Thomas Robert

CV
h-index41
15papers
406citations
Novelty45%
AI Score57

15 Papers

56.8AIMar 26
Voxtral TTS

Alexander H. Liu, Alexis Tacnet, Andy Ehrenberg et al. · deepmind, tsinghua

We introduce Voxtral TTS, an expressive multilingual text-to-speech model that generates natural speech from as little as 3 seconds of reference audio. Voxtral TTS adopts a hybrid architecture that combines auto-regressive generation of semantic speech tokens with flow-matching for acoustic tokens. These tokens are encoded and decoded with Voxtral Codec, a speech tokenizer trained from scratch with a hybrid VQ-FSQ quantization scheme. In human evaluations conducted by native speakers, Voxtral TTS is preferred for multilingual voice cloning due to its naturalness and expressivity, achieving a 68.4\% win rate over ElevenLabs Flash v2.5. We release the model weights under a CC BY-NC license.

CLJan 13
Ministral 3

Alexander H. Liu, Kartik Khandelwal, Sandeep Subramanian et al.

We introduce the Ministral 3 series, a family of parameter-efficient dense language models designed for compute and memory constrained applications, available in three model sizes: 3B, 8B, and 14B parameters. For each model size, we release three variants: a pretrained base model for general-purpose use, an instruction finetuned, and a reasoning model for complex problem-solving. In addition, we present our recipe to derive the Ministral 3 models through Cascade Distillation, an iterative pruning and continued training with distillation technique. Each model comes with image understanding capabilities, all under the Apache 2.0 license.

LGMay 24, 2024Code
MicroAdam: Accurate Adaptive Optimization with Low Space Overhead and Provable Convergence

Ionut-Vlad Modoranu, Mher Safaryan, Grigory Malinovsky et al.

We propose a new variant of the Adam optimizer called MicroAdam that specifically minimizes memory overheads, while maintaining theoretical convergence guarantees. We achieve this by compressing the gradient information before it is fed into the optimizer state, thereby reducing its memory footprint significantly. We control the resulting compression error via a novel instance of the classical \emph{error feedback} mechanism from distributed optimization in which *the error correction information is itself compressed* to allow for practical memory gains. We prove that the resulting approach maintains theoretical convergence guarantees competitive to those of AMSGrad, while providing good practical performance. Specifically, we show that MicroAdam can be implemented efficiently on GPUs: on both million-scale (BERT) and billion-scale (LLaMA) models, MicroAdam provides practical convergence competitive to that of the uncompressed Adam baseline, with lower memory usage and similar running time. Our code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/MicroAdam.

LGOct 21, 2024Code
LDAdam: Adaptive Optimization from Low-Dimensional Gradient Statistics

Thomas Robert, Mher Safaryan, Ionut-Vlad Modoranu et al.

We introduce LDAdam, a memory-efficient optimizer for training large models, that performs adaptive optimization steps within lower dimensional subspaces, while consistently exploring the full parameter space during training. This strategy keeps the optimizer's memory footprint to a fraction of the model size. LDAdam relies on a new projection-aware update rule for the optimizer states that allows for transitioning between subspaces, i.e., estimation of the statistics of the projected gradients. To mitigate the errors due to low-rank projection, LDAdam integrates a new generalized error feedback mechanism, which explicitly accounts for both gradient and optimizer state compression. We prove the convergence of LDAdam under standard assumptions, and show that LDAdam allows for accurate and efficient fine-tuning and pre-training of language models. Code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/LDAdam

CLJun 12, 2025Code
Magistral

Mistral-AI, Abhinav Rastogi, Albert Q. Jiang et al.

We introduce Magistral, Mistral's first reasoning model and our own scalable reinforcement learning (RL) pipeline. Instead of relying on existing implementations and RL traces distilled from prior models, we follow a ground up approach, relying solely on our own models and infrastructure. Notably, we demonstrate a stack that enabled us to explore the limits of pure RL training of LLMs, present a simple method to force the reasoning language of the model, and show that RL on text data alone maintains most of the initial checkpoint's capabilities. We find that RL on text maintains or improves multimodal understanding, instruction following and function calling. We present Magistral Medium, trained for reasoning on top of Mistral Medium 3 with RL alone, and we open-source Magistral Small (Apache 2.0) which further includes cold-start data from Magistral Medium.

SEAug 8, 2025Code
Devstral: Fine-tuning Language Models for Coding Agent Applications

Abhinav Rastogi, Adam Yang, Albert Q. Jiang et al. · deepmind

We introduce Devstral-Small, a lightweight open source model for code agents with the best performance among models below 100B size. In this technical report, we give an overview of how we design and develop a model and craft specializations in agentic software development. The resulting model, Devstral-Small is a small 24B model, fast and easy to serve. Despite its size, Devstral-Small still attains competitive performance compared to models more than an order of magnitude larger.

CVApr 28, 2020Code
PODNet: Pooled Outputs Distillation for Small-Tasks Incremental Learning

Arthur Douillard, Matthieu Cord, Charles Ollion et al.

Lifelong learning has attracted much attention, but existing works still struggle to fight catastrophic forgetting and accumulate knowledge over long stretches of incremental learning. In this work, we propose PODNet, a model inspired by representation learning. By carefully balancing the compromise between remembering the old classes and learning new ones, PODNet fights catastrophic forgetting, even over very long runs of small incremental tasks --a setting so far unexplored by current works. PODNet innovates on existing art with an efficient spatial-based distillation-loss applied throughout the model and a representation comprising multiple proxy vectors for each class. We validate those innovations thoroughly, comparing PODNet with three state-of-the-art models on three datasets: CIFAR100, ImageNet100, and ImageNet1000. Our results showcase a significant advantage of PODNet over existing art, with accuracy gains of 12.10, 6.51, and 2.85 percentage points, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/arthurdouillard/incremental_learning.pytorch

SDJul 17, 2025
Voxtral

Alexander H. Liu, Andy Ehrenberg, Andy Lo et al. · deepmind

We present Voxtral Mini and Voxtral Small, two multimodal audio chat models. Voxtral is trained to comprehend both spoken audio and text documents, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of audio benchmarks, while preserving strong text capabilities. Voxtral Small outperforms a number of closed-source models, while being small enough to run locally. A 32K context window enables the model to handle audio files up to 40 minutes in duration and long multi-turn conversations. We also contribute three benchmarks for evaluating speech understanding models on knowledge and trivia. Both Voxtral models are released under Apache 2.0 license.

