Chris Pal

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

Mai Ababneh

Research Intern - McGill University

ababneh.mai@gmail.com

Shubham Agarwal

Postdoctorate - HEC Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Paul Barde

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Derek Nowrouzezahrai

paul.b.barde@gmail.com

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Chris Beckham

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Can (Sam) Chen

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Chris Emezue

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating Alumni - Polytechnique Montréal

Roger Girgis

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Florian Golemo

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Yousef Kotp

Master's Research - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Olga Luo

PhD - Université de Montréal

Joel Moniz

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Jonathan Pilault

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Juan Rodriguez

PhD - École de technologie suprérieure

Luke Rowe

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Gaurav Sahu

Postdoctorate - HEC Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Direct Behavior Specification via Constrained Reinforcement Learning

Blog Posts

August 31, 2022

Julien Roy

Roger Girgis

Joshua Romoff

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Chris Pal

Read the article

Publications

AgentRewardBench: Evaluating Automatic Evaluations of Web Agent Trajectories

Xing Han Lu

Amirhossein Kazemnejad

Nicholas Meade

Arkil Patel

Dongchan Shin

Alejandra Zambrano

Karolina Stanczak

Peter Shaw

Siva Reddy

Web agents enable users to perform tasks on web browsers through natural language interaction. Evaluating web agents trajectories is an impo… (see more)rtant problem, since it helps us determine whether the agent successfully completed the tasks. Rule-based methods are widely used for this purpose, but they are challenging to extend to new tasks and may not always recognize successful trajectories. We may achieve higher accuracy through human evaluation, but the process would be substantially slower and more expensive. Automatic evaluations with LLMs may avoid the challenges of designing new rules and manually annotating trajectories, enabling faster and cost-effective evaluation. However, it is unclear how effective they are at evaluating web agents. To this end, we propose AgentRewardBench, the first benchmark to assess the effectiveness of LLM judges for evaluating web agents. AgentRewardBench contains 1302 trajectories across 5 benchmarks and 4 LLMs. Each trajectory in AgentRewardBench is reviewed by an expert, who answers questions pertaining to the success, side effects, and repetitiveness of the agent. Using our benchmark, we evaluate 12 LLM judges and find that no single LLM excels across all benchmarks. We also find that the rule-based evaluation used by common benchmarks tends to underreport the success rate of web agents, highlighting a key weakness of rule-based evaluation and the need to develop more flexible automatic evaluations. We release the benchmark at: https://agent-reward-bench.github.io

2025-04-01

arXiv (published)

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

Shubham Agarwal

Gaurav Sahu

Abhay Puri

Issam Hadj Laradji

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Jason Stanley

Laurent Charlin

2025-04-01

TMLR (accepted)

Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments

Luke Rowe

Roger Girgis

Anthony Gosselin

Liam Paull

Felix Heide

2025-03-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments

Luke Rowe

Roger Girgis

Anthony Gosselin

Liam Paull

Felix Heide

2025-03-28

ArXiv (preprint)

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

Patrice Bechard

Chao Wang

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Juan A. Rodriguez

David Vazquez

Spandana Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Perouz Taslakian

2025-03-27

ArXiv (preprint)

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

Patrice Bechard

Chao Wang

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Juan A. Rodriguez

David Vazquez

Spandana Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Perouz Taslakian

2025-03-27

ArXiv (preprint)

UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction

Shravan Nayak

Xiangru Jian

Kevin Qinghong Lin

Juan A. Rodriguez

Montek Kalsi

Rabiul Awal

Nicolas Chapados

M. T. ¨Ozsu

Aishwarya Agrawal

David Vazquez

Perouz Taslakian

Spandana Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Human Annotator

2025-03-19

ArXiv (preprint)

AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Understanding

Ahmed Masry

Juan A. Rodriguez

Tianyu Zhang

Suyuchen Wang

Chao Wang

Aarash Feizi

Akshay Kalkunte Suresh

Abhay Puri

Xiangru Jian

Pierre-Andre Noel

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Enamul Hoque

Issam Hadj Laradji

David Vazquez

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)

WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation

Rabiul Awal

Mahsa Massoud

Zichao Li

Aarash Feizi

Suyuchen Wang

Aishwarya Agrawal

David Vazquez

Siva Reddy

Juan A. Rodriguez

Perouz Taslakian

Spandana Gella

Sai Rajeswar

Understanding diverse web data and automating web development presents an exciting challenge for agentic AI. While existing benchmarks addre… (see more)ss isolated web-based tasks—such as website-based Visual Question Answering (VQA) and UI-to-code generation—they lack a unified evaluation suite for assessing web agents that interact with and reason about web environments. We introduce WebMMU, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating AI-driven web agents across multilingual website VQA, HTML/CSS/JavaScript code editing, and sketch-to-code generation. WebMMU provides a comprehensive evaluation suite with real-world website data, multi-step reasoning tasks, and functional UI understanding. Benchmarking state-of-the-art multimodal models on WebMMU reveals significant limitations in web-based reasoning, layout understanding, and structured code generation, particularly in preserving UI hierarchy, handling multilingual content, and producing robust, functional code. While most existing models are optimized for English-only settings, WebMMU highlights the challenges of cross-lingual adaptation in real-world web development. These findings expose critical gaps in current models’ ability to understand website structures, execute user instructions, and generate high-quality web code, underscoring the need for more advanced multimodal reasoning in AI-driven web understanding and development.

2025-03-05

ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/DL4C (published)

Beyond FVD: An Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Distribution Quality

Ge Ya Luo

Gian Mario Favero

Zhi Hao Luo

Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

The Fréchet Video Distance (FVD) is a widely adopted metric for evaluating video generation distribution quality. However, its effectivenes… (see more)s relies on critical assumptions. Our analysis reveals three significant limitations: (1) the non-Gaussianity of the Inflated 3D Convnet (I3D) feature space; (2) the insensitivity of I3D features to temporal distortions; (3) the impractical sample sizes required for reliable estimation. These findings undermine FVD's reliability and show that FVD falls short as a standalone metric for video generation evaluation. After extensive analysis of a wide range of metrics and backbone architectures, we propose JEDi, the JEPA Embedding Distance, based on features derived from a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, measured using Maximum Mean Discrepancy with polynomial kernel. Our experiments on multiple open-source datasets show clear evidence that it is a superior alternative to the widely used FVD metric, requiring only 16% of the samples to reach its steady value, while increasing alignment with human evaluation by 34%, on average. Project page: https://oooolga.github.io/JEDi.github.io/.

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

Beyond FVD: An Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Distribution Quality

Ge Ya Luo

Gian Mario Favero

Zhi Hao Luo

Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

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

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 19 more)

Sara Shanian

Ying Zhang

Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan

Joao Monteiro

Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham

Torsten Scholak

Nicolas Chapados

Sepideh Kharaghani

Sean Hughes

M. Özsu

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 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)