Perouz Taslakian

David Vazquez

Enamul Hoque

Sai Rajeswar

2025-07-07

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Conference (accepted)

BiXSE: Improving Dense Retrieval via Probabilistic Graded Relevance Distillation

Joao Monteiro

Neural sentence embedding models for dense retrieval typically rely on binary relevance labels, treating query-document pairs as either rele… (see more)vant or irrelevant. However, real-world relevance often exists on a continuum, and recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made it feasible to scale the generation of fine-grained graded relevance labels. In this work, we propose \textbf{BiXSE}, a simple and effective pointwise training method that optimizes binary cross-entropy (BCE) over LLM-generated graded relevance scores. BiXSE interprets these scores as probabilistic targets, enabling granular supervision from a single labeled query-document pair per query. Unlike pairwise or listwise losses that require multiple annotated comparisons per query, BiXSE achieves strong performance with reduced annotation and compute costs by leveraging in-batch negatives. Extensive experiments across sentence embedding (MMTEB) and retrieval benchmarks (BEIR, TREC-DL) show that BiXSE consistently outperforms softmax-based contrastive learning (InfoNCE), and matches or exceeds strong pairwise ranking baselines when trained on LLM-supervised data. BiXSE offers a robust, scalable alternative for training dense retrieval models as graded relevance supervision becomes increasingly accessible.

2025-07-07

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Conference (accepted)

Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Vector Graphics Generation

Juan A. Rodriguez

Haotian Zhang

Abhay Puri

Aarash Feizi

Rishav Pramanik

Pascal Wichmann

Arnab Mondal

Mohammad Reza Samsami

Rabiul Awal

Sai Rajeswar

David Vazquez

Marco Pedersoli

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) offer a powerful format for representing visual designs as interpretable code. Recent advances in vision-lang… (see more)uage models (VLMs) have enabled high-quality SVG generation by framing the problem as a code generation task and leveraging large-scale pretraining. VLMs are particularly suitable for this task as they capture both global semantics and fine-grained visual patterns, while transferring knowledge across vision, natural language, and code domains. However, existing VLM approaches often struggle to produce faithful and efficient SVGs because they never observe the rendered images during training. Although differentiable rendering for autoregressive SVG code generation remains unavailable, rendered outputs can still be compared to original inputs, enabling evaluative feedback suitable for reinforcement learning (RL). We introduce RLRF(Reinforcement Learning from Rendering Feedback), an RL method that enhances SVG generation in autoregressive VLMs by leveraging feedback from rendered SVG outputs. Given an input image, the model generates SVG roll-outs that are rendered and compared to the original image to compute a reward. This visual fidelity feedback guides the model toward producing more accurate, efficient, and semantically coherent SVGs. RLRF significantly outperforms supervised fine-tuning, addressing common failure modes and enabling precise, high-quality SVG generation with strong structural understanding and generalization.

2025-05-27

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

M. Tamer Özsu

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Human Annotator

2025-05-01

ICML.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

Patrice Bechard

Chao Wang

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Juan A. Rodriguez

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

2025-03-27

ArXiv (preprint)

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

Patrice Bechard

Chao Wang

Amirhossein Abaskohi

Juan A. Rodriguez

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

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

M. T. ¨Ozsu

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Human Annotator

2025-03-19

ArXiv (preprint)

AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Understanding

Juan A. Rodriguez

Chao Wang

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)

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)

Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts

Oscar Clivio

Divyat Mahajan

Sara Magliacane

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Drouin

Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not… (see more) guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical Tübingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.

2025-03-05

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

Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts

Oscar Clivio

Divyat Mahajan

Sara Magliacane

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Drouin

Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not… (see more) guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical Tübingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.

2025-03-05

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

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

Mahsa Massoud

David Vazquez

Juan A. Rodriguez

Sai Rajeswar

ServiceNow

WebMMU Benchmark

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)

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

Mahsa Massoud

David Vazquez

Juan A. Rodriguez

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)