Portrait de Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur titulaire, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Fondateur et Conseiller scientifique, Équipe de direction
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

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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 alumni - McGill
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

Diversifying Design of Nucleic Acid Aptamers Using Unsupervised Machine Learning
Siba Moussa
Michael Kilgour
Clara Jans
Miroslava Cuperlovic‐culf
On the Generalization and Adaption Performance of Causal Models
Biological Sequence Design with GFlowNets
Alex-Hernandez Garcia
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou
Chanakya Ekbote
Michael Kilgour
Payel Das
Design of de novo biological sequences with desired properties, like protein and DNA sequences, often involves an active loop with several r… (voir plus)ounds of molecule ideation and expensive wet-lab evaluations. These experiments can consist of multiple stages, with increasing levels of precision and cost of evaluation, where candidates are filtered. This makes the diversity of proposed candidates a key consideration in the ideation phase. In this work, we propose an active learning algorithm leveraging epistemic uncertainty estimation and the recently proposed GFlowNets as a generator of diverse candidate solutions, with the objective to obtain a diverse batch of useful (as defined by some utility function, for example, the predicted anti-microbial activity of a peptide) and informative candidates after each round. We also propose a scheme to incorporate existing labeled datasets of candidates, in addition to a reward function, to speed up learning in GFlowNets. We present empirical results on several biological sequence design tasks, and we find that our method generates more diverse and novel batches with high scoring candidates compared to existing approaches.
Building Robust Ensembles via Margin Boosting
Hongyang R. Zhang
Pradeep Ravikumar
Arun Sai Suggala
In the context of adversarial robustness, a single model does not usually have enough power to defend against all possible adversarial attac… (voir plus)ks, and as a result, has sub-optimal robustness. Consequently, an emerging line of work has focused on learning an ensemble of neural networks to defend against adversarial attacks. In this work, we take a principled approach towards building robust ensembles. We view this problem from the perspective of margin-boosting and develop an algorithm for learning an ensemble with maximum margin. Through extensive empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets, we show that our algorithm not only outperforms existing ensembling techniques, but also large models trained in an end-to-end fashion. An important byproduct of our work is a margin-maximizing cross-entropy (MCE) loss, which is a better alternative to the standard cross-entropy (CE) loss. Empirically, we show that replacing the CE loss in state-of-the-art adversarial training techniques with our MCE loss leads to significant performance improvement.
Generative Flow Networks for Discrete Probabilistic Modeling
We present energy-based generative flow networks (EB-GFN), a novel probabilistic modeling algorithm for high-dimensional discrete data. Buil… (voir plus)ding upon the theory of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we model the generation process by a stochastic data construction policy and thus amortize expensive MCMC exploration into a fixed number of actions sampled from a GFlowNet. We show how GFlowNets can approximately perform large-block Gibbs sampling to mix between modes. We propose a framework to jointly train a GFlowNet with an energy function, so that the GFlowNet learns to sample from the energy distribution, while the energy learns with an approximate MLE objective with negative samples from the GFlowNet. We demonstrate EB-GFN's effectiveness on various probabilistic modeling tasks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zdhNarsil/EB_GFN.
Multi-scale Feature Learning Dynamics: Insights for Double Descent
A key challenge in building theoretical foundations for deep learning is the complex optimization dynamics of neural networks, resulting fro… (voir plus)m the high-dimensional interactions between the large number of network parameters. Such non-trivial dynamics lead to intriguing behaviors such as the phenomenon of "double descent" of the generalization error. The more commonly studied aspect of this phenomenon corresponds to model-wise double descent where the test error exhibits a second descent with increasing model complexity, beyond the classical U-shaped error curve. In this work, we investigate the origins of the less studied epoch-wise double descent in which the test error undergoes two non-monotonous transitions, or descents as the training time increases. By leveraging tools from statistical physics, we study a linear teacher-student setup exhibiting epoch-wise double descent similar to that in deep neural networks. In this setting, we derive closed-form analytical expressions for the evolution of generalization error over training. We find that double descent can be attributed to distinct features being learned at different scales: as fast-learning features overfit, slower-learning features start to fit, resulting in a second descent in test error. We validate our findings through numerical experiments where our theory accurately predicts empirical findings and remains consistent with observations in deep neural networks.
Towards Scaling Difference Target Propagation by Learning Backprop Targets
The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to… (voir plus) scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains. As such, it is important to explore learning algorithms that come with strong theoretical guarantees and can match the performance of backpropagation (BP) on complex tasks. One such algorithm is Difference Target Propagation (DTP), a biologically-plausible learning algorithm whose close relation with Gauss-Newton (GN) optimization has been recently established. However, the conditions under which this connection rigorously holds preclude layer-wise training of the feedback pathway synaptic weights (which is more biologically plausible). Moreover, good alignment between DTP weight updates and loss gradients is only loosely guaranteed and under very specific conditions for the architecture being trained. In this paper, we propose a novel feedback weight training scheme that ensures both that DTP approximates BP and that layer-wise feedback weight training can be restored without sacrificing any theoretical guarantees. Our theory is corroborated by experimental results and we report the best performance ever achieved by DTP on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32
VIM: Variational Independent Modules for Video Prediction
YOUR AUTOREGRESSIVE GENERATIVE MODEL CAN BE BETTER IF YOU TREAT IT AS AN ENERGY-BASED ONE
Yezhen Wang
Tong Che
Bin Li
Kaitao Song
Hengzhi Pei
Dongsheng Li
On Neural Architecture Inductive Biases for Relational Tasks
Current deep learning approaches have shown good in-distribution generalization performance, but struggle with out-of-distribution generaliz… (voir plus)ation. This is especially true in the case of tasks involving abstract relations like recognizing rules in sequences, as we find in many intelligence tests. Recent work has explored how forcing relational representations to remain distinct from sensory representations, as it seems to be the case in the brain, can help artificial systems. Building on this work, we further explore and formalize the advantages afforded by 'partitioned' representations of relations and sensory details, and how this inductive bias can help recompose learned relational structure in newly encountered settings. We introduce a simple architecture based on similarity scores which we name Compositional Relational Network (CoRelNet). Using this model, we investigate a series of inductive biases that ensure abstract relations are learned and represented distinctly from sensory data, and explore their effects on out-of-distribution generalization for a series of relational psychophysics tasks. We find that simple architectural choices can outperform existing models in out-of-distribution generalization. Together, these results show that partitioning relational representations from other information streams may be a simple way to augment existing network architectures' robustness when performing out-of-distribution relational computations.
Agnostic Physics-Driven Deep Learning
Siddhartha Mishra
Yann Ollivier
Coordinating Policies Among Multiple Agents via an Intelligent Communication Channel
Dianbo Liu
Tianmin Shu
Michael Curtis Mozer
Nicolas Heess
In Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), specialized channels are often introduced that allow agents to communicate directly with one a… (voir plus)nother. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach whereby agents communicate through an intelligent facilitator that learns to sift through and interpret signals provided by all agents to improve the agents’ collective performance. To ensure that this facilitator does not become a centralized controller, agents are incentivized to reduce their dependence on the messages it conveys, and the messages can only influence the selection of a policy from a fixed set, not instantaneous actions given the policy. We demonstrate the strength of this architecture over existing baselines on several cooperative MARL environments.