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 :
Maîtrise recherche - Concordia
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

Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models
Issam Hadj Laradji
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
David Vazquez
Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?
Benno Krojer
Elinor Poole-Dayan
Vikram Voleti
Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlik… (voir plus)e discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.
Block-State Transformers
Jonathan Pilault
Mahan Fathi
Orhan Firat
Parallel-mentoring for Offline Model-based Optimization
Can Chen
Christopher Beckham
Zixuan Liu
Parallel-mentoring for Offline Model-based Optimization
Can Chen
Christopher Beckham
Zixuan Liu
We study offline model-based optimization to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and scores. These desi… (voir plus)gns encompass a variety of domains, including materials, robots, DNA sequences, and proteins. A common approach trains a proxy on the static dataset and performs gradient ascent to obtain new designs. However, this often results in poor designs due to the proxy inaccuracies for out-of-distribution designs. Recent studies indicate that (a) gradient ascent with a mean ensemble of proxies generally outperforms simple gradient ascent, and (b) a trained proxy provides weak ranking supervision signals for design selection. Motivated by (a) and (b), we propose
Neural Causal Structure Discovery from Interventions
Nan Rosemary Ke
Olexa Bilaniuk
Anirudh Goyal
Stefan Bauer
Bernhard Schölkopf
Michael Curtis Mozer
Recent promising results have generated a surge of interest in continuous optimization methods for causal discovery from observational data.… (voir plus) However, there are theoretical limitations on the identifiability of underlying structures obtained solely from observational data. Interventional data, on the other hand, provides richer information about the underlying data-generating process. Nevertheless, extending and applying methods designed for observational data to include interventions is a challenging problem. To address this issue, we propose a general framework based on neural networks to develop models that incorporate both observational and interventional data. Notably, our method can handle the challenging and realistic scenario where the identity of the intervened upon variable is unknown. We evaluate our proposed approach in the context of graph recovery, both de novo and from a partially-known edge set. Our method achieves strong benchmark results on various structure learning tasks, including structure recovery of synthetic graphs as well as standard graphs from the Bayesian Network Repository.
Bridging the Gap Between Target Networks and Functional Regularization
Alexandre Piché
Valentin Thomas
Joseph Marino
Gian Maria Marconi
Rafael Pardinas
Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Goal-conditioned GFlowNets for Controllable Multi-Objective Molecular Design
In recent years, in-silico molecular design has received much attention from the machine learning community. When designing a new compound f… (voir plus)or pharmaceutical applications, there are usually multiple properties of such molecules that need to be optimised: binding energy to the target, synthesizability, toxicity, EC50, and so on. While previous approaches have employed a scalarization scheme to turn the multi-objective problem into a preference-conditioned single objective, it has been established that this kind of reduction may produce solutions that tend to slide towards the extreme points of the objective space when presented with a problem that exhibits a concave Pareto front. In this work we experiment with an alternative formulation of goal-conditioned molecular generation to obtain a more controllable conditional model that can uniformly explore solutions along the entire Pareto front.
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat
Block-State Transformers
Mahan Fathi
Jonathan Pilault
Orhan Firat