Portrait of Oscar Mañas

Oscar Mañas

PhD - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Multimodal Learning
Natural Language Processing

Publications

Learning What Matters: Prioritized Concept Learning via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection
Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale d… (see more)atasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.
EvalGIM: A Library for Evaluating Generative Image Models
Melissa Hall
Reyhane Askari
Mark Ibrahim
Candace Ross
Pietro Astolfi
Tariq Berrada
Marton Havasi
Yohann Benchetrit
Karen Ullrich
Carolina Braga
Abhishek Charnalia
Maeve Ryan
Michal Drozdzal
Jakob Verbeek
As the use of text-to-image generative models increases, so does the adoption of automatic benchmarking methods used in their evaluation. Ho… (see more)wever, while metrics and datasets abound, there are few unified benchmarking libraries that provide a framework for performing evaluations across many datasets and metrics. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of increasingly robust benchmarking methods requires that evaluation libraries remain flexible to new datasets and metrics. Finally, there remains a gap in synthesizing evaluations in order to deliver actionable takeaways about model performance. To enable unified, flexible, and actionable evaluations, we introduce EvalGIM (pronounced ''EvalGym''), a library for evaluating generative image models. EvalGIM contains broad support for datasets and metrics used to measure quality, diversity, and consistency of text-to-image generative models. In addition, EvalGIM is designed with flexibility for user customization as a top priority and contains a structure that allows plug-and-play additions of new datasets and metrics. To enable actionable evaluation insights, we introduce ''Evaluation Exercises'' that highlight takeaways for specific evaluation questions. The Evaluation Exercises contain easy-to-use and reproducible implementations of two state-of-the-art evaluation methods of text-to-image generative models: consistency-diversity-realism Pareto Fronts and disaggregated measurements of performance disparities across groups. EvalGIM also contains Evaluation Exercises that introduce two new analysis methods for text-to-image generative models: robustness analyses of model rankings and balanced evaluations across different prompt styles. We encourage text-to-image model exploration with EvalGIM and invite contributions at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EvalGIM/.
EvalGIM: A Library for Evaluating Generative Image Models
Melissa Hall
Reyhane Askari
Mark Ibrahim
Candace Ross
Pietro Astolfi
Tariq Berrada
Marton Havasi
Yohann Benchetrit
Karen Ullrich
Carolina Braga
Abhishek Charnalia
Maeve Ryan
Michal Drozdzal
Jakob Verbeek
As the use of text-to-image generative models increases, so does the adoption of automatic benchmarking methods used in their evaluation. Ho… (see more)wever, while metrics and datasets abound, there are few unified benchmarking libraries that provide a framework for performing evaluations across many datasets and metrics. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of increasingly robust benchmarking methods requires that evaluation libraries remain flexible to new datasets and metrics. Finally, there remains a gap in synthesizing evaluations in order to deliver actionable takeaways about model performance. To enable unified, flexible, and actionable evaluations, we introduce EvalGIM (pronounced ''EvalGym''), a library for evaluating generative image models. EvalGIM contains broad support for datasets and metrics used to measure quality, diversity, and consistency of text-to-image generative models. In addition, EvalGIM is designed with flexibility for user customization as a top priority and contains a structure that allows plug-and-play additions of new datasets and metrics. To enable actionable evaluation insights, we introduce ''Evaluation Exercises'' that highlight takeaways for specific evaluation questions. The Evaluation Exercises contain easy-to-use and reproducible implementations of two state-of-the-art evaluation methods of text-to-image generative models: consistency-diversity-realism Pareto Fronts and disaggregated measurements of performance disparities across groups. EvalGIM also contains Evaluation Exercises that introduce two new analysis methods for text-to-image generative models: robustness analyses of model rankings and balanced evaluations across different prompt styles. We encourage text-to-image model exploration with EvalGIM and invite contributions at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EvalGIM/.
EvalGIM: A Library for Evaluating Generative Image Models
Melissa Hall
Mark Ibrahim
Candace Ross
Pietro Astolfi
Tariq Berrada
Marton Havasi
Yohann Benchetrit
Karen Ullrich
Carolina Braga
Abhishek Charnalia
Maeve Ryan
Michal Drozdzal
Jakob Verbeek
