Portrait de Nicolas Chapados

Nicolas Chapados

Membre industriel associé
Professeur adjoint, Polytechnique Montréal, Département de mathématiques appliquées
Vice-président, Recherche, ServiceNow Research
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond

Biographie

Nicolas Chapados est vice-président de la recherche chez ServiceNow Inc. Il est titulaire d'un diplôme d'ingénieur de l'Université McGill et d'un doctorat en informatique de l'Université de Montréal. Conjointement avec son directeur de thèse, Yoshua Bengio, il a fondé ApSTAT Technologies en 2001. ApSTAT est une entreprise de transfert technologique visant à développer en contexte industriel des idées de pointe en apprentissage automatique, dans des domaines tels que l'évaluation des risques d'assurance, la planification de la chaîne d'approvisionnement, les prévisions commerciales, la biotechnologie et la gestion des fonds de couverture. À partir de ces travaux, il a également cofondé des entreprises dérivées : Imagia, pour détecter et quantifier précocement le cancer grâce à l'analyse d'images médicales par l'IA; Element AI (acquise par ServiceNow en janvier 2021); et Chapados Couture Capital, un gestionnaire d'actifs quantitatifs. Ses intérêts de recherche comprennent la modélisation de séries temporelles, le traitement du langage naturel et la prise de décisions. Il est titulaire du titre d'analyste financier agréé (CFA).

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :

Publications

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Jo˜ao Monteiro
Étienne Marcotte
Pierre-Andre Noel
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vazquez
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.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 3 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 7B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data. Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders
Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (voir plus) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.
WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (voir plus)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.
WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (voir plus)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.
WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (voir plus)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.