Portrait of Chris Pal

Chris Pal

Core Academic Member
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Full Professor, Polytechnique Montréal, Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering
Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research

Biography

Christopher Pal is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, full professor at Polytechnique Montréal and adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal. He is also a Distinguished Scientist at ServiceNow Research.

Pal has been involved in AI and machine learning research for over twenty-five years and has published extensively on large-scale language modelling methods and generative modelling techniques. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo.

Current Students

PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Co-supervisor :
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
PhD - École de technologie suprérieure
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
Co-supervisor :
PhD - Université de Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal
Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
Postdoctorate - HEC Montréal
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal
PhD - Université de Montréal
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Publications

Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?
Benno Krojer
Elinor Poole-Dayan
Vikram Voleti
Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlik… (see more)e discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.
Block-State Transformers
Jonathan Pilault
Mahan Fathi
Orhan Firat
Ross Goroshin
Parallel-mentoring for Offline Model-based Optimization
Can Chen
Christopher Beckham
Zixuan Liu
We study offline model-based optimization to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and scores. These desi… (see more)gns encompass a variety of domains, including materials, robots, DNA sequences, and proteins. A common approach trains a proxy on the static dataset and performs gradient ascent to obtain new designs. However, this often results in poor designs due to the proxy inaccuracies for out-of-distribution designs. Recent studies indicate that (a) gradient ascent with a mean ensemble of proxies generally outperforms simple gradient ascent, and (b) a trained proxy provides weak ranking supervision signals for design selection. Motivated by (a) and (b), we propose
Parallel-mentoring for Offline Model-based Optimization
Can Chen
Christopher Beckham
Zixuan Liu
Neural Causal Structure Discovery from Interventions
Nan Rosemary Ke
Olexa Bilaniuk
Anirudh Goyal
Stefan Bauer
Bernhard Schölkopf
Michael Curtis Mozer
Recent promising results have generated a surge of interest in continuous optimization methods for causal discovery from observational data.… (see more) However, there are theoretical limitations on the identifiability of underlying structures obtained solely from observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, provides richer information about the underlying data-generating process. Nevertheless, extending and applying methods designed for observational data to include interventions is a challenging problem. To address this issue, we propose a general framework based on neural networks to develop models that incorporate both observational and interventional data. Notably, our method can handle the challenging and realistic scenario where the identity of the intervened upon variable is unknown. We evaluate our proposed approach in the context of graph recovery, both de novo and from a partially-known edge set. Our method achieves strong benchmark results on various structure learning tasks, including structure recovery of synthetic graphs as well as standard graphs from the Bayesian Network Repository.
Bridging the Gap Between Target Networks and Functional Regularization
Alexandre Piché
Valentin Thomas
Joseph Marino
Rafael Pardinas
Gian Maria Marconi
Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Goal-conditioned GFlowNets for Controllable Multi-Objective Molecular Design
Julien Roy
Emmanuel Bengio
In recent years, in-silico molecular design has received much attention from the machine learning community. When designing a new compound f… (see more)or pharmaceutical applications, there are usually multiple properties of such molecules that need to be optimised: binding energy to the target, synthesizability, toxicity, EC50, and so on. While previous approaches have employed a scalarization scheme to turn the multi-objective problem into a preference-conditioned single objective, it has been established that this kind of reduction may produce solutions that tend to slide towards the extreme points of the objective space when presented with a problem that exhibits a concave Pareto front. In this work we experiment with an alternative formulation of goal-conditioned molecular generation to obtain a more controllable conditional model that can uniformly explore solutions along the entire Pareto front.
Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and Action Plans
Stefania Raimondo
Xiaotian Liu
David Vazquez
Hector. Palacios
ArK: Augmented Reality with Knowledge Interactive Emergent Ability
Qiuyuan Huang
J. Park
Abhinav Gupta
Pan Lu
Paul N. Bennett
Ran Gong
Subhojit Som
Baolin Peng
Owais Khan Mohammed
Yejin Choi
Jianfeng Gao
Despite the growing adoption of mixed reality and interactive AI agents, it remains challenging for these systems to generate high quality 2… (see more)D/3D scenes in unseen environments. The common practice requires deploying an AI agent to collect large amounts of data for model training for every new task. This process is costly, or even impossible, for many domains. In this study, we develop an infinite agent that learns to transfer knowledge memory from general foundation models (e.g. GPT4, DALLE) to novel domains or scenarios for scene understanding and generation in the physical or virtual world. The heart of our approach is an emerging mechanism, dubbed Augmented Reality with Knowledge Inference Interaction (ArK), which leverages knowledge-memory to generate scenes in unseen physical world and virtual reality environments. The knowledge interactive emergent ability (Figure 1) is demonstrated as the observation learns i) micro-action of cross-modality: in multi-modality models to collect a large amount of relevant knowledge memory data for each interaction task (e.g., unseen scene understanding) from the physical reality; and ii) macro-behavior of reality-agnostic: in mix-reality environments to improve interactions that tailor to different characterized roles, target variables, collaborative information, and so on. We validate the effectiveness of ArK on the scene generation and editing tasks. We show that our ArK approach, combined with large foundation models, significantly improves the quality of generated 2D/3D scenes, compared to baselines, demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating ArK in generative AI for applications such as metaverse and gaming simulation.
Controllable Image Generation via Collage Representations
Arantxa Casanova
Marlene Careil
Jakob Verbeek
Michal Drozdzal
Conservative objective models are a special kind of contrastive divergence-based energy model
Christopher Beckham
In this work we theoretically show that conservative objective models (COMs) for offline model-based optimisation (MBO) are a special kind o… (see more)f contrastive divergence-based energy model, one where the energy function represents both the unconditional probability of the input and the conditional probability of the reward variable. While the initial formulation only samples modes from its learned distribution, we propose a simple fix that replaces its gradient ascent sampler with a Langevin MCMC sampler. This gives rise to a special probabilistic model where the probability of sampling an input is proportional to its predicted reward. Lastly, we show that better samples can be obtained if the model is decoupled so that the unconditional and conditional probabilities are modelled separately.
Visual Question Answering From Another Perspective: CLEVR Mental Rotation Tests
Christopher Beckham
Martin Weiss
Florian Golemo
Sina Honari