As the use of text-to-image generative models increases, so does the adoption of automatic benchmarking methods used in their evaluation. Ho… (see more)wever, while metrics and datasets abound, there are few unified benchmarking libraries that provide a framework for performing evaluations across many datasets and metrics. Furthermore, the rapid introduction of increasingly robust benchmarking methods requires that evaluation libraries remain flexible to new datasets and metrics. Finally, there remains a gap in synthesizing evaluations in order to deliver actionable takeaways about model performance. To enable unified, flexible, and actionable evaluations, we introduce EvalGIM (pronounced ''EvalGym''), a library for evaluating generative image models. EvalGIM contains broad support for datasets and metrics used to measure quality, diversity, and consistency of text-to-image generative models. In addition, EvalGIM is designed with flexibility for user customization as a top priority and contains a structure that allows plug-and-play additions of new datasets and metrics. To enable actionable evaluation insights, we introduce ''Evaluation Exercises'' that highlight takeaways for specific evaluation questions. The Evaluation Exercises contain easy-to-use and reproducible implementations of two state-of-the-art evaluation methods of text-to-image generative models: consistency-diversity-realism Pareto Fronts and disaggregated measurements of performance disparities across groups. EvalGIM also contains Evaluation Exercises that introduce two new analysis methods for text-to-image generative models: robustness analyses of model rankings and balanced evaluations across different prompt styles. We encourage text-to-image model exploration with EvalGIM and invite contributions at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EvalGIM/.
Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimization
Pietro Astolfi
Melissa Hall
Candace Ross
Jack Urbanek
Adina Williams
Michal Drozdzal
An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling
Richard Yuanzhe Pang
Anurag Ajay
Alexander C. Li
Adrien Bardes
Suzanne Petryk
Zhiqiu Lin
Bargav Jayaraman
Mark Ibrahim
Melissa Hall
Yunyang Xiong
Candace Ross
Srihari Jayakumar
Chuan Guo
Diane Bouchacourt
Haider Al-Tahan
Karthik Padthe … (see 21 more)
Vasu Sharma
Huijuan Xu 0001
Xiaoqing Ellen Tan
Megan Richards
Samuel Lavoie
Pietro Astolfi
Jun Chen
Kushal Tirumala
Mazda Moayeri
Arjang Talattof
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Zechun Liu
Xilun Chen
Quentin Garrido
Karen Ullrich
Kate Saenko
Asli Celikyilmaz
Vikas Chandra
Following the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), several attempts have been made to extend them to the visual domain. From h… (see more)aving a visual assistant that could guide us through unfamiliar environments to generative models that produce images using only a high-level text description, the vision-language model (VLM) applications will significantly impact our relationship with technology. However, there are many challenges that need to be addressed to improve the reliability of those models. While language is discrete, vision evolves in a much higher dimensional space in which concepts cannot always be easily discretized. To better understand the mechanics behind mapping vision to language, we present this introduction to VLMs which we hope will help anyone who would like to enter the field. First, we introduce what VLMs are, how they work, and how to train them. Then, we present and discuss approaches to evaluate VLMs. Although this work primarily focuses on mapping images to language, we also discuss extending VLMs to videos.
Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models
8 years after the visual question answering (VQA) task was proposed, accuracy remains the primary metric for automatic evaluation. VQA Accur… (see more)acy has been effective so far in the IID evaluation setting. However, our community is undergoing a shift towards open-ended generative models and OOD evaluation. In this new paradigm, the existing VQA Accuracy metric is overly stringent and underestimates the performance of VQA systems. Thus, there is a need to develop more robust automatic VQA metrics that serve as a proxy for human judgment. In this work, we propose to leverage the in-context learning capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to build a better VQA metric. We formulate VQA evaluation as an answer-rating task where the LLM is instructed to score the accuracy of a candidate answer given a set of reference answers. We demonstrate the proposed metric better correlates with human judgment compared to existing metrics across several VQA models and benchmarks. We hope wide adoption of our metric will contribute to better estimating the research progress on the VQA task. We plan to release the evaluation code and collected human judgments.
MAPL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Unimodal Pre-Trained Models for Vision-Language Few-Shot Prompting
Pau Rodriguez
Aida Nematzadeh
Large pre-trained models have proved to be remarkable zero- and (prompt-based) few-shot learners in unimodal vision and language tasks. We p… (see more)ropose MAPL, a simple and parameter-efficient method that reuses frozen pre-trained unimodal models and leverages their strong generalization capabilities in multimodal vision-language (VL) settings. MAPL learns a lightweight mapping between the representation spaces of unimodal models using aligned image-text data, and can generalize to unseen VL tasks from just a few in-context examples. The small number of trainable parameters makes MAPL effective at low-data and in-domain learning. Moreover, MAPL’s modularity enables easy extension to other pre-trained models. Extensive experiments on several visual question answering and image captioning benchmarks show that MAPL achieves superior or competitive performance compared to similar methods while training orders of magnitude fewer parameters. MAPL can be trained in just a few hours using modest computational resources and public datasets. We release our code and pre-trained model weights at https://github.com/oscmansan/mapl.