Yoshua Bengio

jamal.abouhaibeh@mila.quebec

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

Jamal Abou Haibeh

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Rolnick

berkes.anais@mila.quebec

sanghyeok.choi@mila.quebec

Rim Assouel

Doctorat - UdeM

assouelr@mila.quebec

Xiaoyin Chen

Doctorat - UdeM

xiaoyin.chen@mila.quebec

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

Doctorat - UdeM

aniket.didolkar@mila.quebec

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

eric.elmoznino@mila.quebec

Doctorat - UdeM

lena-nehale.ezzine@mila.quebec

Jean-Pierre Falet

Doctorat - UdeM

jean-pierre.falet@mila.quebec

Doctorat

pietro.greiner@mila.quebec

Mohsin Hasan

Doctorat - UdeM

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

thomas.jiralerspong@mila.quebec

Moksh Jain

Doctorat - UdeM

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

younesse.kaddar@mila.quebec

Minsu Kim

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

minsu.kim@mila.quebec

Hyeonah Kim

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Alex Hernández-García

hyeonah.kim@mila.quebec

Jeongjae Lee

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KOREA ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

jeongjae.lee@mila.quebec

cristian-dragos.manta@mila.quebec

Song LIU

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - s.o.

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Cristian Dragos Manta

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sarthak Mittal

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM

nguyenph@mila.quebec

Ali Parviz

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

ali.parviz@mila.quebec

Lena Podina

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Rolnick

elena.podina@mila.quebec

jarrid.rector-brooks@mila.quebec

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Doctorat - UdeM

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorat - UdeM

danyal.rehman@mila.quebec

oliver.richardson@mila.quebec

Oli RICHARDSON

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Alex Hernández-García

divya.sharma@mila.quebec

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Alex Tong

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Cambridge

oszkar.urban@mila.quebec

donna.vakalis@mila.quebec

Donna Vakalis

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

David Rolnick

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Glen Berseth

siddarth.venkatraman@mila.quebec

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

joseph.viviano2@mila.quebec

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

esmeralda.whitammer@mila.quebec

Collaborateur·rice alumni

omar.younis@mila.quebec

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

taeyoung.yun@mila.quebec

Skipper : combiner l’abstraction spatiale et temporelle afin d’améliorer la généralisation

Tianyu Zhang

Doctorat - UdeM

tianyu.zhang@mila.quebec

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Harry Zhao

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Billets de blogue

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

22 février 2024

par

Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Doina Precup

Yoshua Bengio

Mise à l’échelle au service du raisonnement et de l’apprentissage automatique basé sur un modèle

Scaling in the service of reasoning & model-based ML

4 avril 2023

par

Yoshua Bengio

Edward J. Hu

Une collaboration entre Mila et Relation Therapeutics pour découvrir in vitro de nouvelles associations médicamenteuses synergiques

A collaboration between Mila and Relation Therapeutics to discover novel synergistic combinations of drugs in vitro

23 mars 2022

par

Paul Bertin

Jake P. Taylor-King

Yoshua Bengio

Les réseaux de flot génératifs

15 mars 2022

par

Yoshua Bengio

Publications

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 … (voir plus)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.

2024-05-14

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (publié)

arxiv.org

Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems

David Dalrymple

David

Joar Max Viktor Skalse

Stuart Russell

Max Tegmark

Sanjit A. Seshia

Steve Omohundro

Christian Szegedy

Ben Goldhaber

Nora Ammann

Alessandro Abate

Joe Halpern

Clark Barrett

Ding Zhao

Zhi-Xuan Tan

Jeannette Wing

Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Ensuring that AI systems reliably and robustly avoid harmful or dangerous behaviours is a crucial challenge, especially for AI systems with … (voir plus)a high degree of autonomy and general intelligence, or systems used in safety-critical contexts. In this paper, we will introduce and define a family of approaches to AI safety, which we will refer to as guaranteed safe (GS) AI. The core feature of these approaches is that they aim to produce AI systems which are equipped with high-assurance quantitative safety guarantees. This is achieved by the interplay of three core components: a world model (which provides a mathematical description of how the AI system affects the outside world), a safety specification (which is a mathematical description of what effects are acceptable), and a verifier (which provides an auditable proof certificate that the AI satisfies the safety specification relative to the world model). We outline a number of approaches for creating each of these three core components, describe the main technical challenges, and suggest a number of potential solutions to them. We also argue for the necessity of this approach to AI safety, and for the inadequacy of the main alternative approaches.

