Yoshua Bengio

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 directeur 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 directeur scientifique 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

Stagiaire de recherche - McGill

Mohammed Abukalam

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

Salwane Agassoussi

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Rim Assouel

Doctorat - UdeM

Ayoub Atanane

Stagiaire de recherche - Université du Québec à Rimouski

Stefan Bauer

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Paul Bertin

Doctorat - UdeM

Ghait Boukachab

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UQAR

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Rolnick

Xiaoyin Chen

Doctorat - UdeM

Sanghyeok Choi

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Eric Elmoznino

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Léna Nehale Ezzine

Doctorat - UdeM

Jean-Pierre Falet

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Leo Feng

Doctorat - UdeM

Stagiaire de recherche - Barcelona University

Piotr Gainski

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Ivan Grega

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Pietro Greiner

Stagiaire de recherche

Mohsin Hasan

Doctorat - UdeM

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Alex Hernandez-Garcia

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Edward Hu

Doctorat - UdeM

Moksh Jain

Doctorat - UdeM

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Minsu Kim

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Seanie Lee

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Zhen Liu

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Liam Paull

Chenghao Liu

Collaborateur·rice alumni

Stagiaire de recherche - Imperial College London

Doctorat - UdeM

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Nikolay Malkin

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Cristian Dragos Manta

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Dhanya Sridhar

Sören Mindermann

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Sarthak Mittal

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM

Ali Parviz

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Ying Wu Coll of Computing

Lena Podina

Doctorat - University of Waterloo

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Rolnick

Camille Rochefort-Boulanger

Nassim Rahaman

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

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Doctorat - UdeM

Danyal REHMAN

Postdoctorat - UdeM

James Requeima

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Julie Hussin

Victor Schmidt

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Marcin Sendera

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Dounia Shaaban Kabakibo

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Vedant Shah

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni

Marco Stock

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Technical University of Munich

marco.stock@tum.de

Anja Surina

Doctorat - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Vincent Taboga

Postdoctorat - Polytechnique

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Mélisande Astrid Crystal Teng

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - RWTH Aachen University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen)

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

David Rolnick

alexander.tong@mila.quebec

Alex Tong

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Zichao Yan

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Omar Younis

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Mathieu Blanchette

Dinghuai Zhang

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Aaron Courville

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

Harry Zhao

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Billets de blogue

Generic thumbnail for Mila Blog articles.

22 février 2024

par

Mingde Harry Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Doina Precup

Yoshua Bengio

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

Scaling in the service of reasoning & model-based ML

4 avril 2023

par

Yoshua Bengio

Edward J. Hu

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

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

23 mars 2022

par

Paul Bertin

Jake P. Taylor-King

Yoshua Bengio

Les réseaux de flot génératifs

15 mars 2022

par

Yoshua Bengio

Publications

Sources of richness and ineffability for phenomenally conscious states

Xu Ji

Eric Elmoznino

George Deane

Axel Constant

Guillaume Dumas

Jonathan Simon

2024-03-01

Neuroscience of Consciousness (publié)

Distributional GFlowNets with Quantile Flows

Dinghuai Zhang

Ling Pan

Ricky T. Q. Chen

Aaron Courville

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a new family of probabilistic samplers where an agent learns a stochastic policy for generating com… (voir plus)plex combinatorial structure through a series of decision-making steps. Despite being inspired from reinforcement learning, the current GFlowNet framework is relatively limited in its applicability and cannot handle stochasticity in the reward function. In this work, we adopt a distributional paradigm for GFlowNets, turning each flow function into a distribution, thus providing more informative learning signals during training. By parameterizing each edge flow through their quantile functions, our proposed \textit{quantile matching} GFlowNet learning algorithm is able to learn a risk-sensitive policy, an essential component for handling scenarios with risk uncertainty. Moreover, we find that the distributional approach can achieve substantial improvement on existing benchmarks compared to prior methods due to our enhanced training algorithm, even in settings with deterministic rewards.

2024-02-16

TMLR (accepté)

Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Girish Sastry

Lennart Heim

Haydn Belfield

Markus Anderljung

Miles Brundage

Julian Hazell

Cullen C. O'keefe

Gillian K. Hadfield

Richard Ngo

Konstantin Pilz

George Gor

Emma Bluemke

Sarah Shoker

Janet Egan

Robert F. Trager

Shahar Avin

Adrian Weller

Diane Coyle

Computing power, or"compute,"is crucial for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. As a result, govern… (voir plus)ments and companies have started to leverage compute as a means to govern AI. For example, governments are investing in domestic compute capacity, controlling the flow of compute to competing countries, and subsidizing compute access to certain sectors. However, these efforts only scratch the surface of how compute can be used to govern AI development and deployment. Relative to other key inputs to AI (data and algorithms), AI-relevant compute is a particularly effective point of intervention: it is detectable, excludable, and quantifiable, and is produced via an extremely concentrated supply chain. These characteristics, alongside the singular importance of compute for cutting-edge AI models, suggest that governing compute can contribute to achieving common policy objectives, such as ensuring the safety and beneficial use of AI. More precisely, policymakers could use compute to facilitate regulatory visibility of AI, allocate resources to promote beneficial outcomes, and enforce restrictions against irresponsible or malicious AI development and usage. However, while compute-based policies and technologies have the potential to assist in these areas, there is significant variation in their readiness for implementation. Some ideas are currently being piloted, while others are hindered by the need for fundamental research. Furthermore, naive or poorly scoped approaches to compute governance carry significant risks in areas like privacy, economic impacts, and centralization of power. We end by suggesting guardrails to minimize these risks from compute governance.

2024-02-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Iterated Denoising Energy Matching for Sampling from Boltzmann Densities

Tara Akhound-Sadegh

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Joey Bose

Sarthak Mittal

Pablo Lemos

Cheng-Hao Liu

Marcin Sendera

Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Gauthier Gidel

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

2024-02-09

ArXiv (prépublication)

On diffusion models for amortized inference: Benchmarking and improving stochastic control and sampling

Marcin Sendera

Minsu Kim

Sarthak Mittal

Pablo Lemos

Luca Scimeca

Jarrid Rector-Brooks

Alexandre Adam

Nikolay Malkin

We study the problem of training diffusion models to sample from a distribution with a given unnormalized density or energy function. We ben… (voir plus)chmark several diffusion-structured inference methods, including simulation-based variational approaches and off-policy methods (continuous generative flow networks). Our results shed light on the relative advantages of existing algorithms while bringing into question some claims from past work. We also propose a novel exploration strategy for off-policy methods, based on local search in the target space with the use of a replay buffer, and show that it improves the quality of samples on a variety of target distributions. Our code for the sampling methods and benchmarks studied is made public at https://github.com/GFNOrg/gfn-diffusion as a base for future work on diffusion models for amortized inference.

2024-02-07

ArXiv (prépublication)

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.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (présentation orale)

Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Harry Zhao

Harry Zhao 0001

Mingde Zhao

Safa Alver

Harm van Seijen

Romain Laroche

Doina Precup

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.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

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.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

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 …

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving learning signals through partial trajectory optimization

Dinghuai Zhang

Ricky T. Q. Chen

Cheng-Hao Liu

Aaron Courville

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Expected flow networks in stochastic environments and two-player zero-sum games

Marco Jiralerspong

Bilun Sun

Danilo Vucetic

Tianyu Zhang

Gauthier Gidel

Nikolay Malkin

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)

Local Search GFlowNets

Minsu Kim

Taeyoung Yun

Emmanuel Bengio

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.

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)