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 Cassidy MacNeil, adjointe principale et responsable des opérations cassidy.macneil@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

Jamal Abou Haibeh

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Shahana Chatterjee

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

Aniket Didolkar

Doctorat - UdeM

Abdessamad EL KABID

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Loubna Benabbou

Desmond Elliott

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Doctorat - UdeM

Jean-Pierre Falet

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Thomas Jiralerspong

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Younesse Kaddar

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Alex Hernández-García

Tabitha Edith Lee

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Cristian Dragos Manta

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - University of Waterloo

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Loubna Benabbou

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Doctorat - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Dragos Secrieru

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Postdoctorat

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Alex Hernández-García

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Hugo Larochelle

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Siddarth Venkatraman

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Mathieu Blanchette

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Aaron Courville

Collaborateur·rice alumni - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Billets de blogue

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

22 février 2024

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

par

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

par

Publications

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Cyclic Diffusion Search

Gyubin Lee

Truong Nhat Nguyen Bao

Jaesik Yoon

Dongwoo Lee

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative capabilities across domains ranging from image synthesis to complex reasoning tasks. Ho… (voir plus)wever, most inference-time scaling methods rely on fixed denoising schedules, limiting their ability to allocate computation based on instance difficulty or task-specific demands adaptively. We introduce the challenge of adaptive inference-time scaling-dynamically adjusting computational effort during inference-and propose Adaptive Bi-directional Cyclic Diffusion (ABCD), a flexible, search-based inference framework. ABCD refines outputs through bi-directional diffusion cycles while adaptively controlling exploration depth and termination. It comprises three components: Cyclic Diffusion Search, Automatic Exploration-Exploitation Balancing, and Adaptive Thinking Time. Experiments show that ABCD improves performance across diverse tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.

2025-05-19

ArXiv (prépublication)

Can a Bayesian Oracle Prevent Harm from an Agent?

Michael K. Cohen

Matt MacDermott

Damiano Fornasiere

Younesse Kaddar

Is there a way to design powerful AI systems based on machine learning methods that would satisfy probabilistic safety guarantees? With the … (voir plus)long-term goal of obtaining a probabilistic guarantee that would apply in every context, we consider estimating a context-dependent bound on the probability of violating a given safety specification. Such a risk evaluation would need to be performed at run-time to provide a guardrail against dangerous actions of an AI. Noting that different plausible hypotheses about the world could produce very different outcomes, and because we do not know which one is right, we derive bounds on the safety violation probability predicted under the true but unknown hypothesis. Such bounds could be used to reject potentially dangerous actions. Our main results involve searching for cautious but plausible hypotheses, obtained by a maximization that involves Bayesian posteriors over hypotheses. We consider two forms of this result, in the iid case and in the non-iid case, and conclude with open problems towards turning such theoretical results into practical AI guardrails.

2025-05-06

Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (poster)

proceedings.mlr.press

AI for Global Climate Cooperation: Modeling Global Climate Negotiations, Agreements, and Long-Term Cooperation in RICE-N

Andrew Williams

Phillip Wozny

Kai-Hendrik Cohrs

Koen Ponse

Marco Jiralerspong

Soham Phade

Sunil Srinivasa

Yang Zhang

Prateek Gupta

Erman Acar

Stephan Zheng

Comprehensive global cooperation is essential to limit global temperature increases while continuing economic development, e.g., reducing se… (voir plus)vere inequality or achieving long-term economic growth. Achieving long-term cooperation on climate change mitigation with n strategic agents poses a complex game-theoretic problem. For example, agents may negotiate and reach climate agreements, but there is no central authority to enforce adherence to those agreements. Hence, it is critical to design negotiation and agreement frameworks that foster cooperation, allow all agents to meet their individual policy objectives, and incentivize long-term adherence. This is an interdisciplinary challenge that calls for collaboration between researchers in machine learning, economics, climate science, law, policy, ethics, and other fields. In particular, we argue that machine learning is a critical tool to address the complexity of this domain. To facilitate this research, here we introduce RICE-N, a multi-region integrated assessment model that simulates the global climate and economy, and which can be used to design and evaluate the strategic outcomes for different negotiation and agreement frameworks. We also describe how to use multi-agent reinforcement learning to train rational agents using RICE-N. This framework underpinsAI for Global Climate Cooperation, a working group collaboration and competition on climate negotiation and agreement design. Here, we invite the scientific community to design and evaluate their solutions using RICE-N, machine learning, economic intuition, and other domain knowledge. More information can be found on www.ai4climatecoop.org.

2025-04-30

International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)

proceedings.mlr.press

Latent Veracity Inference for Identifying Errors in Stepwise Reasoning

Jean-Pierre R. Falet

Oliver E. Richardson

Moksh J. Jain

Sungsoo Ahn

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has advanced the capabilities and transparency of language models (LMs); however, reasoning chains can cont… (voir plus)ain inaccurate statements that reduce performance and trustworthiness. To address this, we propose to augment each reasoning step in a CoT with a latent veracity (or correctness) variable. To efficiently explore this expanded space, we introduce Veracity Search (VS), a discrete search algorithm over veracity assignments. It performs otherwise intractable inference in the posterior distribution over latent veracity values by leveraging the LM's joint likelihood over veracity and the final answer as a proxy reward. This efficient inference-time verification method facilitates supervised fine-tuning of an Amortized Veracity Inference (AVI) machine by providing pseudo-labels for veracity. AVI generalizes VS, enabling accurate zero-shot veracity inference in novel contexts. Empirical results demonstrate that VS reliably identifies errors in logical (ProntoQA), mathematical (GSM8K), and commonsense (CommonsenseQA) reasoning benchmarks, with AVI achieving comparable zero-shot accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of latent veracity inference for providing feedback during self-correction and self-improvement.

