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

Publications

Iterated Denoising Energy Matching for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities
Tara Akhound-Sadegh
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Sarthak Mittal
Pablo Lemos
Cheng-Hao Liu
Marcin Sendera
Nikolay Malkin
Alexander Tong
Efficiently generating statistically independent samples from an unnormalized probability distribution, such as equilibrium samples of many-… (voir plus)body systems, is a foundational problem in science. In this paper, we propose Iterated Denoising Energy Matching (iDEM), an iterative algorithm that uses a novel stochastic score matching objective leveraging solely the energy function and its gradient -- and no data samples -- to train a diffusion-based sampler. Specifically, iDEM alternates between (I) sampling regions of high model density from a diffusion-based sampler and (II) using these samples in our stochastic matching objective to further improve the sampler. iDEM is scalable to high dimensions as the inner matching objective, is simulation-free, and requires no MCMC samples. Moreover, by leveraging the fast mode mixing behavior of diffusion, iDEM smooths out the energy landscape enabling efficient exploration and learning of an amortized sampler. We evaluate iDEM on a suite of tasks ranging from standard synthetic energy functions to invariant
Iterated Denoising Energy Matching for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities
Tara Akhound-Sadegh
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Sarthak Mittal
Pablo Lemos
Cheng-Hao Liu
Marcin Sendera
Nikolay Malkin
Alexander Tong
Efficiently generating statistically independent samples from an unnormalized probability distribution, such as equilibrium samples of many-… (voir plus)body systems, is a foundational problem in science. In this paper, we propose Iterated Denoising Energy Matching (iDEM), an iterative algorithm that uses a novel stochastic score matching objective leveraging solely the energy function and its gradient -- and no data samples -- to train a diffusion-based sampler. Specifically, iDEM alternates between (I) sampling regions of high model density from a diffusion-based sampler and (II) using these samples in our stochastic matching objective to further improve the sampler. iDEM is scalable to high dimensions as the inner matching objective, is simulation-free, and requires no MCMC samples. Moreover, by leveraging the fast mode mixing behavior of diffusion, iDEM smooths out the energy landscape enabling efficient exploration and learning of an amortized sampler. We evaluate iDEM on a suite of tasks ranging from standard synthetic energy functions to invariant
Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
Edward J Hu
Moksh J. Jain
Eric Elmoznino
Younesse Kaddar
Nikolay Malkin
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This l… (voir plus)imits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.
Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Harry Zhao 0001
Harry Zhao
Mingde Zhao
Safa Alver
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
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Anirudh Goyal
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
Jean-Pierre R. Falet
Hae Beom Lee
Nikolay Malkin
Chen Sun
Dragos Secrieru
Dinghuai Zhang
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
Dinghuai Zhang
Ricky T. Q. Chen
Cheng-Hao Liu
Expected flow networks in stochastic environments and two-player zero-sum games
Marco Jiralerspong
Bilun Sun
Danilo Vucetic
Tianyu Zhang
Nikolay Malkin
Local Search GFlowNets
Minsu Kim
Taeyoung Yun
Dinghuai Zhang
Sungsoo Ahn
Jinkyoo Park
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.
Object centric architectures enable efficient causal representation learning
Amin Mansouri
Jason Hartford
Yan Zhang
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
Ming Yang Zhou
Zichao Yan
Elliot Layne
Nikolay Malkin
Dinghuai Zhang
Moksh J. Jain
Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Generative Flow Networks
Ling Pan
Moksh J. Jain
Kanika Madan
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects fr… (voir plus)om a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.