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 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

Mohammed Abukalam

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

agassoussisalwane2@gmail.com

Salwane Agassoussi

UdeM

Berkes Anaïs

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Cambridge University

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Rim Assouel

Doctorat - UdeM

Ayoub Atanane

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Université du Québec à Rimouski

Stefan Bauer

Visiteur de recherche indépendant

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Guillaume Lajoie

Paul Bertin

Doctorat - UdeM

Ghait Boukachab

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UQAR

Shahana Chatterjee

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - N/A

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Eric Elmoznino

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Leo Feng

Doctorat - UdeM

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Ivan Grega

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Pietro Greiner

Doctorat

Mohsin Hasan

Doctorat - UdeM

mohsin.hasan@mila.quebec

Edward Hu

Doctorat - UdeM

Moksh Jain

Doctorat - UdeM

moksh.jain@mila.quebec

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Minsu Kim

Stagiaire de recherche - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Michał Koziarski

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Salem Lahlou

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Tabitha Edith Lee

Postdoctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Seanie Lee

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni

Zhen Liu

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Liam Paull

Matt MacDermott

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Imperial College London

Doctorat - UdeM

Collaborateur·rice alumni - 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

Padideh Nouri

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

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

Doctorat - UdeM

Postdoctorat - UdeM

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

Postdoctorat

Marco Stock

Visiteur de recherche indépendant - Technical University of Munich

marco.stock@tum.de

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

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Zichao Yan

Collaborateur·rice alumni - UdeM

Omar G. Younis

Collaborateur·rice de recherche

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - KAIST

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

Nicole Zhang

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

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

Recall Traces: Backtracking Models for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Anirudh Goyal

Philemon Brakel

William Fedus

Soumye Singhal

Timothy P. Lillicrap

Sergey Levine

Hugo Larochelle

In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provid… (voir plus)e a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states and the probable trajectories leading to them. To this end, we advocate for the use of a backtracking model that predicts the preceding states that terminate at a given high-reward state. We can train a model which, starting from a high value state (or one that is estimated to have high value), predicts and sample for which the (state, action)-tuples may have led to that high value state. These traces of (state, action) pairs, which we refer to as Recall Traces, sampled from this backtracking model starting from a high value state, are informative as they terminate in good states, and hence we can use these traces to improve a policy. We provide a variational interpretation for this idea and a practical algorithm in which the backtracking model samples from an approximate posterior distribution over trajectories which lead to large rewards. Our method improves the sample efficiency of both on- and off-policy RL algorithms across several environments and tasks.

2019-01-01

ICLR.cc/2019/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Agriculture

Jonathan Binas

Leonie H. Luginbuehl

Modern machine learning methods have achieved superhuman performance on a variety of tasks, simply learning from the outcomes of their actio… (voir plus)ns. We propose a path towards more sustainable agriculture, considering plant development an optimization problem with respect to certain parameters, such as yield and environmental impact, which can be optimized in an automated way. Specifically, we propose to use reinforcement learning to autonomously explore and learn ways of influencing the development of certain types of plants, controlling environmental parameters, such as irrigation or nutrient supply, and receiving sensory feedback, such as camera images, humidity, and moisture measurements. The trained system will thus be able to provide instructions for optimal treatment of a local population of plants, based on non-invasive measurements, such as imaging.

Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari

Ankesh Anand

Evan Racah

Sherjil Ozair

Marc-Alexandre Côté

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent ag… (voir plus)ents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state variables. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods. The code associated with this work is available at this https URL

Updates of Equilibrium Prop Match Gradients of Backprop Through Time in an RNN with Static Input

Maxence Ernoult

Julie Grollier

Damien Querlioz

Benjamin Scellier

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically inspired learning algorithm for convergent recurrent neural networks, i.e. RNNs that are fed … (voir plus)by a static input x and settle to a steady state. Training convergent RNNs consists in adjusting the weights until the steady state of output neurons coincides with a target y. Convergent RNNs can also be trained with the more conventional Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. In its original formulation EP was described in the case of real-time neuronal dynamics, which is computationally costly. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time version of EP with simplified equations and with reduced simulation time, bringing EP closer to practical machine learning tasks. We first prove theoretically, as well as numerically that the neural and weight updates of EP, computed by forward-time dynamics, are step-by-step equal to the ones obtained by BPTT, with gradients computed backward in time. The equality is strict when the transition function of the dynamics derives from a primitive function and the steady state is maintained long enough. We then show for more standard discrete-time neural network dynamics that the same property is approximately respected and we subsequently demonstrate training with EP with equivalent performance to BPTT. In particular, we define the first convolutional architecture trained with EP achieving ~ 1% test error on MNIST, which is the lowest error reported with EP. These results can guide the development of deep neural networks trained with EP.

Variational Temporal Abstraction

Taesup Kim

Sungjin Ahn

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. W… (voir plus)e propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model that can infer the latent temporal structure and thus perform the stochastic state transition hierarchically. We also propose to apply this model to implement the jumpy imagination ability in imagination-augmented agent-learning in order to improve the efficiency of the imagination. In experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can model 2D and 3D visual sequence datasets with interpretable temporal structure discovery and that its application to jumpy imagination enables more efficient agent-learning in a 3D navigation task.

