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 Marie-Josée Beauchamp, adjointe administrative à marie-josee.beauchamp@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 alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - 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
Doctorat - University of Waterloo
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems
Doctorat - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Technical University of Munich
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

VCR: Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning by Restoring Occluded Text
Tianyu Zhang
Suyuchen Wang
Lu Li
Ge Zhang
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Jie Fu
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 through complex reasoning. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images intrinsically differs from common visual elements and text due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While many works incorporate text into images for visual question answering, they mostly rely on OCR or masked language modeling, reducing the task to 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 VCR-WIKI for VCR using Wikipedia images with captions, including 2.11M English and 346K Chinese training entities, plus 5K validation and 5K test entities in both languages, each in easy and hard configurations. We also make a hidden test set, VCR-HIDDEN, to avoid potential overfitting on VCR-WIKI. 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.
VCR: A Task for Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Restoring Occluded Text
Tianyu Zhang
Suyuchen Wang
Lu Li
Ge Zhang
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Jie Fu
VCR: A Task for Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Restoring Occluded Text
Tianyu Zhang
Suyuchen Wang
Lu Li
Ge Zhang
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Jie Fu
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 through complex reasoning. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images intrinsically differs from common visual elements and text due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While many works incorporate text into images for visual question answering, they mostly rely on OCR or masked language modeling, reducing the task to 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 VCR-WIKI for VCR using Wikipedia images with captions, including 2.11M English and 346K Chinese training entities, plus 5K validation and 5K test entities in both languages, each in easy and hard configurations. We also make a hidden test set, VCR-HIDDEN, to avoid potential overfitting on VCR-WIKI. 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.
Can Safety Fine-Tuning Be More Principled? Lessons Learned from Cybersecurity
David Williams-King
Linh Le
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.
EarthView: A Large Scale Remote Sensing Dataset for Self-Supervision
Diego Velazquez
Pau Rodriguez
Sergio Alonso
Josep M. Gonfaus
Jordi Gonzàlez 0001
Gerardo Richarte
Javier Marin
Alexandre Lacoste
This paper presents EarthView, a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for self-supervision on remote sensing data, intended to enhanc… (voir plus)e deep learning applications on Earth monitoring tasks. The dataset spans 15 tera pixels of global remote-sensing data, combining imagery from a diverse range of sources, including NEON, Sentinel, and a novel release of 1m spatial resolution data from Satellogic. Our dataset provides a wide spectrum of image data with varying resolutions, harnessed from different sensors and organized coherently into an accessible HuggingFace dataset in parquet format. This data spans five years, from 2017 to 2022. Accompanying the dataset, we introduce EarthMAE, a tailored Masked Autoencoder, developed to tackle the distinct challenges of remote sensing data. Trained in a self-supervised fashion, EarthMAE effectively processes different data modalities such as hyperspectral, multispectral, topographical data, segmentation maps, and temporal structure. This model helps us show that pre-training on Satellogic data improves performance on downstream tasks. While there is still a gap to fill in MAE for heterogeneous data, we regard this innovative combination of an expansive, diverse dataset and a versatile model adapted for self-supervised learning as a stride forward in deep learning for Earth monitoring.
ICLR 2025 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Data-Centric Approaches in ML for Climate Action
Konstantin Klemmer
Melissa Chapman
Lily Xu
Poon Kin Ho
Mélisande Teng
Patrick Emami
Climate change is one of the greatest problems society has ever faced, with increasingly severe consequences for humanity as natural disaste… (voir plus)rs multiply, sea levels rise, and ecosystems falter. While no silver bullet, machine learning can be an invaluable tool in fighting climate change via a wide array of applications and techniques, from designing smart electric grids to tracking greenhouse gas emissions through satellite imagery. These applications require algorithmic innovations in machine learning and close collaboration with diverse fields and practitioners. This workshop is intended as a forum for those in the global machine learning community who wish to help tackle climate change, and is further aimed to help foster cross-pollination between researchers in machine learning and experts in complementary climate-relevant fields. Building on our past workshops on this topic, this workshop particularly aims to explore data-centric ML approaches for climate action. Data-centric ML is not only a timely topic within the ICLR community, as analyzing and engineering (pre)training datasets becomes increasingly important, but holds specific challenges and opportunities in climate-related areas. We also want to take the opportunity of ICLR being hosted in Singapore to engage with local communities and shine a light on work that deploys, analyzes or critiques ML methods and their use for climate change adaptation and mitigation on the Asian continent.
