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
Research Topics
Deep Learning

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

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

Publications

LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?
Shubham Agarwal
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Issam Hadj Laradji
Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham
Jason Stanley
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.
LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?
Shubham Agarwal
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Issam Hadj Laradji
Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham
Jason Stanley
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.
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
Franccois Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
Mats Leon Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubbam Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
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
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
Franccois Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
Mats Leon Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubbam Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
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
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
Franccois Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
Mats Leon Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubbam Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
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
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
Franccois Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
M. L. Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubbam Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
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
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
Franccois Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
M. L. Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubbam Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
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
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
ParetoFlow: Guided Flows in Multi-Objective Optimization
Ye Yuan
Can Chen
In offline multi-objective optimization (MOO), we leverage an offline dataset of designs and their associated labels to simultaneously minim… (see more)ize multiple objectives. This setting more closely mirrors complex real-world problems compared to single-objective optimization. Recent works mainly employ evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian optimization, with limited attention given to the generative modeling capabilities inherent in such data. In this study, we explore generative modeling in offline MOO through flow matching, noted for its effectiveness and efficiency. We introduce ParetoFlow, specifically designed to guide flow sampling to approximate the Pareto front. Traditional predictor (classifier) guidance is inadequate for this purpose because it models only a single objective. In response, we propose a multi-objective predictor guidance module that assigns each sample a weight vector, representing a weighted distribution across multiple objective predictions. A local filtering scheme is introduced to address non-convex Pareto fronts. These weights uniformly cover the entire objective space, effectively directing sample generation towards the Pareto front. Since distributions with similar weights tend to generate similar samples, we introduce a neighboring evolution module to foster knowledge sharing among neighboring distributions. This module generates offspring from these distributions, and selects the most promising one for the next iteration. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks.
ParetoFlow: Guided Flows in Multi-Objective Optimization
Ye Yuan
Can Chen
In offline multi-objective optimization (MOO), we leverage an offline dataset of designs and their associated labels to simultaneously minim… (see more)ize multiple objectives. This setting more closely mirrors complex real-world problems compared to single-objective optimization. Recent works mainly employ evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian optimization, with limited attention given to the generative modeling capabilities inherent in such data. In this study, we explore generative modeling in offline MOO through flow matching, noted for its effectiveness and efficiency. We introduce ParetoFlow, specifically designed to guide flow sampling to approximate the Pareto front. Traditional predictor (classifier) guidance is inadequate for this purpose because it models only a single objective. In response, we propose a multi-objective predictor guidance module that assigns each sample a weight vector, representing a weighted distribution across multiple objective predictions. A local filtering scheme is introduced to address non-convex Pareto fronts. These weights uniformly cover the entire objective space, effectively directing sample generation towards the Pareto front. Since distributions with similar weights tend to generate similar samples, we introduce a neighboring evolution module to foster knowledge sharing among neighboring distributions. This module generates offspring from these distributions, and selects the most promising one for the next iteration. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks.
IntentGPT: Few-shot Intent Discovery with Large Language Models
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicholas Botzer
David Vazquez
Issam Hadj Laradji
In today's digitally driven world, dialogue systems play a pivotal role in enhancing user interactions, from customer service to virtual ass… (see more)istants. In these dialogues, it is important to identify user's goals automatically to resolve their needs promptly. This has necessitated the integration of models that perform Intent Detection. However, users' intents are diverse and dynamic, making it challenging to maintain a fixed set of predefined intents. As a result, a more practical approach is to develop a model capable of identifying new intents as they emerge. We address the challenge of Intent Discovery, an area that has drawn significant attention in recent research efforts. Existing methods need to train on a substantial amount of data for correctly identifying new intents, demanding significant human effort. To overcome this, we introduce IntentGPT, a novel training-free method that effectively prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to discover new intents with minimal labeled data. IntentGPT comprises an \textit{In-Context Prompt Generator}, which generates informative prompts for In-Context Learning, an \textit{Intent Predictor} for classifying and discovering user intents from utterances, and a \textit{Semantic Few-Shot Sampler} that selects relevant few-shot examples and a set of known intents to be injected into the prompt. Our experiments show that IntentGPT outperforms previous methods that require extensive domain-specific data and fine-tuning, in popular benchmarks, including CLINC and BANKING, among others.
IntentGPT: Few-shot Intent Discovery with Large Language Models
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicholas Botzer
David Vazquez
Issam Hadj Laradji
In today's digitally driven world, dialogue systems play a pivotal role in enhancing user interactions, from customer service to virtual ass… (see more)istants. In these dialogues, it is important to identify user's goals automatically to resolve their needs promptly. This has necessitated the integration of models that perform Intent Detection. However, users' intents are diverse and dynamic, making it challenging to maintain a fixed set of predefined intents. As a result, a more practical approach is to develop a model capable of identifying new intents as they emerge. We address the challenge of Intent Discovery, an area that has drawn significant attention in recent research efforts. Existing methods need to train on a substantial amount of data for correctly identifying new intents, demanding significant human effort. To overcome this, we introduce IntentGPT, a novel training-free method that effectively prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to discover new intents with minimal labeled data. IntentGPT comprises an \textit{In-Context Prompt Generator}, which generates informative prompts for In-Context Learning, an \textit{Intent Predictor} for classifying and discovering user intents from utterances, and a \textit{Semantic Few-Shot Sampler} that selects relevant few-shot examples and a set of known intents to be injected into the prompt. Our experiments show that IntentGPT outperforms previous methods that require extensive domain-specific data and fine-tuning, in popular benchmarks, including CLINC and BANKING, among others.
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan A. Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte Suresh
François Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
Mats Leon Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubham Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (see 23 more)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
Noah Bolger
Kurt MacDonald
Joao Monteiro
Simon Fauvel
Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan
Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham
Srinivas Sunkara
Torsten Scholak
Sepideh Kharaghani
M. Özsu
Sean Hughes
Issam Hadj Laradji
Spandana Gella
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .