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Christopher Pal

48 accepted papers

2026

DRBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Enterprise Deep Research

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce DRBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on complex, open-ended deep research tasks in enterprise settings. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on simple questions or web-only queries, DRBench evaluates agents on multi-step queries (for example, "What changes should we make to our p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

ICLR 2026poster

Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SelvaBox: A high‑resolution dataset for tropical tree crown detection

ICLR 2026poster

Detecting individual tree crowns in tropical forests is essential to study these complex and crucial ecosystems impacted by human interventions and climate change. However, tropical crowns vary widely in size, structure, and pattern and are largely overlapping and intertwined, requiring advanced rem…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Training Diffusion Language Models for Black-Box Optimization

ICML 2026spotlight

We study offline black-box optimization (BBO), aiming to discover improved designs from an offline dataset of designs and labels, a problem common in robotics, DNA, and materials science with limited labeled samples. While recent work applies autoregressive LLMs to BBO by formatting tasks as natural…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Document Understanding

NeurIPS 2025poster

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Beyond FVD: An Enhanced Evaluation Metrics for Video Generation Distribution Quality

ICLR 2025poster

The Fréchet Video Distance (FVD) is a widely adopted metric for evaluating video generation distribution quality. However, its effectiveness relies on critical assumptions. Our analysis reveals three significant limitations: (1) the non-Gaussianity of the Inflated 3D Convnet (I3D) feature space; (2)…

2025

BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows, extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Desp…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CarbonSense: A Multimodal Dataset and Baseline for Carbon Flux Modelling

ICLR 2025poster

Terrestrial carbon fluxes provide vital information about our biosphere's health and its capacity to absorb anthropogenic CO$_2$ emissions. The importance of predicting carbon fluxes has led to the emerging field of data-driven carbon flux modelling (DDCFM), which uses statistical techniques to pre…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

GeoCoder: Solving Geometry Problems by Generating Modular Code through Vision-Language Models

NAACL 2025findings

Geometry problem-solving demands advanced reasoning abilities to process multimodal inputs and employ mathematical knowledge effectively. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in various multimodal tasks. Yet, they still struggle with geometry problems and are significantly li…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We introduce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and i…

2025

Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Vector Graphics Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) offer a powerful format for representing visual designs as interpretable code. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled high-quality SVG generation by framing the problem as a code generation task and leveraging large-scale pretraining. VLMs are pa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments

CVPR 2025poster

We introduce Scenario Dreamer, a fully data-driven generative simulator for autonomous vehicle planning that generates both the initial traffic scene--comprising a lane graph and agent bounding boxes--and closed-loop agent behaviours. Existing methods for generating driving simulation environments e…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Seq-VCR: Preventing Collapse in Intermediate Transformer Representations for Enhanced Reasoning

ICLR 2025poster

Decoder-only Transformers often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, particularly arithmetic reasoning requiring multiple sequential operations. In this work, we identify representation collapse in the model’s intermediate layers as a key factor limiting their reasoning capabilities. To address th…

2025

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

AAAI 2025technical

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) have become integral to modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability and versatility, especially in graphic design and web development. SVGs are essentially long strings of code that adhere to a structured syntax with validity constraints. With…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

CVPR 2025poster

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are vital for modern image rendering due to their scalability and versatility. Previous SVG generation methods have focused on curve-based vectorization, lacking semantic understanding, often producing artifacts, and struggling with SVG primitives beyond path curves.…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing

NeurIPS 2025poster

While image generation techniques are now capable of producing high-quality images that respect prompts which span multiple sentences, the task of text-guided image editing remains a challenge. Even edit requests that consist of only a few words often fail to be executed correctly. We explore three…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction

ICML 2025poster

Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain und…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation

EMNLP 2025

We present WebMMU, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates three core web tasks: (1) website visual question answering, (2) code editing involving HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and (3) mockup-to-code generation. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat these tasks separately, WebMMU unifies them using expert-annot

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

CtRL-Sim: Reactive and Controllable Driving Agents with Offline Reinforcement Learning

CoRL 2024poster

Evaluating autonomous vehicle stacks (AVs) in simulation typically involves replaying driving logs from real-world recorded traffic. However, agents replayed from offline data are not reactive and hard to intuitively control. Existing approaches address these challenges by proposing methods that rel…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2024

Learning Action and Reasoning-Centric Image Editing from Videos and Simulation

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current *general* instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and r…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

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

ICRA 2024poster

In recent years, legged and wheeled-legged robots have gained prominence for tasks in environments predominantly created for humans across various domains. One significant challenge faced by many of these robots is their limited capability to navigate stairs, which hampers their functionality in mul…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2024

RepLiQA: A Question-Answering Dataset for Benchmarking LLMs on Unseen Reference Content

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includes encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (*e.g.*, Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for evalu…

2024

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

ICLR 2024oral

We introduce Würstchen, a novel architecture for text-to-image synthesis that combines competitive performance with unprecedented cost-effectiveness for large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. A key contribution of our work is to develop a latent diffusion technique in which we learn a detailed…

Cited by 97SourcePDFScholar
2024

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

EMNLP 2024finding

Prompts are often employed to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference information. 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…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?