2024-05-09

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Amortizing Intractable Inference in Large Language Models

Edward J. Hu

Nikolay Malkin

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This l… (voir plus)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.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (oral))

Cycle Consistency Driven Object Discovery

Aniket Didolkar

Anirudh Goyal

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. … (voir plus)Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

Delta-AI: Local Objectives for Amortized Inference in Sparse Graphical Models

Jean-Pierre Falet

Hae Beom Lee

Nikolay Malkin

Chen Sun

We present a new algorithm for amortized inference in sparse probabilistic graphical models (PGMs), which we call …

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving Learning Signals Through Partial Trajectory Optimization

Dinghuai Zhang

Ricky T. Q. Chen

Cheng-Hao Liu

Aaron Courville

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine lear… (voir plus)ning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

Expected Flow Networks in Stochastic Environments and Two-Player Zero-Sum Games

Bilun Sun

Esmeralda S. Whitammer

Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are sequential sampling models trained to match a given distribution. GFlowNets have been successfully … (voir plus)applied to various structured object generation tasks, sampling a diverse set of high-reward objects quickly. We propose expected flow networks (EFlowNets), which extend GFlowNets to stochastic environments. We show that EFlowNets outperform other GFlowNet formulations in stochastic tasks such as protein design. We then extend the concept of EFlowNets to adversarial environments, proposing adversarial flow networks (AFlowNets) for two-player zero-sum games. We show that AFlowNets learn to find above 80% of optimal moves in Connect-4 via self-play and outperform AlphaZero in tournaments.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

Local Search GFlowNets

Sungsoo Ahn

Jinkyoo Park

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized sampling methods that learn a distribution over discrete objects proportional to their re… (voir plus)wards. GFlowNets exhibit a remarkable ability to generate diverse samples, yet occasionally struggle to consistently produce samples with high rewards due to over-exploration on wide sample space. This paper proposes to train GFlowNets with local search, which focuses on exploiting high-rewarded sample space to resolve this issue. Our main idea is to explore the local neighborhood via backtracking and reconstruction guided by backward and forward policies, respectively. This allows biasing the samples toward high-reward solutions, which is not possible for a typical GFlowNet solution generation scheme, which uses the forward policy to generate the solution from scratch. Extensive experiments demonstrate a remarkable performance improvement in several biochemical tasks. Source code is available: https://github.com/dbsxodud-11/ls_gfn.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (spotlight))

Object-Centric Architectures Enable Efficient Causal Representation Learning

Amin Mansouri

Jason Hartford

Yan Zhang

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees… (voir plus) (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

PhyloGFN: Phylogenetic Inference with Generative Flow Networks

Mingyang Zhou

Nikolay Malkin

Phylogenetics is a branch of computational biology that studies the evolutionary relationships among biological entities. Its long history a… (voir plus)nd numerous applications notwithstanding, inference of phylogenetic trees from sequence data remains challenging: the high complexity of tree space poses a significant obstacle for the current combinatorial and probabilistic techniques. In this paper, we adopt the framework of generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to tackle two core problems in phylogenetics: parsimony-based and Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Because GFlowNets are well-suited for sampling complex combinatorial structures, they are a natural choice for exploring and sampling from the multimodal posterior distribution over tree topologies and evolutionary distances. We demonstrate that our amortized posterior sampler, PhyloGFN, produces diverse and high-quality evolutionary hypotheses on real benchmark datasets. PhyloGFN is competitive with prior works in marginal likelihood estimation and achieves a closer fit to the target distribution than state-of-the-art variational inference methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zmy1116/phylogfn.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))

Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects fr… (voir plus)om a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (spotlight))

Tree Cross Attention

Leo Feng

Frederick Tung

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Cross Attention is a popular method for retrieving information from a set of context tokens for making predictions. At inference time, for e… (voir plus)ach prediction, Cross Attention scans the full set of

2024-05-06

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (poster))