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

*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 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 :
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

A Complexity-Based Theory of Compositionality
Can Safety Fine-Tuning Be More Principled? Lessons Learned from Cybersecurity
David Williams-King
Adam Oberman
As LLMs develop increasingly advanced capabilities, there is an increased need to minimize the harm that could be caused to society by certa… (voir plus)in model outputs; hence, most LLMs have safety guardrails added, for example via fine-tuning. In this paper, we argue the position that current safety fine-tuning is very similar to a traditional cat-and-mouse game (or arms race) between attackers and defenders in cybersecurity. Model jailbreaks and attacks are patched with bandaids to target the specific attack mechanism, but many similar attack vectors might remain. When defenders are not proactively coming up with principled mechanisms, it becomes very easy for attackers to sidestep any new defenses. We show how current defenses are insufficient to prevent new adversarial jailbreak attacks, reward hacking, and loss of control problems. In order to learn from past mistakes in cybersecurity, we draw analogies with historical examples and develop lessons learned that can be applied to LLM safety. These arguments support the need for new and more principled approaches to designing safe models, which are architected for security from the beginning. We describe several such approaches from the AI literature.
Rejecting Hallucinated State Targets during Planning
Mingde “Harry” Zhao
Mingde “Harry” 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.
Object-Centric Temporal Consistency via Conditional Autoregressive Inductive Biases
Akihiro Nakano
Mircea Tudor Lică
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Masahiro Suzuki
Mengmi Zhang
Justin Dauwels
Yutaka Matsuo
AI-Assisted Generation of Difficult Math Questions
Dingli Yu
Kaifeng Lyu
Simon Park
Nan Rosemary Ke
Jiatong Yu
Yinghui He
Michael Curtis Mozer
James Lloyd McClelland
Sanjeev Arora
Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet dem… (voir plus)and for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core"skills"from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an"out of distribution"task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH
VCR: A Task for Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Restoring Occluded Text
We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured … (voir plus)texts using pixel-level hints within images. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images is intrinsically different from common visual elements and natural language due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While numerous works have integrated text embedded in images into visual question-answering tasks, approaches to these tasks generally rely on optical character recognition or masked language modeling, thus reducing the task to mainly text-based processing. However, text-based processing becomes ineffective in VCR as accurate text restoration depends on the combined information from provided images, context, and subtle cues from the tiny exposed areas of masked texts. We develop a pipeline to generate synthetic images for the VCR task using image-caption pairs, with adjustable caption visibility to control the task difficulty. With this pipeline, we construct a dataset for VCR called VCR-Wiki using images with captions from Wikipedia, comprising 2.11M English and 346K Chinese entities in both easy and hard split variants. Our results reveal that current vision language models significantly lag behind human performance in the VCR task, and merely fine-tuning the models on our dataset does not lead to notable improvements. We release VCR-Wiki and the data construction code to facilitate future research.
Path-filtering in path-integral simulations of open quantum systems using GFlowNets
An important class of methods for modeling dynamics in open quantum systems is based on the well-known influence functional (IF) approach to… (voir plus) solving path-integral equations of motion. Within this paradigm, path-filtering schemes based on the removal of IF elements that fall below a certain threshold aim to reduce the effort needed to calculate and store the influence functional, making very challenging simulations possible. A filtering protocol of this type is considered acceptable as long as the simulation remains mathematically stable. This, however, does not guarantee that the approximated dynamics preserve the physics of the simulated process. In this paper, we explore the possibility of training Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to produce filtering protocols while optimizing for mathematical stability and for physical accuracy. Trained using the trajectory balance objective, the model produces sets of paths to be added to a truncated initial set; it is rewarded if the combined set of paths gives rise to solutions in which the trace of the density matrix is conserved, the populations remain real, and the dynamics approach the exact reference. Using a simple two-level system coupled to a dissipative reservoir, we perform proof-of-concept simulations and demonstrate the elegant and surprising filtering solutions proposed by the GFlowNet.
Were RNNs All We Needed?
Frederick Tung
Mohamed Osama Ahmed
Hossein Hajimirsadeghi
The introduction of Transformers in 2017 reshaped the landscape of deep learning. Originally proposed for sequence modelling, Transformers h… (voir plus)ave since achieved widespread success across various domains. However, the scalability limitations of Transformers - particularly with respect to sequence length - have sparked renewed interest in novel recurrent models that are parallelizable during training, offer comparable performance, and scale more effectively. In this work, we revisit sequence modelling from a historical perspective, focusing on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which dominated the field for two decades before the rise of Transformers. Specifically, we examine LSTMs (1997) and GRUs (2014). We demonstrate that by simplifying these models, we can derive minimal versions (minLSTMs and minGRUs) that (1) use fewer parameters than their traditional counterparts, (2) are fully parallelizable during training, and (3) achieve surprisingly competitive performance on a range of tasks, rivalling recent models including Transformers.
Were RNNs All We Needed?
Frederick Tung
Mohamed Osama Ahmed
Hossein Hajimirsadeghi
MAP: Model Merging with Amortized Pareto Front Using Limited Computation
Li Li
Zhiqi Bu
Huan He
Yonghui Wu
Jiang Bian
Yong Chen
Amortizing intractable inference in diffusion models for vision, language, and control
Diffusion models have emerged as effective distribution estimators in vision, language, and reinforcement learning, but their use as priors … (voir plus)in downstream tasks poses an intractable posterior inference problem. This paper studies amortized sampling of the posterior over data,
Improved off-policy training of diffusion samplers
We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We ben… (voir plus)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.