Portrait de Aarash Feizi

Aarash Feizi

Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Reihaneh Rabbany
Co-supervisor
Adriana Romero Soriano
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Vision par ordinateur
Site web
Google Scholar
GitHub

Publications

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations
Aarash Feizi
Shravan Nayak
Xiangru Jian
Kevin Qinghong Lin
Kaixin Li
Rabiul Awal
Xing Han Lu
Johan Obando-Ceron
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicolas Chapados
David Vázquez
Adriana Romero-Soriano
Reihaneh Rabbany
Perouz Taslakian
Christopher Pal
Spandana Gella
Sai Rajeswar
Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen eleme… (voir plus)nts. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.
2025-12-31
International Conference on Learning Representations (Accept (Poster))
doi.org
openreview.net
Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations
Aarash Feizi
Shravan Nayak
Xiangru Jian
Kevin Qinghong Lin
Kaixin Li
Rabiul Awal
Xing Han Lu
Johan Obando-Ceron
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicolas Chapados
David Vázquez
Adriana Romero-Soriano
Reihaneh Rabbany
Perouz Taslakian
Christopher Pal
Spandana Gella
Sai Rajeswar
Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen eleme… (voir plus)nts. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.
2025-11-09
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
openreview.net
WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Aarash Feizi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Christopher Pal
Aishwarya Agrawal
David Vázquez
Siva Reddy
Juan A. Rodriguez
Perouz Taslakian
Spandana Gella
Sai Rajeswar
We present WebMMU, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates three core web tasks: (1) website visual question answering, (2) code editing inv… (voir plus)olving HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and (3) mockup-to-code generation. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat these tasks separately, WebMMU unifies them using expert-annotated, real-world web data to assess models'abilities in complex multi-step reasoning, precise element grounding, and functional UI comprehension and coding. Our evaluation shows that while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on basic information extraction, they struggle with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. These findings reveal key limitations in current MLLMs and underscore the need for improved multimodal and cross-lingual reasoning to build future web agents capable of automating diverse web development tasks.
2025-10-31
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (publié)
doi.org
openreview.net
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
Perouz Taslakian
Spandana Gella
Sai Rajeswar
David Vázquez
Christopher Pal
Marco Pedersoli
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) offer a powerful format for representing visual designs as interpretable code. Recent advances in vision-lang… (voir plus)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.
2025-09-17
NeurIPS.cc/2025/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Document Understanding
Ahmed Masry
Juan A. Rodriguez
Tianyu Zhang
Suyuchen Wang
Chao Wang
Aarash Feizi
Akshay Kalkunte Suresh
Abhay Puri
Xiangru Jian
Pierre-Andre Noel
Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan
Marco Pedersoli
Bang Liu
Nicolas Chapados
Yoshua Bengio
Enamul Hoque
Christopher Pal
Issam H. Laradji
David Vázquez
Perouz Taslakian … (voir 2 de plus)
Spandana Gella
Sai Rajeswar
Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges… (voir plus) 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), lack inductive bias to constrain visual features within the linguistic structure of the LLM's embedding space, making them data-hungry and prone to cross-modal misalignment. 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 visual and textual modalities are highly correlated. Our extensive experiments show that AlignVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior alignment methods, with larger gains on document understanding tasks and under low-resource setups. We provide further analysis demonstrating its efficiency and robustness to noise.
2025-03-04
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/Re-Align (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multi-modal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte
François Savard
Ahmed Masry
Shravan Nayak
Rabiul Awal
Mahsa Massoud
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Zichao Li
Suyuchen Wang
Pierre-Andre Noel
Mats Leon Richter
Saverio Vadacchino
Shubham Agarwal
Sanket Biswas … (voir 23 de plus)
Sara Shanian
Ying Zhang
Noah Bolger
Kurt MacDonald
Simon Fauvel
Sathwik Tejaswi
Srinivas Sunkara
Joao Monteiro
Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham
Torsten Scholak
Nicolas Chapados
Sepideh Kharagani
Sean Hughes
M. Özsu
Siva Reddy
Marco Pedersoli
Yoshua Bengio
Christopher Pal
Issam Laradji
Spandana Gella
Perouz Taslakian
David Vázquez
Sai Rajeswar
Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows,… (voir plus) extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Despite this, their use in commercial applications is often limited due to limited access to training data and restrictive licensing, which hinders open access. To address these limitations, we introduce BigDocs-7.5M, a high-quality, open-access dataset comprising 7.5 million multimodal documents across 30 tasks. We use an efficient data curation process to ensure our data is high-quality and license-permissive. Our process emphasizes accountability, responsibility, and transparency through filtering rules, traceable metadata, and careful content analysis. Additionally, we introduce BigDocs-Bench, a benchmark suite with 10 novel tasks where we create datasets that reflect real-world use cases involving reasoning over Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and code generation from images. Our experiments show that training with BigDocs-Bench improves average performance up to 25.8% over closed-source GPT-4o in document reasoning and structured output tasks such as Screenshot2HTML or Image2Latex generation. Finally, human evaluations showed a preference for outputs from models trained on BigDocs over GPT-4o. This suggests that BigDocs can help both academics and the open-source community utilize and improve AI tools to enhance multimodal capabilities and document reasoning. The project is hosted at https://bigdocs.github.io .
