Narges Armanfard

Biography

Narges Armanfard (PhD, PEng) is the Founder and Principal Investigator of McGill University’s iSMART Lab. She's a tenure-track Assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill and an Associate Academic member at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Armanfard is also affiliated with McGill’s Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM), the McGill initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM), and the McGill Institute for Aerospace Engineering (MIAE).

Her research focuses on developing innovative algorithms for various domains, such as time-series data analysis, computer vision, reinforcement learning and representation learning for tasks like data clustering, classification and anomaly detection.

Her contributions to the field of AI have been recognized with numerous awards from a variety of institutions, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, AgeWell, Vanier-Banting and the Fonds de recherche du Québec, as well as McMaster University, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Scale AI.

Current Students

Ahmad Al-Jabi

Undergraduate - McGill University

Website

Cormac Cureton

Master's Research - McGill University

Website

Navid hassan Zadeh

PhD - McGill University

Khanh Ho Ho

PhD - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

Alexander Koran

PhD - McGill University

Thomas Lai

PhD - McGill University

Brian MacDonald

Master's Research - McGill University

Dario Morle

PhD - McGill University

Abhijeet Praveen

Master's Research - McGill University

Aman Sidhu

Master's Research - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

Sareh Soleimani Gilakjani

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Jack Wei

Master's Research - McGill University

Publications

Adversarial-Robust Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection via Joint Information Retention

Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical component in monitoring complex systems, yet modern deep learning-based detectors are oft… (see more)en highly sensitive to localized input corruptions and structured noise. We propose ARTA (Adversarially Robust multivariate Time-series Anomaly detection via joint information retention), a joint training framework that improves detector robustness through a principled min-max optimization objective. ARTA comprises an anomaly detector and a sparsity-constrained mask generator that are trained simultaneously. The generator identifies minimal, task-relevant temporal perturbations that maximally increase the detector's anomaly score, while the detector is optimized to remain stable under these structured perturbations. The resulting masks characterize the detector's sensitivity to adversarial temporal corruptions and can serve as explanatory signals for the detector's decisions. This adversarial training strategy exposes brittle decision pathways and encourages the detector to rely on distributed and stable temporal patterns rather than spurious localized artifacts. We conduct extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark, demonstrating that ARTA consistently improves anomaly detection performance across diverse datasets and exhibits significantly more graceful degradation under increasing noise levels compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

2026-03-25

arXiv (preprint)

Collision-Aware Vision-Language Learning for End-to-End Driving with Multimodal Infraction Datasets

Alex Koran

Dimitrios Sinodinos

Takuya Nanri

Fangge Chen

High infraction rates remain the primary bottleneck for end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving, as evidenced by the low driving scores on the C… (see more)ARLA Leaderboard. Despite collision-related infractions being the dominant failure mode in closed-loop evaluations, collision-aware representation learning has received limited attention. To address this gap, we first develop a Video-Language-Augmented Anomaly Detector (VLAAD), leveraging a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) formulation to obtain stable, temporally localized collision signals for proactive prediction. To transition these capabilities into closed-loop simulations, we must overcome the limitations of existing simulator datasets, which lack multimodality and are frequently restricted to simple intersection scenarios. Therefore, we introduce CARLA-Collide, a large-scale multimodal dataset capturing realistic collision events across highly diverse road networks. Trained on this diverse simulator data, VLAAD serves as a collision-aware plug-in module that can be seamlessly integrated into existing E2E driving models. By integrating our module into a pretrained TransFuser++ agent, we demonstrate a 14.12% relative increase in driving score with minimal fine-tuning. Beyond closed-loop evaluation, we further assess the generalization capability of VLAAD in an open-loop setting using real-world driving data. To support this analysis, we introduce Real-Collide, a multimodal dataset of diverse dashcam videos paired with semantically rich annotations for collision detection and prediction. On this benchmark, despite containing only 0.6B parameters, VLAAD outperforms a multi-billion-parameter vision-language model, achieving a 23.3% improvement in AUC.

2026-03-25

arXiv (preprint)

EngineAD: A Real-World Vehicle Engine Anomaly Detection Dataset

Christopher Roth

Rory Woods

Ken Sills

The progress of Anomaly Detection (AD) in safety-critical domains, such as transportation, is severely constrained by the lack of large-scal… (see more)e, real-world benchmarks. To address this, we introduce EngineAD, a novel, multivariate dataset comprising high-resolution sensor telemetry collected from a fleet of 25 commercial vehicles over a six-month period. Unlike synthetic datasets, EngineAD features authentic operational data labeled with expert annotations, distinguishing normal states from subtle indicators of incipient engine faults. We preprocess the data into

2026-03-25

arXiv (preprint)

Multitask-Informed Prior for In-Context Learning on Tabular Data: Application to Steel Property Prediction

