Yoshua Bengio

Affiliation: Unknown

Papers

  • The Effect of Diversity in Meta-Learning

    Few-shot learning aims to learn representations that can tackle novel tasks given a small number of examples. Recent studies show that task distribution plays a vital role in the model's performance. Conventional wisdom is that task diversity should improve the performance of meta-learning. In this work, we find evidence to …

  • Rethinking Learning Dynamics in RL using Adversarial Networks

    We present a learning mechanism for reinforcement learning of closely related skills parameterized via a skill embedding space. Our approach is grounded on the intuition that nothing makes you learn better than a coevolving adversary. The main contribution of our work is to formulate an adversarial training regime for reinforcement …

  • Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

    Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a method for learning a stochastic policy for generating compositional objects, such as graphs or strings, from a given unnormalized density by sequences of actions, where many possible action sequences may lead to the same object. Prior temporal difference-like learning objectives for training GFlowNets, such …

  • Towards Scaling Difference Target Propagation by Learning Backprop Targets

    The development of biologically-plausible learning algorithms is important for understanding learning in the brain, but most of them fail to scale-up to real-world tasks, limiting their potential as explanations for learning by real brains. As such, it is important to explore learning algorithms that come with strong theoretical guarantees and …

  • Adaptive Discrete Communication Bottlenecks with Dynamic Vector Quantization

    Vector Quantization (VQ) is a method for discretizing latent representations and has become a major part of the deep learning toolkit. It has been theoretically and empirically shown that discretization of representations leads to improved generalization, including in reinforcement learning where discretization can be used to bottleneck multi-agent communication to …

  • Generative Flow Networks for Discrete Probabilistic Modeling

    We present energy-based generative flow networks (EB-GFN), a novel probabilistic modeling algorithm for high-dimensional discrete data. Building upon the theory of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we model the generation process by a stochastic data construction policy and thus amortize expensive MCMC exploration into a fixed number of actions sampled from …

  • Unifying Likelihood-free Inference with Black-box Optimization and Beyond

    Black-box optimization formulations for biological sequence design have drawn recent attention due to their promising potential impact on the pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we propose to unify two seemingly distinct worlds: likelihood-free inference and black-box optimization, under one probabilistic framework. In tandem, we provide a recipe for constructing various …