AIFeb 11
Voxtral Realtime

Alexander H. Liu, Andy Ehrenberg, Andy Lo et al.

We introduce Voxtral Realtime, a natively streaming automatic speech recognition model that matches offline transcription quality at sub-second latency. Unlike approaches that adapt offline models through chunking or sliding windows, Voxtral Realtime is trained end-to-end for streaming, with explicit alignment between audio and text streams. Our architecture builds on the Delayed Streams Modeling framework, introducing a new causal audio encoder and Ada RMS-Norm for improved delay conditioning. We scale pretraining to a large-scale dataset spanning 13 languages. At a delay of 480ms, Voxtral Realtime achieves performance on par with Whisper, the most widely deployed offline transcription system. We release the model weights under the Apache 2.0 license.

CVJun 24, 2020
Insights from the Future for Continual Learning

Arthur Douillard, Eduardo Valle, Charles Ollion et al.

Continual learning aims to learn tasks sequentially, with (often severe) constraints on the storage of old learning samples, without suffering from catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose prescient continual learning, a novel experimental setting, to incorporate existing information about the classes, prior to any training data. Usually, each task in a traditional continual learning setting evaluates the model on present and past classes, the latter with a limited number of training samples. Our setting adds future classes, with no training samples at all. We introduce Ghost Model, a representation-learning-based model for continual learning using ideas from zero-shot learning. A generative model of the representation space in concert with a careful adjustment of the losses allows us to exploit insights from future classes to constraint the spatial arrangement of the past and current classes. Quantitative results on the AwA2 and aP\&Y datasets and detailed visualizations showcase the interest of this new setting and the method we propose to address it.

CVJun 3, 2019
DualDis: Dual-Branch Disentangling with Adversarial Learning

Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome, Matthieu Cord

In computer vision, disentangling techniques aim at improving latent representations of images by modeling factors of variation. In this paper, we propose DualDis, a new auto-encoder-based framework that disentangles and linearizes class and attribute information. This is achieved thanks to a two-branch architecture forcing the separation of the two kinds of information, accompanied by a decoder for image reconstruction and generation. To effectively separate the information, we propose to use a combination of regular and adversarial classifiers to guide the two branches in specializing for class and attribute information respectively. We also investigate the possibility of using semi-supervised learning for an effective disentangling even using few labels. We leverage the linearization property of the latent spaces for semantic image editing and generation of new images. We validate our approach on CelebA, Yale-B and NORB by measuring the efficiency of information separation via classification metrics, visual image manipulation and data augmentation.

LGJul 30, 2018
HybridNet: Classification and Reconstruction Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Learning

Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome, Matthieu Cord

In this paper, we introduce a new model for leveraging unlabeled data to improve generalization performances of image classifiers: a two-branch encoder-decoder architecture called HybridNet. The first branch receives supervision signal and is dedicated to the extraction of invariant class-related representations. The second branch is fully unsupervised and dedicated to model information discarded by the first branch to reconstruct input data. To further support the expected behavior of our model, we propose an original training objective. It favors stability in the discriminative branch and complementarity between the learned representations in the two branches. HybridNet is able to outperform state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10, SVHN and STL-10 in various semi-supervised settings. In addition, visualizations and ablation studies validate our contributions and the behavior of the model on both CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets.

MLMay 14, 2018
SHADE: Information-Based Regularization for Deep Learning

Michael Blot, Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome et al.

Regularization is a big issue for training deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a new information-theory-based regularization scheme named SHADE for SHAnnon DEcay. The originality of the approach is to define a prior based on conditional entropy, which explicitly decouples the learning of invariant representations in the regularizer and the learning of correlations between inputs and labels in the data fitting term. Our second contribution is to derive a stochastic version of the regularizer compatible with deep learning, resulting in a tractable training scheme. We empirically validate the efficiency of our approach to improve classification performances compared to standard regularization schemes on several standard architectures.

MLApr 29, 2018
SHADE: Information Based Regularization for Deep Learning

Michael Blot, Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome et al.

Regularization is a big issue for training deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a new information-theory-based regularization scheme named SHADE for SHAnnon DEcay. The originality of the approach is to define a prior based on conditional entropy, which explicitly decouples the learning of invariant representations in the regularizer and the learning of correlations between inputs and labels in the data fitting term. Our second contribution is to derive a stochastic version of the regularizer compatible with deep learning, resulting in a tractable training scheme. We empirically validate the efficiency of our approach to improve classification performances compared to common regularization schemes on several standard architectures.

CVOct 18, 2016
M2CAI Workflow Challenge: Convolutional Neural Networks with Time Smoothing and Hidden Markov Model for Video Frames Classification

Rémi Cadène, Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome et al.

Our approach is among the three best to tackle the M2CAI Workflow challenge. The latter consists in recognizing the operation phase for each frames of endoscopic videos. In this technical report, we compare several classification models and temporal smoothing methods. Our submitted solution is a fine tuned Residual Network-200 on 80% of the training set with temporal smoothing using simple temporal averaging of the predictions and a Hidden Markov Model modeling the sequence.