Dimitrios Sinodinos

Bahareh Nikpour

Jack Y. Wei

Sushant Sinha

Xiaoping Ma

Kashif Rehman

Stephen Yue

Accurate prediction of mechanical properties of steel during hot rolling processes, such as Thin Slab Direct Rolling (TSDR), remains challen… (see more)ging due to complex interactions among chemical compositions, processing parameters, and resultant microstructures. Traditional empirical and experimental methodologies, while effective, are often resource-intensive and lack adaptability to varied production conditions. Moreover, most existing approaches do not explicitly leverage the strong correlations among key mechanical properties, missing an opportunity to improve predictive accuracy through multitask learning. To address this, we present a multitask learning framework that injects multitask awareness into the prior of TabPFN--a transformer-based foundation model for in-context learning on tabular data--through novel fine-tuning strategies. Originally designed for single-target regression or classification, we augment TabPFN's prior with two complementary approaches: (i) target averaging, which provides a unified scalar signal compatible with TabPFN's single-target architecture, and (ii) task-specific adapters, which introduce task-specific supervision during fine-tuning. These strategies jointly guide the model toward a multitask-informed prior that captures cross-property relationships among key mechanical metrics. Extensive experiments on an industrial TSDR dataset demonstrate that our multitask adaptations outperform classical machine learning methods and recent state-of-the-art tabular learning models across multiple evaluation metrics. Notably, our approach enhances both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency compared to task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating that multitask-aware prior adaptation enables foundation models for tabular data to deliver scalable, rapid, and reliable deployment for automated industrial quality control and process optimization in TSDR.

2026-03-23

arXiv (preprint)

ICLAD: In-Context Learning for Unified Tabular Anomaly Detection Across Supervision Regimes

Jack Yi Wei

Anomaly detection on tabular data is commonly studied under three supervision regimes, including one-class settings that assume access to an… (see more)omaly-free training samples, fully unsupervised settings with unlabeled and potentially contaminated training data, and semi-supervised settings with limited anomaly labels. Existing deep learning approaches typically train dataset-specific models under the assumption of a single supervision regime, which limits their ability to leverage shared structures across anomaly detection tasks and to adapt to different supervision levels. We propose ICLAD, an in-context learning foundation model for tabular anomaly detection that generalizes across both datasets and supervision regimes. ICLAD is trained via meta-learning on synthetic tabular anomaly detection tasks, and at inference time, the model assigns anomaly scores by conditioning on the training set without updating model weights. Comprehensive experiments on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across three supervision regimes, establishing a unified framework for tabular anomaly detection.

2026-03-18

arXiv (preprint)

Supervised Multimodal Model for Plasma Spray Diagnostics and Spray Health Monitoring

Cormac Cureton

Abhijeet Praveen

Sareh Soleimani

Aman Sidhu

Cristian Cojocaru

Kintak Raymond Yu

2025-12-31

SSRN Electronic Journal (accepted)

MultiTab: A Scalable Foundation for Multitask Learning on Tabular Data

Dimitrios Sinodinos

Jack Yi Wei

Tabular data is the most abundant data type in the world, powering systems in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and beyond. As tabular datase… (see more)ts grow and span multiple related targets, there is an increasing need to exploit shared task information for improved multitask generalization. Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful way to improve generalization and efficiency, yet most existing work focuses narrowly on large-scale recommendation systems, leaving its potential in broader tabular domains largely underexplored. Also, existing MTL approaches for tabular data predominantly rely on multi-layer perceptron-based backbones, which struggle to capture complex feature interactions and often fail to scale when data is abundant, a limitation that transformer architectures have overcome in other domains. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiTab-Net, the first multitask transformer architecture specifically designed for large tabular data. MultiTab-Net employs a novel multitask masked-attention mechanism that dynamically models feature-feature dependencies while mitigating task competition. Through extensive experiments, we show that MultiTab-Net consistently achieves higher multitask gain than existing MTL architectures and single-task transformers across diverse domains including large-scale recommendation data, census-like socioeconomic data, and physics datasets, spanning a wide range of task counts, task types, and feature modalities. In addition, we contribute MultiTab-Bench, a generalized multitask synthetic dataset generator that enables systematic evaluation of multitask dynamics by tuning task count, task correlations, and relative task complexity. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Armanfard-Lab/MultiTab.

2025-10-31

arXiv (published)

Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with Dual-Branch Prompt Learning

Zihan Wang

S Ebrahimi Kahou

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) enables identifying and localizing defects in unseen categories by relying solely on generalizable featur… (see more)es rather than requiring any labeled examples of anomalies. However, existing ZSAD methods, whether using fixed or learned prompts, struggle under domain shifts because their training data are derived from limited training domains and fail to generalize to new distributions. In this paper, we introduce PILOT, a framework designed to overcome these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a novel dual-branch prompt learning mechanism that dynamically integrates a pool of learnable prompts with structured semantic attributes, enabling the model to adaptively weight the most relevant anomaly cues for each input image; and (2) a label-free test-time adaptation strategy that updates the learnable prompt parameters using high-confidence pseudo-labels from unlabeled test data. Extensive experiments on 13 industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and localization under domain shift.

2025-07-31

arXiv (published)

Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Contaminated Data: Application to Physiological Signals

Thi Kieu Khanh Ho

2025-07-10

Proceedings of the Forty-first Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (published)