NeurIPS 2023poster

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlike discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative…

2023

Block-State Transformers

NeurIPS 2023poster

State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous signals, SSMs have shown superior performance on a plethora of tas…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Parallel-mentoring for Offline Model-based Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

We study offline model-based optimization to maximize a black-box objective function with a static dataset of designs and scores. These designs encompass a variety of domains, including materials, robots, DNA sequences, and proteins. A common approach trains a proxy on the static dataset and perform…

2022

Latent Variable Sequential Set Transformers for Joint Multi-Agent Motion Prediction

ICLR 2022spotlight

Robust multi-agent trajectory prediction is essential for the safe control of robotic systems. A major challenge is to efficiently learn a representation that approximates the true joint distribution of contextual, social, and temporal information to enable planning. We propose Latent Variable Seque…

2022

Learning Multi-Objective Curricula for Robotic Policy Learning

CoRL 2022poster

Various automatic curriculum learning (ACL) methods have been proposed to improve the sample efficiency and final performance of robots' policies learning. They are designed to control how a robotic agent collects data, which is inspired by how humans gradually adapt their learning processes to thei…

Cited by 4SourcecodeScholar
2022

Learning to Guide and to be Guided in the Architect-Builder Problem

ICLR 2022poster

We are interested in interactive agents that learn to coordinate, namely, a $builder$ -- which performs actions but ignores the goal of the task, i.e. has no access to rewards -- and an $architect$ which guides the builder towards the goal of the task. We define and explore a formal setting where a…

2022

MCVD - Masked Conditional Video Diffusion for Prediction, Generation, and Interpolation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Video prediction is a challenging task. The quality of video frames from current state-of-the-art (SOTA) generative models tends to be poor and generalization beyond the training data is difficult. Furthermore, existing prediction frameworks are typically not capable of simultaneously handling othe…

2022

Neural Attentive Circuits

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recent work has seen the development of general purpose neural architectures that can be trained to perform tasks across diverse data modalities. General purpose models typically make few assumptions about the underlying data-structure and are known to perform well in the large-data regime. At the s…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Conditionally Adaptive Multi-Task Learning: Improving Transfer Learning in NLP Using Fewer Parameters & Less Data

ICLR 2021poster

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in…

2021

Predicting Infectiousness for Proactive Contact Tracing

ICLR 2021spotlight

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide, overwhelming manual contact tracing in many countries and resulting in widespread lockdowns for emergency containment. Large-scale digital contact tracing (DCT) has emerged as a potential solution to resume economic and social activity while minimi…

2021

Reinforcement Learning with Random Delays

ICLR 2021poster

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in hindsight allows for off-policy multi-step value estimation. W…

2021

Systematic Evaluation of Causal Discovery in Visual Model Based Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make sense of their environment, the only observables are low-l…

Cited by 52SourcecodeScholar
2020

A Meta-Transfer Objective for Learning to Disentangle Causal Mechanisms

ICLR 2020poster

We propose to use a meta-learning objective that maximizes the speed of transfer on a modified distribution to learn how to modularize acquired knowledge. In particular, we focus on how to factor a joint distribution into appropriate conditionals, consistent with the causal directions. We explain wh…

Cited by 438SourceScholar
2020

AR-DAE: Towards Unbiased Neural Entropy Gradient Estimation

ICML 2020poster

Entropy is ubiquitous in machine learning, but it is in general intractable to compute the entropy of the distribution of an arbitrary continuous random variable. In this paper, we propose the amortized residual denoising autoencoder (AR-DAE) to approximate the gradient of the log density function,…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2020

Action-based Representation Learning for Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2020

Human drivers produce a vast amount of data which could, in principle, be used to improve autonomous driving systems. Unfortunately, seemingly straightforward approaches for creating end-to-end driving models that map sensor data directly into driving actions are problematic in terms of interpretabi

2018

Focused Hierarchical RNNs for Conditional Sequence Processing

ICML 2018oral

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms have obtained state-of-the-art results for many sequence processing tasks. Most of these models use a simple form of encoder with attention that looks over the entire sequence and assigns a weight to each token independently. We present a me…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2018

Improving Landmark Localization With Semi-Supervised Learning

CVPR 2018poster

We present two techniques to improve landmark localization in images from partially annotated datasets. Our primary goal is to leverage the common situation where precise landmark locations are only provided for a small data subset, but where class labels for classification or regression tasks relat…

Cited by 211SourcePDFScholar
2017

A Dataset and Exploration of Models for Understanding Video Data Through Fill-In-The-Blank Question-Answering

CVPR 2017poster

While deep convolutional neural networks frequently approach or exceed human-level performance in benchmark tasks involving static images, extending this success to moving images is not straightforward. Video understanding is of interest for many applications, including content recommendation, predi…

Cited by 126PDFcodeScholar
2017

Unimodal Probability Distributions for Deep Ordinal Classification

ICML 2017poster

Probability distributions produced by the cross-entropy loss for ordinal classification problems can possess undesired properties. We propose a straightforward technique to constrain discrete ordinal probability distributions to be unimodal via the use of the Poisson and binomial probability distrib…

2017

Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations

ICLR 2017poster

We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain their previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden un…

Cited by 397SourcecodeScholar
2016

Recombinator Networks: Learning Coarse-To-Fine Feature Aggregation

CVPR 2016spotlight

Deep neural networks with alternating convolutional, max-pooling and decimation layers are widely used in state of the art architectures for computer vision. Max-pooling purposefully discards precise spatial information in order to create features that are more robust, and typically organized as low…

Cited by 156PDFcodeScholar
2015

Describing Videos by Exploiting Temporal Structure

ICCV 2015poster

Recent progress in using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for image description has motivated the exploration of their application for video description. However, while images are static, working with videos requires modeling their dynamic temporal structure and then properly integrating that inform…

Cited by 1392PDFcodeScholar