Portrait of Perouz Taslakian is unavailable

Perouz Taslakian

Associate Industry Member
Adjunct Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Multimodal Learning
Vision and Language

Publications

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Jo˜ao Monteiro
Étienne Marcotte
Pierre-Andre Noel
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vazquez
In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (see more)on. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context isn't known in advance, caching ICL can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform ICL, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude.
XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Jo˜ao Monteiro
Étienne Marcotte
Pierre-Andre Noel
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vazquez
In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (see more)on. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context isn't known in advance, caching ICL can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform ICL, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude.
XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Jo˜ao Monteiro
Étienne Marcotte
Pierre-Andre Noel
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vazquez
In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (see more)on. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context isn't known in advance, caching ICL can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform ICL, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude.
Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models
Issam Hadj Laradji
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (see more)er, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a"capture the flag"principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.
Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models
Issam Hadj Laradji
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (see more)er, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a"capture the flag"principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.
Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models
Issam Hadj Laradji
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
OC-NMN: Object-centric Compositional Neural Module Network for Generative Visual Analogical Reasoning
Pau Rodriguez
David Vazquez
OCIM : Object-centric Compositional Imagination for Visual Abstract Reasoning
Pau Rodriguez
David Vazquez
A long-sought property of machine learning systems is the ability to compose learned concepts in novel ways that would enable them to m… (see more)ake sense of new situations. Such capacity for imagination -- a core aspect of human intelligence -- is not yet attained for machines. In this work, we show that object-centric inductive biases can be leveraged to derive an imagination-based learning framework that achieves compositional generalization on a series of tasks. Our method, denoted Object-centric Compositional IMagination (OCIM), decomposes visual reasoning tasks into a series of primitives applied to objects without using a domain-specific language. We show that these primitives can be recomposed to generate new imaginary tasks. By training on such imagined tasks, the model learns to reuse the previously-learned concepts to systematically generalize at test time. We test our model on a series of arithmetic tasks where the model has to infer the sequence of operations (programs) applied to a series of inputs. We find that imagination is key for the model to find the correct solution for unseen combinations of operations.
Explaining Graph Neural Networks Using Interpretable Local Surrogates
We propose an interpretable local surrogate (ILS) method for understanding the predictions of black-box graph models. Explainability methods… (see more) are commonly employed to gain insights into black-box models and, given the widespread adoption of GNNs in diverse applications, understanding the underlying reasoning behind their decision-making processes becomes crucial. Our ILS method approximates the behavior of a black-box graph model by fitting a simple surrogate model in the local neighborhood of a given input example. Leveraging the interpretability of the surrogate, ILS is able to identify the most relevant nodes contributing to a specific prediction. To efficiently identify these nodes, we utilize group sparse linear models as local surrogates. Through empirical evaluations on explainability benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph explainability methods. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in providing enhanced interpretability for GNN predictions.
Using Graph Algorithms to Pretrain Graph Completion Transformers
Mikhail Galkin
Bahare Fatemi
David Vasquez
Recent work on Graph Neural Networks has demonstrated that self-supervised pretraining can further enhance performance on downstream graph, … (see more)link, and node classification tasks. However, the efficacy of pretraining tasks has not been fully investigated for downstream large knowledge graph completion tasks. Using a contextualized knowledge graph embedding approach, we investigate five different pretraining signals, constructed using several graph algorithms and no external data, as well as their combination. We leverage the versatility of our Transformer-based model to explore graph structure generation pretraining tasks (i.e. path and k-hop neighborhood generation), typically inapplicable to most graph embedding methods. We further propose a new path-finding algorithm guided by information gain and find that it is the best-performing pretraining task across three downstream knowledge graph completion datasets. While using our new path-finding algorithm as a pretraining signal provides 2-3% MRR improvements, we show that pretraining on all signals together gives the best knowledge graph completion results. In a multitask setting that combines all pretraining tasks, our method surpasses the latest and strong performing knowledge graph embedding methods on all metrics for FB15K-237, on MRR and Hit@1 for WN18RRand on MRR and hit@10 for JF17K (a knowledge hypergraph dataset).
Object-centric Compositional Imagination for Visual Abstract Reasoning
Pau Rodriguez
David Vazquez
Like humans devoid of imagination, current machine learning systems lack the ability to adapt to new, unexpected situations by foreseeing th… (see more)em, which makes them unable to solve new tasks by analogical reasoning. In this work, we introduce a new compositional imagination framework that improves a model's ability to generalize. One of the key components of our framework is object-centric inductive biases that enables models to perceive the environment as a series of objects, properties, and transformations. By composing these key ingredients, it is possible to generate new unseen tasks that, when used to train the model, improve generalization. Experiments on a simplified version of the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.