Chris Pal

Biographie

Christopher Pal est titulaire d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR, professeur titulaire à Polytechnique Montréal et professeur adjoint au Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle (DIRO) de l'Université de Montréal. Il est également chercheur émérite à ServiceNow Research. Il est engagé dans la recherche sur l'intelligence artificielle et l'apprentissage automatique depuis plus de 25 ans, publiant souvent des travaux sur les méthodes de modélisation du langage à grande échelle et les techniques de modélisation générative. Il a obtenu un doctorat en informatique à l'Université de Waterloo.

Étudiants actuels

Mai Ababneh

Stagiaire de recherche - McGill

ababneh.mai@gmail.com

Shubham Agarwal

Postdoctorat - HEC

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Paul Barde

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Derek Nowrouzezahrai

paul.b.barde@gmail.com

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Chris Beckham

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Can (Sam) Chen

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Chris Emezue

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique

Roger Girgis

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Florian Golemo

Postdoctorat - McGill

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique

Doctorat - UdeM

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Yousef Kotp

Maîtrise recherche - Concordia

Co-superviseur⋅e :

Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM

Maîtrise recherche - UdeM

Olga Luo

Doctorat - UdeM

Joel Moniz

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Jonathan Pilault

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Juan Rodriguez

Doctorat - École de technologie suprérieure

Luke Rowe

Doctorat - UdeM

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Gaurav Sahu

Postdoctorat - HEC

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - McGill

Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Doctorat - Polytechnique

Spécification directe du comportement par apprentissage par renforcement sous contrainte

Billets de blogue

Direct Behavior Specification via Constrained Reinforcement Learning

31 août 2022

par

Julien Roy

Roger Girgis

Joshua Romoff

Pierre-Luc Bacon

Chris Pal

Lire l'article

Publications

Würstchen: An Efficient Architecture for Large-Scale Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Pablo Pernias

Dominic Rampas

Mats Leon Richter

Marc Aubreville

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (présentation orale)

openreview.net

Exploring validation metrics for ofﬂine model-based optimisation

Christopher Beckham

Alexandre Piché

David Vazquez

In ofﬂine model-based optimisation (MBO) we are interested in using machine learning to de-sign candidates that maximise some measure of d… (voir plus)esirability through an expensive but real-world scoring process. Ofﬂine MBO tries to approximate this expensive scoring function and use that to evaluate generated designs, however evaluation is non-exact because one approximation is being evaluated with another. Instead, we ask ourselves: if we did have the real world scoring function at hand, what cheap-to-compute validation metrics would correlate best with this? Since the real-world scoring function is available for simulated MBO datasets, insights obtained from this can be transferred over to real-world ofﬂine MBO tasks where the real-world scoring function is expensive to compute. To address this, we propose a conceptual evaluation framework that is amenable to measuring extrapolation, and apply this to conditional denoising diffusion models. Empirically, we ﬁnd that two validation metrics – agreement and Frechet distance – correlate quite well with the ground truth. When there is high variability in conditional generation, feedback is required in the form of an approximated version of the real-world scoring function. Furthermore, we ﬁnd that generating high-scoring samples may require heavily weighting the generative model in favour of sample quality, potentially at the cost of sample diversity.

2024-01-01

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (publié)

dblp.uni-trier.de

Reinforcement Learning for Blind Stair Climbing with Legged and Wheeled-Legged Robots

Simon Chamorro

Victor Klemm

Miguel de La Iglesia Valls

Roland Siegwart

2024-01-01

ICRA (publié)

Würstchen: An Efficient Architecture for Large-Scale Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Pablo Pernias

Dominic Rampas

Mats Leon Richter

Marc Aubreville

2024-01-01

International Conference on Learning Representations (publié)

openreview.net

Würstchen: An Efficient Architecture for Large-Scale Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Pablo Pernias

Dominic Rampas

Mats Leon Richter

Marc Aubreville

2024-01-01

International Conference on Learning Representations (publié)

dblp.uni-trier.de

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference

Jo˜ao Monteiro

Étienne Marcotte

Pierre-Andre Noel

Valentina Zantedeschi

David Vazquez

Nicolas Chapados

Perouz Taslakian

In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (voir plus)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.

2024-01-01

EMNLP (Findings) (publié)

Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models

Issam Hadj Laradji

Perouz Taslakian

Sai Rajeswar

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

Nicolas Chapados

David Vazquez

Alexandre Drouin

The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (voir plus)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.

2023-12-21

ArXiv (prépublication)

Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models

Issam Hadj Laradji

Perouz Taslakian

Sai Rajeswar

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

Nicolas Chapados

David Vazquez

Alexandre Drouin

2023-12-21

ArXiv (prépublication)

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

Juan A. Rodriguez

Abhay Puri

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Pau Rodriguez

Sai Rajeswar

David Vazquez

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are vital for modern image rendering due to their scalability and versatility. Previous SVG generation metho… (voir plus)ds have focused on curve-based vectorization, lacking semantic understanding, often producing artifacts, and struggling with SVG primitives beyond path curves. To address these issues, we introduce StarVector, a multimodal large language model for SVG generation. It performs image vectorization by understanding image semantics and using SVG primitives for compact, precise outputs. Unlike traditional methods, StarVector works directly in the SVG code space, leveraging visual understanding to apply accurate SVG primitives. To train StarVector, we create SVG-Stack, a diverse dataset of 2M samples that enables generalization across vectorization tasks and precise use of primitives like ellipses, polygons, and text. We address challenges in SVG evaluation, showing that pixel-based metrics like MSE fail to capture the unique qualities of vector graphics. We introduce SVG-Bench, a benchmark across 10 datasets, and 3 tasks: Image-to-SVG, Text-to-SVG generation, and diagram generation. Using this setup, StarVector achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing more compact and semantically rich SVGs.

2023-12-17

ArXiv (prépublication)

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

Juan A. Rodriguez

Abhay Puri

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Pau Rodriguez

Sai Rajeswar

David Vazquez

2023-12-17

ArXiv (prépublication)

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

Juan A. Rodriguez

Abhay Puri

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Pau Rodriguez

Sai Rajeswar

David Vazquez

2023-12-17

ArXiv (prépublication)

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images

Juan A. Rodriguez

Abhay Puri

Shubham Agarwal

Issam Hadj Laradji

Pau Rodriguez

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) have become integral in modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability in resolution,… (voir plus) versatile usability, and editing capabilities. SVGs are particularly popular in the fields of web development and graphic design. Existing approaches for SVG modeling using deep learning often struggle with generating complex SVGs and are restricted to simpler ones that require extensive processing and simplification. This paper introduces StarVector, a multimodal SVG generation model that effectively integrates Code Generation Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) and vision models. Our approach utilizes a CLIP image encoder to extract visual representations from pixel-based images, which are then transformed into visual tokens via an adapter module. These visual tokens are pre-pended to the SVG token embeddings, and the sequence is modeled by the StarCoder model using next-token prediction, effectively learning to align the visual and code tokens. This enables StarVector to generate unrestricted SVGs that accurately represent pixel images. To evaluate StarVector's performance, we present SVG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating SVG methods across multiple datasets and relevant metrics. Within this benchmark, we introduce novel datasets including SVG-Stack, a large-scale dataset of real-world SVG examples, and use it to pre-train StarVector as a large foundation model for SVGs. Our results demonstrate significant enhancements in visual quality and complexity handling over current methods, marking a notable advancement in SVG generation technology. Code and models: https://github.com/joanrod/star-vector

2023-12-17

ArXiv (prépublication)