2025-04-30

arXiv (publié)

Outsourced Diffusion Sampling: Efficient Posterior Inference in Latent Spaces of Generative Models

Siddarth Venkatraman

Any well-behaved generative model over a variable …

2025-04-30

International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)

proceedings.mlr.press

Self-Evolving Curriculum for LLM Reasoning

Alexandre Piché

Nicolas Gontier

Ehsan Kamalloo

2025-04-30

arXiv (publié)

Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model

Can Chen

David Heurtel-Depeiges

Robert M. Vernon

Christopher J. Langmead

Quentin Fournier

2025-04-30

arXiv (publié)

Steering Masked Discrete Diffusion Models via Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Zhangzhi Peng

Zachary Quinn

Michael Bronstein

Pranam Chatterjee

Avishek Joey Bose

Generative modeling of discrete data underlies important applications spanning text-based agents like ChatGPT to the design of the very buil… (voir plus)ding blocks of life in protein sequences. However, application domains need to exert control over the generated data by steering the generative process - typically via RLHF - to satisfy a specified property, reward, or affinity metric. In this paper, we study the problem of steering Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs), a recent class of discrete diffusion models that offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive models. We introduce Discrete Denoising Posterior Prediction (DDPP), a novel framework that casts the task of steering pre-trained MDMs as a problem of probabilistic inference by learning to sample from a target Bayesian posterior. Our DDPP framework leads to a family of three novel objectives that are all simulation-free, and thus scalable while applying to general non-differentiable reward functions. Empirically, we instantiate DDPP by steering MDMs to perform class-conditional pixel-level image modeling, RLHF-based alignment of MDMs using text-based rewards, and finetuning protein language models to generate more diverse secondary structures and shorter proteins. We substantiate our designs via wet-lab validation, where we observe transient expression of reward-optimized protein sequences.

2025-04-22

International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))

Open Problems in Technical AI Governance

Anka Reuel

Benjamin Bucknall

Stephen Casper

Timothy Fist

Lisa Soder

Onni Aarne

Lewis Hammond

Lujain Ibrahim

Peter Wills

Markus Anderljung

Ben Garfinkel

Lennart Heim

Andrew Trask

Gabriel Mukobi

Rylan Schaeffer

Mauricio Baker

Sara Hooker

Irene Solaiman

Sasha Luccioni … (voir 14 de plus)

Alexandra Luccioni

Nitarshan Rajkumar

Nicolas Moës

Jeffrey Ladish

David Bau

Paul Bricman

Neel Guha

Jessica Newman

Tobin South

Alex Pentland

Sanmi Koyejo

Mykel Kochenderfer

Robert Trager

AI progress is creating a growing range of risks and opportunities, but it is often unclear how they should be navigated. In many cases, the… (voir plus) barriers and uncertainties faced are at least partly technical. Technical AI governance, referring to technical analysis and tools for supporting the effective governance of AI, seeks to address such challenges. It can help to (a) identify areas where intervention is needed, (b) identify and assess the efficacy of potential governance actions, and (c) enhance governance options by designing mechanisms for enforcement, incentivization, or compliance. In this paper, we explain what technical AI governance is, why it is important, and present a taxonomy and incomplete catalog of its open problems. This paper is intended as a resource for technical researchers or research funders looking to contribute to AI governance.

2025-04-13

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (accepté)

Assessing SAM for Tree Crown Instance Segmentation from Drone Imagery

Mélisande Teng

Arthur Ouaknine

Étienne Laliberté

Hugo Larochelle

2025-03-25

ArXiv (prépublication)

Extendable Planning via Multiscale Diffusion

Chang Chen

Hany Hamed

Doojin Baek

Taegu Kang

Long-horizon planning is crucial in complex environments, but diffusion-based planners like Diffuser are limited by the trajectory lengths o… (voir plus)bserved during training. This creates a dilemma: long trajectories are needed for effective planning, yet they degrade model performance. In this paper, we introduce this extendable long-horizon planning challenge and propose a two-phase solution. First, Progressive Trajectory Extension incrementally constructs longer trajectories through multi-round compositional stitching. Second, the Hierarchical Multiscale Diffuser enables efficient training and inference over long horizons by reasoning across temporal scales. To avoid the need for multiple separate models, we propose Adaptive Plan Pondering and the Recursive HM-Diffuser, which unify hierarchical planning within a single model. Experiments show our approach yields strong performance gains, advancing scalable and efficient decision-making over long-horizons.

2025-03-24

ArXiv (prépublication)

A scalable gene network model of regulatory dynamics in single cells

Joseph D Viviano

Alejandro Tejada-Lapuerta

Weixu Wang

Fabian J. Theis

2025-03-24

ArXiv (prépublication)