Portrait of Oscar Mañas

Oscar Mañas

PhD - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Aishwarya Agrawal
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Multimodal Learning
Natural Language Processing
Website
Google Scholar
Bluesky
GitHub

Publications

An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling
Florian Bordes
Richard Yuanzhe Pang
Anurag Ajay
Alexander C. Li
Adrien Bardes
Suzanne Petryk
Oscar Mañas
Zhiqiu Lin
Anas Mahmoud
Bargav Jayaraman
Mark Ibrahim
Melissa Hall
Yunyang Xiong
Jonathan Lebensold
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
Reyhane Askari Hemmat
Jun Chen
Kushal Tirumala
Rim Assouel
Mazda Moayeri
Arjang Talattof
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Zechun Liu
Xilun Chen
Quentin Garrido
Karen Ullrich
Aishwarya Agrawal
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.
2024-05-27
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling
Florian Bordes
Richard Yuanzhe Pang
Anurag Ajay
Alexander C. Li
Adrien Bardes
Suzanne Petryk
Oscar Mañas
Zhiqiu Lin
Anas Mahmoud
Bargav Jayaraman
Mark Ibrahim
Melissa Hall
Yunyang Xiong
Jonathan Lebensold
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
Reyhane Askari Hemmat
Jun Chen
Kushal Tirumala
Rim Assouel
Mazda Moayeri
Arjang Talattof
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Zechun Liu
Xilun Chen
Quentin Garrido
Karen Ullrich
Aishwarya Agrawal
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.
2024-05-27
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models
Oscar Mañas
Benno Krojer
Aishwarya Agrawal
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.
2024-03-24
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
MAPL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Unimodal Pre-Trained Models for Vision-Language Few-Shot Prompting
Oscar Mañas
Pau Rodriguez
Saba Ahmadi
Aida Nematzadeh
Yash Goyal
Aishwarya Agrawal
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.
2023-05-01
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org