2025-01-21
International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
PairBench: Are Vision-Language Models Reliable at Comparing What They See?
Aarash Feizi
Sai Rajeswar
Adriana Romero
Reihaneh Rabbany
Spandana Gella
Valentina Zantedeschi
Joao Monteiro
Understanding how effectively large vision language models (VLMs) compare visual inputs is crucial across numerous applications, yet this fu… (voir plus)ndamental capability remains insufficiently assessed. While VLMs are increasingly deployed for tasks requiring comparative judgment, including automated evaluation, re-ranking, and retrieval-augmented generation, no systematic framework exists to measure their performance in these scenarios. We present PairBench, a simple framework that evaluates VLMs as customizable similarity tools using widely available image datasets. Our approach introduces four key metrics for reliable comparison: alignment with human annotations, consistency across pair ordering, distribution smoothness, and controllability through prompting. Our analysis reveals that no model consistently excels across all metrics, with each demonstrating distinct strengths and weaknesses. Most concerning is the widespread inability of VLMs to maintain symmetric similarity scores. Interestingly, we demonstrate that performance on our benchmark strongly correlates with popular benchmarks used for more complex tasks, while providing additional metrics into controllability, smoothness and ordering. This makes PairBench a unique and comprehensive framework to evaluate the performance of VLMs for automatic evaluation depending on the task.
2024-12-31
arXiv.org (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
FairLoRA: Unpacking Bias Mitigation in Vision Models with Fairness-Driven Low-Rank Adaptation
Rohan Sukumaran
Aarash Feizi
Adriana Romero-Sorian
Golnoosh Farnadi
2024-10-21
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
GPS-SSL: Guided Positive Sampling to Inject Prior Into Self-Supervised Learning
Aarash Feizi
Randall Balestriero
Arantxa Casanova
Adriana Romero
Reihaneh Rabbany
We propose Guided Positive Sampling Self-Supervised Learning (GPS-SSL), a general method to inject a priori knowledge into Self-Supervised L… (voir plus)earning (SSL) positive samples selection. Current SSL methods leverage Data-Augmentations (DA) for generating positive samples and incorporate prior knowledge - an incorrect, or too weak DA will drastically reduce the quality of the learned representation. GPS-SSL proposes instead to design a metric space where Euclidean distances become a meaningful proxy for semantic relationship. In that space, it is now possible to generate positive samples from nearest neighbor sampling. Any prior knowledge can now be embedded into that metric space independently from the employed DA. From its simplicity, GPS-SSL is applicable to any SSL method, e.g. SimCLR or BYOL. A key benefit of GPS-SSL is in reducing the pressure in tailoring strong DAs. For example GPS-SSL reaches 85.58% on Cifar10 with weak DA while the baseline only reaches 37.51%. We therefore move a step forward towards the goal of making SSL less reliant on DA. We also show that even when using strong DAs, GPS-SSL outperforms the baselines on under-studied domains. We evaluate GPS-SSL along with multiple baseline SSL methods on numerous downstream datasets from different domains when the models use strong or minimal data augmentations. We hope that GPS-SSL will open new avenues in studying how to inject a priori knowledge into SSL in a principled manner.
2024-01-02
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
openreview.net
Party Prediction for Twitter
Kellin Pelrine
Anne Imouza
Zachary Yang
Jacob-Junqi Tian
Sacha Lévy
Gabrielle Desrosiers-Brisebois
Aarash Feizi
Cécile Amadoro
Andre Blais
Jean-François Godbout
Reihaneh Rabbany
A large number of studies on social media compare the behaviour of users from different political parties. As a basic step, they employ a pr… (voir plus)edictive model for inferring their political affiliation. The accuracy of this model can change the conclusions of a downstream analysis significantly, yet the choice between different models seems to be made arbitrarily. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey and an empirical comparison of the current party prediction practices and propose several new approaches which are competitive with or outperform state-of-the-art methods, yet require less computational resources. Party prediction models rely on the content generated by the users (e.g., tweet texts), the relations they have (e.g., who they follow), or their activities and interactions (e.g., which tweets they like). We examine all of these and compare their signal strength for the party prediction task. This paper lets the practitioner select from a wide range of data types that all give strong performance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on different aspects of these methods, such as data collection speed and transfer capabilities, which can provide further insights for both applied and methodological research.
2022-12-31
arXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Revisiting Hotels-50K and Hotel-ID
Aarash Feizi
Arantxa Casanova
Adriana Romero
Reihaneh Rabbany
In this paper, we propose revisited versions for two recent hotel recognition datasets: Hotels-50K and Hotel-ID. The revisited versions prov… (voir plus)ide evaluation setups with different levels of difficulty to better align with the intended real-world application, i.e. countering human trafficking. Real-world scenarios involve hotels and locations that are not captured in the current data sets, therefore it is important to consider evaluation settings where classes are truly unseen. We test this setup using multiple state-of-the-art image retrieval models and show that as expected, the models’ performances decrease as the evaluation gets closer to the real-world unseen settings. The rankings of the best performing models also change across the different evaluation settings, which further motivates using the proposed revisited datasets.
2022-07-19
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org