Integrating Generative and Experimental Platforms for Biomolecular Design
Cheng-Hao Liu
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Soojung Yang
Sidney L Lisanza
Francesca-Zhoufan Li
Hannes Stärk
Jacob Gershon
Lauren Hong
Pranam Chatterjee
Tommi Jaakkola
Regina Barzilay
David Baker
Frances H. Arnold
Biomolecular design, through artificial engineering of proteins, ligands, and nucleic acids, holds immense promise in addressing pressing me… (voir plus)dical, industrial, and environmental challenges. While generative machine learning has shown significant potential in this area, a palpable disconnect exists with experimental biology: many ML research efforts prioritize static benchmark performance, potentially sidelining impactful biological applications. This workshop seeks to bridge this gap by bringing computationalists and experimentalists together, catalyzing a deeper interdisciplinary discourse. Together, we will explore the strengths and challenges of generative ML in biology, experimental integration of generative ML, and biological problems ready for ML. To attract high-quality and diverse research, we partnered with Nature Biotechnology for a special collection, and we created dedicated tracks for in-silico ML research and hybrid ML-experimental biology research. Our lineup features emerging leaders as speakers and renowned scientists as panelists, encapsulating a spectrum from high-throughput experimentation and computational biology to generative ML. With a diverse organizing team and backed by industry sponsors, we dedicate the workshop to pushing the boundaries of ML's role in biology.
Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony: Decoupling Exploration and Learning for Fast, Scalable LLM Post-Training
Brian R. Bartoldson
Siddarth Venkatraman
James Diffenderfer
Moksh J. Jain
Tal Ben-Nun
Seanie Lee
Minsu Kim
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Bhavya Kailkhura
Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony: Decoupling Exploration and Learning for Fast, Scalable LLM Post-Training
Brian R. Bartoldson
Siddarth Venkatraman
James Diffenderfer
Moksh J. Jain
Tal Ben-Nun
Seanie Lee
Minsu Kim
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Bhavya Kailkhura
A neuronal least-action principle for real-time learning in cortical circuits
Walter Senn
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
Benjamin Ellenberger
Jakob Jordan
João Sacramento
Mihai A. Petrovici
One of the most fundamental laws of physics is the principle of least action. Motivated by its predictive power, we introduce a neuronal lea… (voir plus)st-action principle for cortical processing of sensory streams to produce appropriate behavioural outputs in real time. The principle postulates that the voltage dynamics of cortical pyramidal neurons prospectively minimize the local somato-dendritic mismatch error within individual neurons. For motor output neurons, it implies minimizing an instantaneous behavioural error. For deep network neurons, it implies a prospective firing to overcome integration delays and correct for possible output errors right in time. The neuron-specific errors are extracted in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons through a cortical microcircuit that tries to explain away the feedback from the periphery, and correct the trajectory on the fly. Any motor output is in a moving equilibrium with the sensory inputs and the motor feedback during the whole sensory-motor trajectory. Ongoing synaptic plasticity reduces the somato-dendritic mismatch error within each cortical neuron and performs gradient descent on the output cost at any moment in time. The neuronal least-action principle offers an axiomatic framework to derive local neuronal and synaptic dynamics for global real-time computation and learning in the brain and in physical substrates in general.
Efficient Diversity-Preserving Diffusion Alignment via Gradient-Informed GFlowNets
Zhen Liu
Tim Z. Xiao
Weiyang Liu
Dinghuai Zhang
While one commonly trains large diffusion models by collecting datasets on target downstream tasks, it is often desired to align and finetun… (voir plus)e pretrained diffusion models on some reward functions that are either designed by experts or learned from small-scale datasets. Existing methods for finetuning diffusion models typically suffer from lack of diversity in generated samples, lack of prior preservation, and/or slow convergence in finetuning. Inspired by recent successes in generative flow networks (GFlowNets), a class of probabilistic models that sample with the unnormalized density of a reward function, we propose a novel GFlowNet method dubbed Nabla-GFlowNet (abbreviated as
Efficient Diversity-Preserving Diffusion Alignment via Gradient-Informed GFlowNets
Zhen Liu
Tim Z. Xiao
Weiyang Liu
Dinghuai Zhang
While one commonly trains large diffusion models by collecting datasets on target downstream tasks, it is often desired to align and finetun… (voir plus)e pretrained diffusion models on some reward functions that are either designed by experts or learned from small-scale datasets. Existing methods for finetuning diffusion models typically suffer from lack of diversity in generated samples, lack of prior preservation, and/or slow convergence in finetuning. Inspired by recent successes in generative flow networks (GFlowNets), a class of probabilistic models that sample with the unnormalized density of a reward function, we propose a novel GFlowNet method dubbed Nabla-GFlowNet (abbreviated as