Wasserstein Dependency Measure for Representation Learning

Sherjil Ozair

Corey Lynch

Aäron van den Oord

Sergey Levine

Pierre Sermanet

Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the… (voir plus)-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. However, such approaches are fundamentally limited since a tight lower bound of mutual information requires sample size exponential in the mutual information. This limits the applicability of these approaches for prediction tasks with high mutual information, such as in video understanding or reinforcement learning. In these settings, such techniques are prone to overfit, both in theory and in practice, and capture only a few of the relevant factors of variation. This leads to incomplete representations that are not optimal for downstream tasks. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that mutual information-based representation learning approaches do fail to learn complete representations on a number of designed and real-world tasks. To mitigate these problems we introduce the Wasserstein dependency measure, which learns more complete representations by using the Wasserstein distance instead of the KL divergence in the mutual information estimator. We show that a practical approximation to this theoretically motivated solution, constructed using Lipschitz constraint techniques from the GAN literature, achieves substantially improved results on tasks where incomplete representations are a major challenge.

On Training Recurrent Neural Networks for Lifelong Learning

Shagun Sodhani

Sarath Chandar

Catastrophic forgetting and capacity saturation are the central challenges of any parametric lifelong learning system. In this work, we stud… (voir plus)y these challenges in the context of sequential supervised learning with emphasis on recurrent neural networks. To evaluate the models in the lifelong learning setting, we propose a curriculum-based, simple, and intuitive benchmark where the models are trained on tasks with increasing levels of difficulty. To measure the impact of catastrophic forgetting, the model is tested on all the previous tasks as it completes any task. As a step towards developing true lifelong learning systems, we unify Gradient Episodic Memory (a catastrophic forgetting alleviation approach) and Net2Net(a capacity expansion approach). Both these models are proposed in the context of feedforward networks and we evaluate the feasibility of using them for recurrent networks. Evaluation on the proposed benchmark shows that the unified model is more suitable than the constituent models for lifelong learning setting.

2018-11-16

ArXiv (prépublication)

HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering

Zhilin Yang

Peng Qi

Saizheng Zhang

William W. Cohen

Russ Salakhutdinov

Christopher D Manning

Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. We int… (voir plus)roduce HotpotQA, a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) we provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning, allowing QA systems to reason with strong supervision and explain the predictions; (4) we offer a new type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. We show that HotpotQA is challenging for the latest QA systems, and the supporting facts enable models to improve performance and make explainable predictions.

2018-10-01

Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (publié)

doi.org

Deep Graph Infomax

Petar Veličković

William Fedus

William L. Hamilton

Pietro Lio

(Rex) Devon Hjelm

2018-09-27

ArXiv (prépublication)

Probabilistic Planning with Sequential Monte Carlo methods

Alexandre Piché

Valentin Thomas

Cyril Ibrahim

Chris Pal

2018-09-27

International Conference on Learning Representations (publié)

openreview.net

How can deep learning advance computational modeling of sensory information processing?

Jessica A.F. Thompson

Elia Formisano

Marc Schönwiesner

Deep learning, computational neuroscience, and cognitive science have overlapping goals related to understanding intelligence such that perc… (voir plus)eption and behaviour can be simulated in computational systems. In neuroimaging, machine learning methods have been used to test computational models of sensory information processing. Recently, these model comparison techniques have been used to evaluate deep neural networks (DNNs) as models of sensory information processing. However, the interpretation of such model evaluations is muddied by imprecise statistical conclusions. Here, we make explicit the types of conclusions that can be drawn from these existing model comparison techniques and how these conclusions change when the model in question is a DNN. We discuss how DNNs are amenable to new model comparison techniques that allow for stronger conclusions to be made about the computational mechanisms underlying sensory information processing.

2018-09-25

ArXiv (prépublication)

On the Learning Dynamics of Deep Neural Networks

Remi Tachet des Combes

Mohammad Pezeshki

Samira Shabanian

Aaron Courville

While a lot of progress has been made in recent years, the dynamics of learning in deep nonlinear neural networks remain to this day largely… (voir plus) misunderstood. In this work, we study the case of binary classification and prove various properties of learning in such networks under strong assumptions such as linear separability of the data. Extending existing results from the linear case, we confirm empirical observations by proving that the classification error also follows a sigmoidal shape in nonlinear architectures. We show that given proper initialization, learning expounds parallel independent modes and that certain regions of parameter space might lead to failed training. We also demonstrate that input norm and features' frequency in the dataset lead to distinct convergence speeds which might shed some light on the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks. We provide a comparison between the dynamics of learning with cross-entropy and hinge losses, which could prove useful to understand recent progress in the training of generative adversarial networks. Finally, we identify a phenomenon that we baptize \textit{gradient starvation} where the most frequent features in a dataset prevent the learning of other less frequent but equally informative features.

2018-09-18

ArXiv (prépublication)