
Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models
Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.
Active Attacks: Red-teaming LLMs via Adaptive Environments
Pierre-Luc St-Charles
Jinkyoo Park
Graph Dreamer: Temporal Graph World Models for Sample-Efficient and Generalisable Reinforcement Learning