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
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 de recherche - Cambridge University
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Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A
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Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST
Visiteur de recherche indépendant
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Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Postdoctorat - UdeM
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Stagiaire de recherche - KOREA ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - s.o.
Doctorat - UdeM
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Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
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Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo
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Doctorat - UdeM
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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
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Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill
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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.
Cycle Consistency Driven Object Discovery
Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. … (voir plus)Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.
Delta-AI: Local Objectives for Amortized Inference in Sparse Graphical Models
We present a new algorithm for amortized inference in sparse probabilistic graphical models (PGMs), which we call …
Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving Learning Signals Through Partial Trajectory Optimization
Ricky T. Q. Chen
Cheng-Hao Liu
We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine lear… (voir plus)ning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.
Expected Flow Networks in Stochastic Environments and Two-Player Zero-Sum Games
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are sequential sampling models trained to match a given distribution. GFlowNets have been successfully … (voir plus)applied to various structured object generation tasks, sampling a diverse set of high-reward objects quickly. We propose expected flow networks (EFlowNets), which extend GFlowNets to stochastic environments. We show that EFlowNets outperform other GFlowNet formulations in stochastic tasks such as protein design. We then extend the concept of EFlowNets to adversarial environments, proposing adversarial flow networks (AFlowNets) for two-player zero-sum games. We show that AFlowNets learn to find above 80% of optimal moves in Connect-4 via self-play and outperform AlphaZero in tournaments.
Object-Centric Architectures Enable Efficient Causal Representation Learning
Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees… (voir plus) (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as
PhyloGFN: Phylogenetic Inference with Generative Flow Networks
Phylogenetics is a branch of computational biology that studies the evolutionary relationships among biological entities. Its long history a… (voir plus)nd numerous applications notwithstanding, inference of phylogenetic trees from sequence data remains challenging: the high complexity of tree space poses a significant obstacle for the current combinatorial and probabilistic techniques. In this paper, we adopt the framework of generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to tackle two core problems in phylogenetics: parsimony-based and Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Because GFlowNets are well-suited for sampling complex combinatorial structures, they are a natural choice for exploring and sampling from the multimodal posterior distribution over tree topologies and evolutionary distances. We demonstrate that our amortized posterior sampler, PhyloGFN, produces diverse and high-quality evolutionary hypotheses on real benchmark datasets. PhyloGFN is competitive with prior works in marginal likelihood estimation and achieves a closer fit to the target distribution than state-of-the-art variational inference methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zmy1116/phylogfn.
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models
Usman Anwar
Abulhair Saparov
Javier Rando
Daniel Paleka
Miles Turpin
Peter Hase
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Erik Jenner
Stephen Casper
Oliver Sourbut
Benjamin L. Edelman
Zhaowei Zhang
Mario Günther
Anton Korinek
Jose Hernandez-Orallo
Lewis Hammond
Eric Bigelow
Alexander Pan
Lauro Langosco
Tomasz Korbak … (voir 22 de plus)
Heidi Zhang
Ruiqi Zhong
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh
Gabriel Recchia
Giulio Corsi
Markus Anderljung
Lilian Edwards
Aleksandar Petrov
Christian Schroeder de Witt
Sumeet Ramesh Motwani
Samuel Albanie
Danqi Chen
Philip H.S. Torr
Jakob Foerster
Florian Tramèr
He He
Atoosa Kasirzadeh
Yejin Choi
David Krueger
This work identifies 18 foundational challenges in assuring the alignment and safety of large language models (LLMs). These challenges are o… (voir plus)rganized into three different categories: scientific understanding of LLMs, development and deployment methods, and sociotechnical challenges. Based on the identified challenges, we pose
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.
Local Search GFlowNets
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized sampling methods that learn a distribution over discrete objects proportional to their re… (voir plus)wards. GFlowNets exhibit a remarkable ability to generate diverse samples, yet occasionally struggle to consistently produce samples with high rewards due to over-exploration on wide sample space. This paper proposes to train GFlowNets with local search, which focuses on exploiting high-rewarded sample space to resolve this issue. Our main idea is to explore the local neighborhood via backtracking and reconstruction guided by backward and forward policies, respectively. This allows biasing the samples toward high-reward solutions, which is not possible for a typical GFlowNet solution generation scheme, which uses the forward policy to generate the solution from scratch. Extensive experiments demonstrate a remarkable performance improvement in several biochemical tasks. Source code is available: https://github.com/dbsxodud-11/ls_gfn.
Machine Learning and Information Theory Concepts Towards an AI Mathematician
Nikolay Malkin
The current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence is impressive, especially in terms of mastery of language, but not so much in terms … (voir plus)of mathematical reasoning. What could be missing? Can we learn something useful about that gap from how the brains of mathematicians go about their craft? This essay builds on the idea that current deep learning mostly succeeds at system 1 abilities -- which correspond to our intuition and habitual behaviors -- but still lacks something important regarding system 2 abilities -- which include reasoning and robust uncertainty estimation. It takes an information-theoretical posture to ask questions about what constitutes an interesting mathematical statement, which could guide future work in crafting an AI mathematician. The focus is not on proving a given theorem but on discovering new and interesting conjectures. The central hypothesis is that a desirable body of theorems better summarizes the set of all provable statements, for example by having a small description length while at the same time being close (in terms of number of derivation steps) to many provable statements.
PhAST: Physics-Aware, Scalable, and Task-Specific GNNs for Accelerated Catalyst Design
Mitigating the climate crisis requires a rapid transition towards lower-carbon energy. Catalyst materials play a crucial role in the electro… (voir plus)chemical reactions involved in numerous industrial processes key to this transition, such as renewable energy storage and electrofuel synthesis. To reduce the energy spent on such activities, we must quickly discover more efficient catalysts to drive electrochemical reactions. Machine learning (ML) holds the potential to efficiently model materials properties from large amounts of data, accelerating electrocatalyst design. The Open Catalyst Project OC20 dataset was constructed to that end. However, ML models trained on OC20 are still neither scalable nor accurate enough for practical applications. In this paper, we propose task-specific innovations applicable to most architectures, enhancing both computational efficiency and accuracy. This includes improvements in (1) the graph creation step, (2) atom representations, (3) the energy prediction head, and (4) the force prediction head. We describe these contributions, referred to as PhAST, and evaluate them thoroughly on multiple architectures. Overall, PhAST improves energy MAE by 4 to 42