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

Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Mingde Zhao
Harm van Seijen
Romain Laroche
Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstracti… (voir plus)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.
blocks: Version 0.2.0
A Theano framework for building and training neural networks
Generative Active Learning for the Search of Small-Molecule Protein Binders
Cheng-Hao Liu
Éric Jolicoeur
Edward Ruediger
Andrei Nica
Daniel St-Cyr
Doris Alexandra Schuetz
Victor Ion Butoi
Saikrishna Gottipati
Prateek Gupta
Sasikanth Avancha
William Hamilton
Brooks Paige
Sanchit Misra
Bharat Kaul
José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Marwin Segler
Michael Bronstein
Anne Marinier
Mike Tyers
Despite substantial progress in machine learning for scientific discovery in recent years, truly de novo design of small molecules which exh… (voir plus)ibit a property of interest remains a significant challenge. We introduce LambdaZero, a generative active learning approach to search for synthesizable molecules. Powered by deep reinforcement learning, LambdaZero learns to search over the vast space of molecules to discover candidates with a desired property. We apply LambdaZero with molecular docking to design novel small molecules that inhibit the enzyme soluble Epoxide Hydrolase 2 (sEH), while enforcing constraints on synthesizability and drug-likeliness. LambdaZero provides an exponential speedup in terms of the number of calls to the expensive molecular docking oracle, and LambdaZero de novo designed molecules reach docking scores that would otherwise require the virtual screening of a hundred billion molecules. Importantly, LambdaZero discovers novel scaffolds of synthesizable, drug-like inhibitors for sEH. In in vitro experimental validation, a series of ligands from a generated quinazoline-based scaffold were synthesized, and the lead inhibitor N-(4,6-di(pyrrolidin-1-yl)quinazolin-2-yl)-N-methylbenzamide (UM0152893) displayed sub-micromolar enzyme inhibition of sEH.
Speech Model Pre-training for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding
Patrick Ignoto
Vikrant Singh Tomar
Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map spe… (voir plus)ech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these end-to-end models without a large amount of training data is difficult. We propose a method to reduce the data requirements of end-to-end SLU in which the model is first pre-trained to predict words and phonemes, thus learning good features for SLU. We introduce a new SLU dataset, Fluent Speech Commands, and show that our method improves performance both when the full dataset is used for training and when only a small subset is used. We also describe preliminary experiments to gauge the model's ability to generalize to new phrases not heard during training.
Towards equilibrium molecular conformation generation with GFlowNets
Cheng-Hao Liu
Santiago Miret
Luca Thiede
Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Sampling diverse, thermodynamically feasible molecular conformations plays a crucial role in predicting properties of a molecule. In this pa… (voir plus)per we propose to use GFlowNet for sampling conformations of small molecules from the Boltzmann distribution, as determined by the molecule's energy. The proposed approach can be used in combination with energy estimation methods of different fidelity and discovers a diverse set of low-energy conformations for highly flexible drug-like molecules. We demonstrate that GFlowNet can reproduce molecular potential energy surfaces by sampling proportionally to the Boltzmann distribution.
Contrastive Retrospection: honing in on critical steps for rapid learning and generalization in RL
In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. T… (voir plus)hese critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods that rely on the Bellman equation for credit assignment. Here, we present a new RL algorithm that uses offline contrastive learning to hone in on these critical steps. This algorithm, which we call Contrastive Retrospection (ConSpec), can be added to any existing RL algorithm. ConSpec learns a set of prototypes for the critical steps in a task by a novel contrastive loss and delivers an intrinsic reward when the current state matches one of the prototypes. The prototypes in ConSpec provide two key benefits for credit assignment: (i) They enable rapid identification of all the critical steps. (ii) They do so in a readily interpretable manner, enabling out-of-distribution generalization when sensory features are altered. Distinct from other contemporary RL approaches to credit assignment, ConSpec takes advantage of the fact that it is easier to retrospectively identify the small set of steps that success is contingent upon (and ignoring other states) than it is to prospectively predict reward at every taken step. ConSpec greatly improves learning in a diverse set of RL tasks. The code is available at the link: https://github.com/sunchipsster1/ConSpec
DynGFN: Towards Bayesian Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with GFlowNets
Bo Wang
Leo J. Lee
Jason Hartford
One of the grand challenges of cell biology is inferring the gene regulatory network (GRN) which describes interactions between genes and th… (voir plus)eir products that control gene expression and cellular function. We can treat this as a causal discovery problem but with two non-standard challenges: (1) regulatory networks are inherently cyclic so we should not model a GRN as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and (2) observations have significant measurement noise, so for typical sample sizes there will always be a large equivalence class of graphs that are likely given the data, and we want methods that capture this uncertainty. Existing methods either focus on challenge (1), identifying cyclic structure from dynamics, or on challenge (2) learning complex Bayesian posteriors over DAGs, but not both. In this paper we leverage the fact that it is possible to estimate the "velocity" of gene expression with RNA velocity techniques to develop an approach that addresses both challenges. Because we have access to velocity information, we can treat the Bayesian structure learning problem as a problem of sparse identification of a dynamical system, capturing cyclic feedback loops through time. Since our objective is to model uncertainty over discrete structures, we leverage Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to estimate the posterior distribution over the combinatorial space of possible sparse dependencies. Our results indicate that our method learns posteriors that better encapsulate the distributions of cyclic structures compared to counterpart state-of-the-art Bayesian structure learning approaches.
GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring
Alexandre Lacoste
Nils Lehmann
Pau Rodríguez
Evan David Sherwin
Hannah Kerner
Björn Lütjens
Jeremy Irvin
David Dao
Hamed Alemohammad
Mehmet Gunturkun
Dava Newman
Stefano Ermon
Xiao Xiang Zhu
Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to subst… (voir plus)antial increases in generalization to downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models. We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Geometric GNNs for 3D Atomic Systems
Alexandre AGM Duval
Simon V. Mathis
Chaitanya K. Joshi
Santiago Miret
Fragkiskos D. Malliaros
Taco Cohen
Pietro Lio’
Michael M. Bronstein
Improving day-ahead Solar Irradiance Time Series Forecasting by Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Context
Solar power harbors immense potential in mitigating climate change by substantially reducing CO…
Joint Bayesian Inference of Graphical Structure and Parameters with a Single Generative Flow Network
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a class of generative models over discrete and structured sample spaces, have been previously applied … (voir plus)to the problem of inferring the marginal posterior distribution over the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of a Bayesian Network, given a dataset of observations. Based on recent advances extending this framework to non-discrete sample spaces, we propose in this paper to approximate the joint posterior over not only the structure of a Bayesian Network, but also the parameters of its conditional probability distributions. We use a single GFlowNet whose sampling policy follows a two-phase process: the DAG is first generated sequentially one edge at a time, and then the corresponding parameters are picked once the full structure is known. Since the parameters are included in the posterior distribution, this leaves more flexibility for the local probability models of the Bayesian Network, making our approach applicable even to non-linear models parametrized by neural networks. We show that our method, called JSP-GFN, offers an accurate approximation of the joint posterior, while comparing favorably against existing methods on both simulated and real data.
Let the Flows Tell: Solving Graph Combinatorial Optimization Problems with GFlowNets