Abhay Puri

Xiangru Jian

Pierre-Andre Noel

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Enamul Hoque

Issam Hadj Laradji

Perouz Taslakian … (see 2 more)

Spandana Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges… (see more) on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarity. Existing connectors, such as multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), often produce out-of-distribution or noisy inputs, leading to misalignment between the modalities. In this work, we propose a novel vision-text alignment method, AlignVLM, that maps visual features to a weighted average of LLM text embeddings. Our approach leverages the linguistic priors encoded by the LLM to ensure that visual features are mapped to regions of the space that the LLM can effectively interpret. AlignVLM is particularly effective for document understanding tasks, where scanned document images must be accurately mapped to their textual content. Our extensive experiments show that AlignVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior alignment methods. We provide further analysis demonstrating improved vision-text feature alignment and robustness to noise.

2025-03-05

ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/Re-Align (poster)

BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan A. Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte Suresh

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

Sanket Biswas … (see 19 more)

Sara Shanian

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to relevant training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure that our data is high quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench,, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we carefully create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench, improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations revealed that participants preferred the outputs from models trained with BigDocs over those from GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning.

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Juan A. Rodriguez

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte Suresh

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Sai Rajeswar

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation

Juan A. Rodriguez

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Mohammad Chegini

Alexandre Drouin

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

Sai Rajeswar

Issam Hadj Laradji

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Jason Stanley

Laurent Charlin

2024-12-15

ArXiv (preprint)

LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Jason Stanley

Laurent Charlin

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially du… (see more)e to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Further, we demonstrate that our planning-based approach achieves higher-quality reviews by minimizing hallucinated references in the generated review by 18-26% compared to existing simpler LLM-based generation methods.

2024-12-15

ArXiv (preprint)

LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Jason Stanley

Laurent Charlin

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially du… (see more)e to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Further, we demonstrate that our planning-based approach achieves higher-quality reviews by minimizing hallucinated references in the generated review by 18-26% compared to existing simpler LLM-based generation methods.

2024-12-15

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

M. L. Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharagani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

M. L. Richter

Saverio Vadacchino

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharagani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)

BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

Xiangru Jian

Akshay Kalkunte

Franccois Savard

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Pierre-Andre Noel

Shubbam Agarwal

Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)

Sara Shanian

Noah Bolger

Kurt MacDonald

Simon Fauvel

Sathwik Tejaswi

Srinivas Sunkara

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

Issam Hadj Laradji

Spandanna Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (see more) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .

2024-12-05

ArXiv (preprint)