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

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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.

Billets de blogue

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

22 février 2024

Skipper : combiner l’abstraction spatiale et temporelle afin d’améliorer la généralisation

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Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Scaling in the service of reasoning & model-based ML

4 avril 2023

Mise à l’échelle au service du raisonnement et de l’apprentissage automatique basé sur un modèle

par

A collaboration between Mila and Relation Therapeutics to discover novel synergistic combinations of drugs in vitro

23 mars 2022

Une collaboration entre Mila et Relation Therapeutics pour découvrir in vitro de nouvelles associations médicamenteuses synergiques

par

Jake P. Taylor-King

Generative Flow Networks

15 mars 2022

Les réseaux de flot génératifs

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Publications

GFlowNets and Variational Inference

This paper builds bridges between two families of probabilistic algorithms: (hierarchical) variational inference (VI), which is typically us… (voir plus)ed to model distributions over continuous spaces, and generative flow networks (GFlowNets), which have been used for distributions over discrete structures such as graphs. We demonstrate that, in certain cases, VI algorithms are equivalent to special cases of GFlowNets in the sense of equality of expected gradients of their learning objectives. We then point out the differences between the two families and show how these differences emerge experimentally. Notably, GFlowNets, which borrow ideas from reinforcement learning, are more amenable than VI to off-policy training without the cost of high gradient variance induced by importance sampling. We argue that this property of GFlowNets can provide advantages for capturing diversity in multimodal target distributions.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Latent Bottlenecked Attentive Neural Processes

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

Neural Processes (NPs) are popular methods in meta-learning that can estimate predictive uncertainty on target datapoints by conditioning on… (voir plus) a context dataset. Previous state-of-the-art method Transformer Neural Processes (TNPs) achieve strong performance but require quadratic computation with respect to the number of context datapoints, significantly limiting its scalability. Conversely, existing sub-quadratic NP variants perform significantly worse than that of TNPs. Tackling this issue, we propose Latent Bottlenecked Attentive Neural Processes (LBANPs), a new computationally efficient sub-quadratic NP variant, that has a querying computational complexity independent of the number of context datapoints. The model encodes the context dataset into a constant number of latent vectors on which self-attention is performed. When making predictions, the model retrieves higher-order information from the context dataset via multiple cross-attention mechanisms on the latent vectors. We empirically show that LBANPs achieve results competitive with the state-of-the-art on meta-regression, image completion, and contextual multi-armed bandits. We demonstrate that LBANPs can trade-off the computational cost and performance according to the number of latent vectors. Finally, we show LBANPs can scale beyond existing attention-based NP variants to larger dataset settings.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Latent State Marginalization as a Low-Cost Approach for Improving Exploration

Aaron Courville

Qinqing Zheng

Ricky T. Q. Chen

While the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- often touted for its exploration and robustness capabilities -- … (voir plus)is usually motivated from a probabilistic perspective, the use of deep probabilistic models has not gained much traction in practice due to their inherent complexity. In this work, we propose the adoption of latent variable policies within the MaxEnt framework, which we show can provably approximate any policy distribution, and additionally, naturally emerges under the use of world models with a latent belief state. We discuss why latent variable policies are difficult to train, how naive approaches can fail, then subsequently introduce a series of improvements centered around low-cost marginalization of the latent state, allowing us to make full use of the latent state at minimal additional cost. We instantiate our method under the actor-critic framework, marginalizing both the actor and critic. The resulting algorithm, referred to as Stochastic Marginal Actor-Critic (SMAC), is simple yet effective. We experimentally validate our method on continuous control tasks, showing that effective marginalization can lead to better exploration and more robust training. Our implementation is open sourced at https://github.com/zdhNarsil/Stochastic-Marginal-Actor-Critic.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Predictive Inference with Feature Conformal Prediction

Jiaye Teng

Chuan Wen

Yang Gao

Yang Yuan

Conformal prediction is a distribution-free technique for establishing valid prediction intervals. Although conventionally people conduct co… (voir plus)nformal prediction in the output space, this is not the only possibility. In this paper, we propose feature conformal prediction, which extends the scope of conformal prediction to semantic feature spaces by leveraging the inductive bias of deep representation learning. From a theoretical perspective, we demonstrate that feature conformal prediction provably outperforms regular conformal prediction under mild assumptions. Our approach could be combined with not only vanilla conformal prediction, but also other adaptive conformal prediction methods. Apart from experiments on existing predictive inference benchmarks, we also demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed methods on large-scale tasks such as ImageNet classification and Cityscapes image segmentation.The code is available at https://github.com/AlvinWen428/FeatureCP.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Robust and Controllable Object-Centric Learning through Energy-based Models

