Portrait de Narges Armanfard

Narges Armanfard

Membre académique associé
Professeure agrégée, McGill University, Département de génie électrique et informatique
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage actif
Apprentissage automatique médical
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage en ligne
Apprentissage multimodal
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Détection d'anomalies
IA appliquée
IA en santé
Méthodes de réduction de la dimensionnalité
Modèles génératifs
Réseaux de neurones en graphes
Vision par ordinateur

Biographie

Narges Armanfard (Ph. D., ing.) est la fondatrice et la chercheuse principale du laboratoire iSMART. Elle est professeure adjointe au Département de génie électrique et informatique de l'Université McGill et membre académique associé à Mila – Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle. Elle est également affiliée au Centre sur les machines intelligentes de McGill (CIM), à l'Initiative de McGill en médecine computationnelle (MiCM) et à l'Institut de génie aérospatial de McGill (MIAE). Sa recherche porte sur le développement d'algorithmes novateurs pour divers domaines tels que l'analyse de données de séries temporelles, la vision par ordinateur, l'apprentissage par renforcement et l'apprentissage par représentation pour des tâches telles que le regroupement de données, la classification et la détection d'anomalies. Ses contributions au domaine de l'IA ont été reconnues par de nombreux prix, décernés notamment par le Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, AgeWell, Vanier-Banting, les Fonds de recherche du Québec, ainsi que l'Université McMaster, l'Université McGill, l'Université de Toronto, les Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada et Scale AI.

Étudiants actuels

Baccalauréat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Postdoctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill

Publications

Adversarial-Robust Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection via Joint Information Retention
Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical component in monitoring complex systems, yet modern deep learning-based detectors are oft… (voir plus)en highly sensitive to localized input corruptions and structured noise. We propose ARTA (Adversarially Robust multivariate Time-series Anomaly detection via joint information retention), a joint training framework that improves detector robustness through a principled min-max optimization objective. ARTA comprises an anomaly detector and a sparsity-constrained mask generator that are trained simultaneously. The generator identifies minimal, task-relevant temporal perturbations that maximally increase the detector's anomaly score, while the detector is optimized to remain stable under these structured perturbations. The resulting masks characterize the detector's sensitivity to adversarial temporal corruptions and can serve as explanatory signals for the detector's decisions. This adversarial training strategy exposes brittle decision pathways and encourages the detector to rely on distributed and stable temporal patterns rather than spurious localized artifacts. We conduct extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark, demonstrating that ARTA consistently improves anomaly detection performance across diverse datasets and exhibits significantly more graceful degradation under increasing noise levels compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Collision-Aware Vision-Language Learning for End-to-End Driving with Multimodal Infraction Datasets
Alex Koran
Takuya Nanri
Fangge Chen
High infraction rates remain the primary bottleneck for end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving, as evidenced by the low driving scores on the C… (voir plus)ARLA Leaderboard. Despite collision-related infractions being the dominant failure mode in closed-loop evaluations, collision-aware representation learning has received limited attention. To address this gap, we first develop a Video-Language-Augmented Anomaly Detector (VLAAD), leveraging a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) formulation to obtain stable, temporally localized collision signals for proactive prediction. To transition these capabilities into closed-loop simulations, we must overcome the limitations of existing simulator datasets, which lack multimodality and are frequently restricted to simple intersection scenarios. Therefore, we introduce CARLA-Collide, a large-scale multimodal dataset capturing realistic collision events across highly diverse road networks. Trained on this diverse simulator data, VLAAD serves as a collision-aware plug-in module that can be seamlessly integrated into existing E2E driving models. By integrating our module into a pretrained TransFuser++ agent, we demonstrate a 14.12% relative increase in driving score with minimal fine-tuning. Beyond closed-loop evaluation, we further assess the generalization capability of VLAAD in an open-loop setting using real-world driving data. To support this analysis, we introduce Real-Collide, a multimodal dataset of diverse dashcam videos paired with semantically rich annotations for collision detection and prediction. On this benchmark, despite containing only 0.6B parameters, VLAAD outperforms a multi-billion-parameter vision-language model, achieving a 23.3% improvement in AUC.
EngineAD: A Real-World Vehicle Engine Anomaly Detection Dataset
Christopher Roth
Rory Woods
Ken Sills
The progress of Anomaly Detection (AD) in safety-critical domains, such as transportation, is severely constrained by the lack of large-scal… (voir plus)e, real-world benchmarks. To address this, we introduce EngineAD, a novel, multivariate dataset comprising high-resolution sensor telemetry collected from a fleet of 25 commercial vehicles over a six-month period. Unlike synthetic datasets, EngineAD features authentic operational data labeled with expert annotations, distinguishing normal states from subtle indicators of incipient engine faults. We preprocess the data into
Multitask-Informed Prior for In-Context Learning on Tabular Data: Application to Steel Property Prediction
Bahareh Nikpour
Jack Y. Wei
Sushant Sinha
Xiaoping Ma
Kashif Rehman
Stephen Yue
Accurate prediction of mechanical properties of steel during hot rolling processes, such as Thin Slab Direct Rolling (TSDR), remains challen… (voir plus)ging due to complex interactions among chemical compositions, processing parameters, and resultant microstructures. Traditional empirical and experimental methodologies, while effective, are often resource-intensive and lack adaptability to varied production conditions. Moreover, most existing approaches do not explicitly leverage the strong correlations among key mechanical properties, missing an opportunity to improve predictive accuracy through multitask learning. To address this, we present a multitask learning framework that injects multitask awareness into the prior of TabPFN--a transformer-based foundation model for in-context learning on tabular data--through novel fine-tuning strategies. Originally designed for single-target regression or classification, we augment TabPFN's prior with two complementary approaches: (i) target averaging, which provides a unified scalar signal compatible with TabPFN's single-target architecture, and (ii) task-specific adapters, which introduce task-specific supervision during fine-tuning. These strategies jointly guide the model toward a multitask-informed prior that captures cross-property relationships among key mechanical metrics. Extensive experiments on an industrial TSDR dataset demonstrate that our multitask adaptations outperform classical machine learning methods and recent state-of-the-art tabular learning models across multiple evaluation metrics. Notably, our approach enhances both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency compared to task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating that multitask-aware prior adaptation enables foundation models for tabular data to deliver scalable, rapid, and reliable deployment for automated industrial quality control and process optimization in TSDR.
ICLAD: In-Context Learning for Unified Tabular Anomaly Detection Across Supervision Regimes
Jack Yi Wei
Anomaly detection on tabular data is commonly studied under three supervision regimes, including one-class settings that assume access to an… (voir plus)omaly-free training samples, fully unsupervised settings with unlabeled and potentially contaminated training data, and semi-supervised settings with limited anomaly labels. Existing deep learning approaches typically train dataset-specific models under the assumption of a single supervision regime, which limits their ability to leverage shared structures across anomaly detection tasks and to adapt to different supervision levels. We propose ICLAD, an in-context learning foundation model for tabular anomaly detection that generalizes across both datasets and supervision regimes. ICLAD is trained via meta-learning on synthetic tabular anomaly detection tasks, and at inference time, the model assigns anomaly scores by conditioning on the training set without updating model weights. Comprehensive experiments on 57 tabular datasets from ADBench show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across three supervision regimes, establishing a unified framework for tabular anomaly detection.
Supervised Multimodal Model for Plasma Spray Diagnostics and Spray Health Monitoring
Sareh Soleimani
Cristian Cojocaru
Kintak Raymond Yu
MultiTab: A Scalable Foundation for Multitask Learning on Tabular Data
Tabular data is the most abundant data type in the world, powering systems in finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and beyond. As tabular datase… (voir plus)ts grow and span multiple related targets, there is an increasing need to exploit shared task information for improved multitask generalization. Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful way to improve generalization and efficiency, yet most existing work focuses narrowly on large-scale recommendation systems, leaving its potential in broader tabular domains largely underexplored. Also, existing MTL approaches for tabular data predominantly rely on multi-layer perceptron-based backbones, which struggle to capture complex feature interactions and often fail to scale when data is abundant, a limitation that transformer architectures have overcome in other domains. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiTab-Net, the first multitask transformer architecture specifically designed for large tabular data. MultiTab-Net employs a novel multitask masked-attention mechanism that dynamically models feature-feature dependencies while mitigating task competition. Through extensive experiments, we show that MultiTab-Net consistently achieves higher multitask gain than existing MTL architectures and single-task transformers across diverse domains including large-scale recommendation data, census-like socioeconomic data, and physics datasets, spanning a wide range of task counts, task types, and feature modalities. In addition, we contribute MultiTab-Bench, a generalized multitask synthetic dataset generator that enables systematic evaluation of multitask dynamics by tuning task count, task correlations, and relative task complexity. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Armanfard-Lab/MultiTab.
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with Dual-Branch Prompt Learning
S Ebrahimi Kahou
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) enables identifying and localizing defects in unseen categories by relying solely on generalizable featur… (voir plus)es rather than requiring any labeled examples of anomalies. However, existing ZSAD methods, whether using fixed or learned prompts, struggle under domain shifts because their training data are derived from limited training domains and fail to generalize to new distributions. In this paper, we introduce PILOT, a framework designed to overcome these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a novel dual-branch prompt learning mechanism that dynamically integrates a pool of learnable prompts with structured semantic attributes, enabling the model to adaptively weight the most relevant anomaly cues for each input image; and (2) a label-free test-time adaptation strategy that updates the learnable prompt parameters using high-confidence pseudo-labels from unlabeled test data. Extensive experiments on 13 industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and localization under domain shift.
Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection with Contaminated Data: Application to Physiological Signals
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho
An interpretable and reliable framework for alloy discovery in thermomechanical processing
Sushant Sinha
Xiaoping Ma
Kashif Rehman
Stephen Yue
EMA-Net: Efficient Multitask Affinity Learning for Dense Scene Predictions
Graph-Jigsaw Conditioned Diffusion Model for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho