Portrait de Chris Pal

Chris Pal

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur titulaire, Polytechnique Montréal, Département de génie informatique et de génie logiciel
Professeur associé, Université de Montréal, Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond

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

Stagiaire de recherche - McGill
Postdoctorat - HEC
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Postdoctorat - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique
Doctorat - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - UdeM
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Doctorat - UdeM
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Doctorat - École de technologie suprérieure
Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Postdoctorat - HEC
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique

Publications

IntentGPT: Few-shot Intent Discovery with Large Language Models
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicholas Botzer
David Vazquez
Issam Hadj Laradji
In today's digitally driven world, dialogue systems play a pivotal role in enhancing user interactions, from customer service to virtual ass… (voir plus)istants. In these dialogues, it is important to identify user's goals automatically to resolve their needs promptly. This has necessitated the integration of models that perform Intent Detection. However, users' intents are diverse and dynamic, making it challenging to maintain a fixed set of predefined intents. As a result, a more practical approach is to develop a model capable of identifying new intents as they emerge. We address the challenge of Intent Discovery, an area that has drawn significant attention in recent research efforts. Existing methods need to train on a substantial amount of data for correctly identifying new intents, demanding significant human effort. To overcome this, we introduce IntentGPT, a novel training-free method that effectively prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to discover new intents with minimal labeled data. IntentGPT comprises an \textit{In-Context Prompt Generator}, which generates informative prompts for In-Context Learning, an \textit{Intent Predictor} for classifying and discovering user intents from utterances, and a \textit{Semantic Few-Shot Sampler} that selects relevant few-shot examples and a set of known intents to be injected into the prompt. Our experiments show that IntentGPT outperforms previous methods that require extensive domain-specific data and fine-tuning, in popular benchmarks, including CLINC and BANKING, among others.
BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks
Juan A. Rodriguez
Xiangru Jian
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Tianyu Zhang
Aarash Feizi
Abhay Puri
Akshay Kalkunte Suresh
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 Madhusudhan
Srinivas Sunkara
Joao Monteiro
Krishnamurthy Dj Dvijotham
Torsten Scholak
Sepideh Kharaghani
Sean Hughes
M. Özsu
Issam Hadj Laradji
Spandana Gella
Perouz Taslakian
David Vazquez
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 .
Beyond FVD: Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Quality
Ge Ya Luo
Gian Mario Favero
Zhi Hao Luo
Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau
The Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD) is a widely adopted metric for evaluating video generation distribution quality. However, its effectivene… (voir plus)ss relies on critical assumptions. Our analysis reveals three significant limitations: (1) the non-Gaussianity of the Inflated 3D Convnet (I3D) feature space; (2) the insensitivity of I3D features to temporal distortions; (3) the impractical sample sizes required for reliable estimation. These findings undermine FVD's reliability and show that FVD falls short as a standalone metric for video generation evaluation. After extensive analysis of a wide range of metrics and backbone architectures, we propose JEDi, the JEPA Embedding Distance, based on features derived from a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, measured using Maximum Mean Discrepancy with polynomial kernel. Our experiments on multiple open-source datasets show clear evidence that it is a superior alternative to the widely used FVD metric, requiring only 16% of the samples to reach its steady value, while increasing alignment with human evaluation by 34%, on average.
Beyond FVD: Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Quality
Ge Ya Luo
Gian Favero
Zhi Hao Luo
Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau
The Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD) is a widely adopted metric for evaluating video generation distribution quality. However, its effectivene… (voir plus)ss relies on critical assumptions. Our analysis reveals three significant limitations: (1) the non-Gaussianity of the Inflated 3D Convnet (I3D) feature space; (2) the insensitivity of I3D features to temporal distortions; (3) the impractical sample sizes required for reliable estimation. These findings undermine FVD's reliability and show that FVD falls short as a standalone metric for video generation evaluation. After extensive analysis of a wide range of metrics and backbone architectures, we propose JEDi, the JEPA Embedding Distance, based on features derived from a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, measured using Maximum Mean Discrepancy with polynomial kernel. Our experiments on multiple open-source datasets show clear evidence that it is a superior alternative to the widely used FVD metric, requiring only 16% of the samples to reach its steady value, while increasing alignment with human evaluation by 34%, on average.
Robust Guided Diffusion for Offline Black-Box Optimization
Can Chen
Christopher Beckham
Zixuan Liu
Offline black-box optimization aims to maximize a black-box function using an offline dataset of designs and their measured properties. Two … (voir plus)main approaches have emerged: the forward approach, which learns a mapping from input to its value, thereby acting as a proxy to guide optimization, and the inverse approach, which learns a mapping from value to input for conditional generation. (a) Although proxy-free~(classifier-free) diffusion shows promise in robustly modeling the inverse mapping, it lacks explicit guidance from proxies, essential for generating high-performance samples beyond the training distribution. Therefore, we propose \textit{proxy-enhanced sampling} which utilizes the explicit guidance from a trained proxy to bolster proxy-free diffusion with enhanced sampling control. (b) Yet, the trained proxy is susceptible to out-of-distribution issues. To address this, we devise the module \textit{diffusion-based proxy refinement}, which seamlessly integrates insights from proxy-free diffusion back into the proxy for refinement. To sum up, we propose \textit{\textbf{R}obust \textbf{G}uided \textbf{D}iffusion for Offline Black-box Optimization}~(\textbf{RGD}), combining the advantages of proxy~(explicit guidance) and proxy-free diffusion~(robustness) for effective conditional generation. RGD achieves state-of-the-art results on various design-bench tasks, underscoring its efficacy. Our code is at https://github.com/GGchen1997/RGD.
Learning Action and Reasoning-Centric Image Editing from Videos and Simulation
Benno Krojer
Dheeraj Vattikonda
Luis Lara
Varun Jampani
RepLiQA: A Question-Answering Dataset for Benchmarking LLMs on Unseen Reference Content
Joao Monteiro
Pierre-Andre Noel
Étienne Marcotte
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vazquez
Perouz Taslakian
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includ… (voir plus)es encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (*e.g.*, Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and depicting an imaginary scenario (*e.g.*, a news article) absent from the internet; (2) a question about the document’s topic; (3) a ground-truth answer derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting. Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.
CtRL-Sim: Reactive and Controllable Driving Agents with Offline Reinforcement Learning
Luke Rowe
Roger Girgis
Anthony Gosselin
Bruno Carrez
Florian Golemo
Felix Heide
Evaluating autonomous vehicle stacks (AVs) in simulation typically involves replaying driving logs from real-world recorded traffic. However… (voir plus), agents replayed from offline data do not react to the actions of the AV, and their behaviour cannot be easily controlled to simulate counterfactual scenarios. Existing approaches have attempted to address these shortcomings by proposing methods that rely on heuristics or learned generative models of real-world data but these approaches either lack realism or necessitate costly iterative sampling procedures to control the generated behaviours. In this work, we take an alternative approach and propose CtRL-Sim, a method that leverages return-conditioned offline reinforcement learning within a physics-enhanced Nocturne simulator to efficiently generate reactive and controllable traffic agents. Specifically, we process real-world driving data through the Nocturne simulator to generate a diverse offline reinforcement learning dataset, annotated with various reward terms. With this dataset, we train a return-conditioned multi-agent behaviour model that allows for fine-grained manipulation of agent behaviours by modifying the desired returns for the various reward components. This capability enables the generation of a wide range of driving behaviours beyond the scope of the initial dataset, including those representing adversarial behaviours. We demonstrate that CtRL-Sim can efficiently generate diverse and realistic safety-critical scenarios while providing fine-grained control over agent behaviours. Further, we show that fine-tuning our model on simulated safety-critical scenarios generated by our model enhances this controllability.
Redesigning Information Markets in the Era of Language Models
Martin Weiss
Nasim Rahaman
Manuel Wüthrich
Li Erran Li
Bernhard Schölkopf
InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Juan A. Rodriguez
Perouz Taslakian
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
Sai Rajeswar
Issam Hadj Laradji
Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (voir plus)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.
InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Juan A. Rodriguez
Perouz Taslakian
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
Sai Rajeswar
Issam Hadj Laradji
Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (voir plus)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.
InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation
Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Juan A. Rodriguez
Perouz Taslakian
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
Sai Rajeswar
Issam Hadj Laradji
Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (voir plus)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.