Tong Che

Boris Ivanovic

Marco Pavone

Humans are remarkably good at understanding and reasoning about complex visual scenes. The capability to decompose low-level observations in… (voir plus)to discrete objects allows us to build a grounded abstract representation and identify the compositional structure of the world. Accordingly, it is a crucial step for machine learning models to be capable of inferring objects and their properties from visual scenes without explicit supervision. However, existing works on object-centric representation learning either rely on tailor-made neural network modules or strong probabilistic assumptions in the underlying generative and inference processes. In this work, we present \ours, a conceptually simple and general approach to learning object-centric representations through an energy-based model. By forming a permutation-invariant energy function using vanilla attention blocks readily available in Transformers, we can infer object-centric latent variables via gradient-based MCMC methods where permutation equivariance is automatically guaranteed. We show that \ours can be easily integrated into existing architectures and can effectively extract high-quality object-centric representations, leading to better segmentation accuracy and competitive downstream task performance. Further, empirical evaluations show that \ours's learned representations are robust against distribution shift. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours in systematic compositional generalization, by re-composing learned energy functions for novel scene generation and manipulation.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Stateful Active Facilitator: Coordination and Environmental Heterogeneity in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Dianbo Liu

Oussama Boussif

Tianmin Shu

Michael Mozer

Nicolas Heess

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a team of agents works together to achieve a common goal. Different environments or tasks… (voir plus) may require varying degrees of coordination among agents in order to achieve the goal in an optimal way. The nature of coordination will depend on the properties of the environment -- its spatial layout, distribution of obstacles, dynamics, etc. We term this variation of properties within an environment as heterogeneity. Existing literature has not sufficiently addressed the fact that different environments may have different levels of heterogeneity. We formalize the notions of coordination level and heterogeneity level of an environment and present HECOGrid, a suite of multi-agent RL environments that facilitates empirical evaluation of different MARL approaches across different levels of coordination and environmental heterogeneity by providing a quantitative control over coordination and heterogeneity levels of the environment. Further, we propose a Centralized Training Decentralized Execution learning approach called Stateful Active Facilitator (SAF) that enables agents to work efficiently in high-coordination and high-heterogeneity environments through a differentiable and shared knowledge source used during training and dynamic selection from a shared pool of policies. We evaluate SAF and compare its performance against baselines IPPO and MAPPO on HECOGrid. Our results show that SAF consistently outperforms the baselines across different tasks and different heterogeneity and coordination levels. We release the code for HECOGrid as well as all our experiments.

2023-01-31

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Leveraging the Third Dimension in Contrastive Learning

Sumukh K Aithal

Michael Curtis Mozer

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods operate on unlabeled data to learn robust representations useful for downstream tasks. Most SSL metho… (voir plus)ds rely on augmentations obtained by transforming the 2D image pixel map. These augmentations ignore the fact that biological vision takes place in an immersive three-dimensional, temporally contiguous environment, and that low-level biological vision relies heavily on depth cues. Using a signal provided by a pretrained state-of-the-art monocular RGB-to-depth model (the \emph{Depth Prediction Transformer}, Ranftl et al., 2021), we explore two distinct approaches to incorporating depth signals into the SSL framework. First, we evaluate contrastive learning using an RGB+depth input representation. Second, we use the depth signal to generate novel views from slightly different camera positions, thereby producing a 3D augmentation for contrastive learning. We evaluate these two approaches on three different SSL methods -- BYOL, SimSiam, and SwAV -- using ImageNette (10 class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet-100 and ImageNet-1k datasets. We find that both approaches to incorporating depth signals improve the robustness and generalization of the baseline SSL methods, though the first approach (with depth-channel concatenation) is superior. For instance, BYOL with the additional depth channel leads to an increase in downstream classification accuracy from 85.3\% to 88.0\% on ImageNette and 84.1\% to 87.0\% on ImageNet-C.

2023-01-26

ArXiv (prépublication)

Regeneration Learning: A Learning Paradigm for Data Generation

Xu Tan

Tao Qin

Jiang Bian

Tie-Yan Liu

2023-01-20

ArXiv (prépublication)

Scalable Neural Network Algorithms for High Dimensional Data

Mukesh Soni

Marwan Ali Shnan

2023-01-14

Mesopotamian Journal of Big Data (publié)

Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks

Vijay Prakash Dwivedi

Chaitanya K. Joshi

Thomas Laurent

Anh Tuan Luu

Xavier Bresson

2022-12-31

J. Mach. Learn. Res. (publié)

Conditional Flow Matching: Simulation-Free Dynamic Optimal Transport

Guillaume Huguet

Yanlei Zhang

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

2022-12-31

arXiv.org (prépublication)

Constant Memory Attentive Neural Processes

Frederick Tung

Hossein Hajimirsadeghi

Mohamed Osama Ahmed

2022-12-31

arXiv.org (prépublication)