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
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Doctorat
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
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

h-detach: Modifying the LSTM Gradient Towards Better Optimization
Devansh Arpit
Bhargav Kanuparthi
Giancarlo Kerg
Nan Rosemary Ke
Recurrent neural networks are known for their notorious exploding and vanishing gradient problem (EVGP). This problem becomes more evident i… (voir plus)n tasks where the information needed to correctly solve them exist over long time scales, because EVGP prevents important gradient components from being back-propagated adequately over a large number of steps. We introduce a simple stochastic algorithm (\textit{h}-detach) that is specific to LSTM optimization and targeted towards addressing this problem. Specifically, we show that when the LSTM weights are large, the gradient components through the linear path (cell state) in the LSTM computational graph get suppressed. Based on the hypothesis that these components carry information about long term dependencies (which we show empirically), their suppression can prevent LSTMs from capturing them. Our algorithm\footnote{Our code is available at this https URL.} prevents gradients flowing through this path from getting suppressed, thus allowing the LSTM to capture such dependencies better. We show significant improvements over vanilla LSTM gradient based training in terms of convergence speed, robustness to seed and learning rate, and generalization using our modification of LSTM gradient on various benchmark datasets.
How to Initialize your Network? Robust Initialization for WeightNorm & ResNets
Devansh Arpit
Vı́ctor Campos
Residual networks (ResNet) and weight normalization play an important role in various deep learning applications. However, parameter initial… (voir plus)ization strategies have not been studied previously for weight normalized networks and, in practice, initialization methods designed for un-normalized networks are used as a proxy. Similarly, initialization for ResNets have also been studied for un-normalized networks and often under simplified settings ignoring the shortcut connection. To address these issues, we propose a novel parameter initialization strategy that avoids explosion/vanishment of information across layers for weight normalized networks with and without residual connections. The proposed strategy is based on a theoretical analysis using mean field approximation. We run over 2,500 experiments and evaluate our proposal on image datasets showing that the proposed initialization outperforms existing initialization methods in terms of generalization performance, robustness to hyper-parameter values and variance between seeds, especially when networks get deeper in which case existing methods fail to even start training. Finally, we show that using our initialization in conjunction with learning rate warmup is able to reduce the gap between the performance of weight normalized and batch normalized networks.
InfoBot: Structured Exploration in ReinforcementLearning Using Information Bottleneck
Anirudh Goyal
Riashat Islam
D. Strouse
Zafarali Ahmed
Matthew Botvinick
Sergey Levine
InfoBot: Transfer and Exploration via the Information Bottleneck
Anirudh Goyal
Riashat Islam
DJ Strouse
Zafarali Ahmed
Matthew Botvinick
Sergey Levine
A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postula… (voir plus)te that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out {\it decision states}. These states lie at critical junctions in the state space from where the agent can transition to new, potentially unexplored regions. We propose to learn about decision states from prior experience. By training a goal-conditioned policy with an information bottleneck, we can identify decision states by examining where the model actually leverages the goal state. We find that this simple mechanism effectively identifies decision states, even in partially observed settings. In effect, the model learns the sensory cues that correlate with potential subgoals. In new environments, this model can then identify novel subgoals for further exploration, guiding the agent through a sequence of potential decision states and through new regions of the state space.
Interpolated Adversarial Training: Achieving Robust Neural Networks without Sacrificing Accuracy
Alex Lamb
Vikas Verma
Juho Kannala
Adversarial robustness has become a central goal in deep learning, both in theory and practice. However, successful methods to improve adver… (voir plus)sarial robustness (such as adversarial training) greatly hurt generalization performance on the clean data. This could have a major impact on how adversarial robustness affects real world systems (i.e. many may opt to forego robustness if it can improve performance on the clean data). We propose Interpolated Adversarial Training, which employs recently proposed interpolation based training methods in the framework of adversarial training. On CIFAR-10, adversarial training increases clean test error from 5.8% to 16.7%, whereas with our Interpolated adversarial training we retain adversarial robustness while achieving a clean test error of only 6.5%. With our technique, the relative error increase for the robust model is reduced from 187.9% to just 12.1%.
Interpolated Adversarial Training: Achieving Robust Neural Networks without Sacrificing Accuracy
Alex Lamb
Vikas Verma
Juho Kannala
Adversarial robustness has become a central goal in deep learning, both in theory and practice. However, successful methods to improve adver… (voir plus)sarial robustness (such as adversarial training) greatly hurt generalization performance on the clean data. This could have a major impact on how adversarial robustness affects real world systems (i.e. many may opt to forego robustness if it can improve performance on the clean data). We propose Interpolated Adversarial Training, which employs recently proposed interpolation based training methods in the framework of adversarial training. On CIFAR-10, adversarial training increases clean test error from 5.8% to 16.7%, whereas with our Interpolated adversarial training we retain adversarial robustness while achieving a clean test error of only 6.5%. With our technique, the relative error increase for the robust model is reduced from 187.9% to just 12.1%.
Lagrangian neurodynamics for real-time error-backpropagation across cortical areas
Dominik Dold
Akos F. Kungl
João Sacramento
Mihai A. Petrovici
Kaspar Schindler
Jonathan Binas
Walter Senn
.
Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization
Alex Fedorov
Samuel Lavoie-Marchildon
Karan Grewal
Adam Trischler
Phil Bachman
This work investigates unsupervised learning of representations by maximizing mutual information between an input and the output of a deep n… (voir plus)eural network encoder. Importantly, we show that structure matters: incorporating knowledge about locality in the input into the objective can significantly improve a representation’s suitability for downstream tasks. We further control characteristics of the representation by matching to a prior distribution adversarially. Our method, which we call Deep InfoMax (DIM), outperforms a number of popular unsupervised learning methods and compares favorably with fully-supervised learning on several classification tasks in with some standard architectures. DIM opens new avenues for unsupervised learning of representations and is an important step towards flexible formulations of representation learning objectives for specific end-goals.
MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis
Kundan Kumar
Rithesh Kumar
Thibault De Boissière
Lucas Gestin
Wei Zhen Teoh
Jose Sotelo
Alexandre De Brébisson
Quaternion Recurrent Neural Networks
Titouan Parcollet
Mohamed Morchid
Georges Linarès
Chiheb Trabelsi
Renato De Mori
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are powerful architectures to model sequential data, due to their capability to learn short and long-term d… (voir plus)ependencies between the basic elements of a sequence. Nonetheless, popular tasks such as speech or images recognition, involve multi-dimensional input features that are characterized by strong internal dependencies between the dimensions of the input vector. We propose a novel quaternion recurrent neural network (QRNN), alongside with a quaternion long-short term memory neural network (QLSTM), that take into account both the external relations and these internal structural dependencies with the quaternion algebra. Similarly to capsules, quaternions allow the QRNN to code internal dependencies by composing and processing multidimensional features as single entities, while the recurrent operation reveals correlations between the elements composing the sequence. We show that both QRNN and QLSTM achieve better performances than RNN and LSTM in a realistic application of automatic speech recognition. Finally, we show that QRNN and QLSTM reduce by a maximum factor of 3.3x the number of free parameters needed, compared to real-valued RNNs and LSTMs to reach better results, leading to a more compact representation of the relevant information.
Recall Traces: Backtracking Models for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Anirudh Goyal
Philemon Brakel
William Fedus
Soumye Singhal
Timothy P. Lillicrap
Sergey Levine
In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provid… (voir plus)e a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states and the probable trajectories leading to them. To this end, we advocate for the use of a backtracking model that predicts the preceding states that terminate at a given high-reward state. We can train a model which, starting from a high value state (or one that is estimated to have high value), predicts and sample for which the (state, action)-tuples may have led to that high value state. These traces of (state, action) pairs, which we refer to as Recall Traces, sampled from this backtracking model starting from a high value state, are informative as they terminate in good states, and hence we can use these traces to improve a policy. We provide a variational interpretation for this idea and a practical algorithm in which the backtracking model samples from an approximate posterior distribution over trajectories which lead to large rewards. Our method improves the sample efficiency of both on- and off-policy RL algorithms across several environments and tasks.
Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Agriculture
Jonathan Binas
Leonie H. Luginbuehl
Modern machine learning methods have achieved superhuman performance on a variety of tasks, simply learning from the outcomes of their actio… (voir plus)ns. We propose a path towards more sustainable agriculture, considering plant development an optimization problem with respect to certain parameters, such as yield and environmental impact, which can be optimized in an automated way. Specifically, we propose to use reinforcement learning to autonomously explore and learn ways of influencing the development of certain types of plants, controlling environmental parameters, such as irrigation or nutrient supply, and receiving sensory feedback, such as camera images, humidity, and moisture measurements. The trained system will thus be able to provide instructions for optimal treatment of a local population of plants, based on non-invasive measurements, such as imaging.