Alexis Roger

Alexis Roger, Esma Aïmeur, Irina Rish

Generative AI systems (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc) are expanding into multiple areas of our lives, from art Rombach et al. [2021] to mental health Rob Morris and Kareem Kouddous [2022]; their rapidly growing societal impact opens new opportunities, but also raises ethical concerns. The emerging field of AI alignment aims to make AI systems reflect human values. This paper focuses on evaluating the ethics of multimodal AI systems involving both text and images - a relatively under-explored area, as most alignment work is currently focused on language models. We first create a multimodal ethical database from human feedback on ethicality. Then, using this database, we develop algorithms, including a RoBERTa-large classifier and a multilayer perceptron, to automatically assess the ethicality of system responses.

Jean-Charles Layoun, Alexis Roger, Irina Rish

The goal of vision-language modeling is to allow models to tie language understanding with visual inputs. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and align the Visual Language Model (VLM) called Multimodal Augmentation of Generative Models through Adapter-based finetuning (MAGMA) with human values. MAGMA is a VLM that is capable of image captioning and visual question-answering. We will evaluate its alignment in three different scenarios. To begin, we assess MAGMA's out-of-the-box alignment through the checkpoint provided by Hugging Face. Then, we measure if few-shot learning manages to improve the results. Finally, we finetune the model on aligned examples and evaluate its behavior.

Rishika Bhagwatkar, Shravan Nayak, Reza Bayat et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have witnessed a surge in both research and real-world applications. However, as they are becoming increasingly prevalent, ensuring their robustness against adversarial attacks is paramount. This work systematically investigates the impact of model design choices on the adversarial robustness of VLMs against image-based attacks. Additionally, we introduce novel, cost-effective approaches to enhance robustness through prompt formatting. By rephrasing questions and suggesting potential adversarial perturbations, we demonstrate substantial improvements in model robustness against strong image-based attacks such as Auto-PGD. Our findings provide important guidelines for developing more robust VLMs, particularly for deployment in safety-critical environments.

Alexis Roger, Prateek Humane, Zhenghan Tai et al.

Can language-pretrained transformers become effective time-series forecasters, and why? In this paper, we show that cross-modal transfer arises because language pretraining preconditions time series training with a reusable manifold. A linear probe on frozen LLM states decodes realistic time-series trajectories without paired supervision, and retrieval in this projected space yields competitive forecasts, showing that structure and dynamics exist before finetuning. Pretrained initialization also improves optimization, producing coherent gradients and a highly anisotropic loss landscape unlike random initialization. Finetuning then acts as low-dimensional alignment, reusing existing directions rather than learning temporal primitives from scratch, as evidenced by low-rank updates, subspace alignment, and shared features for periodicity, trend, and repetition. Together, these results support a geometric account of LLM-to-time-series transfer: language pretraining builds the manifold, and finetuning projects numerical dynamics onto task-relevant directions.

Alexis Roger, Gwen Legate, Kashif Rasul et al.

Tokenization and transfer learning are two critical components in building state of the art time series foundation models for forecasting. In this work, we systematically study the effect of tokenizer design, specifically scaling and quantization strategies, on model performance, alongside the impact of pretraining versus random initialization. We show that tokenizer configuration primarily governs the representational capacity and stability of the model, while transfer learning influences optimization efficiency and alignment. Using a combination of empirical training experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate that pretrained models consistently leverage well-designed tokenizers more effectively, particularly at smaller vocabulary sizes. Conversely, misaligned tokenization can diminish or even invert the benefits of pretraining. These findings highlight the importance of careful tokenization in time series modeling and suggest that combining small, efficient vocabularies with pretrained weights is especially advantageous in multi-modal forecasting settings, where the overall vocabulary must be shared across modalities. Our results provide concrete guidance for designing tokenizers and leveraging transfer learning in discrete representation learning for continuous signals.

Anatole Jacquin de Margerie, Alexis Roger, Irina Rish

Reproducibility remains a cornerstone of scientific progress, yet complex multimodal models often lack transparent implementation details and accessible training infrastructure. In this work, we present a detailed reproduction and critical analysis of the Monkey Vision-Language Model (VLM) (Li et al. 2023b) published in CVPR24, a recent approach to high-resolution image understanding via image tiling. The original paper proposed splitting large images into tiles to recover fine-grained visual details while maintaining computational efficiency. Our study replicates this strategy using open checkpoints and reimplements the training pipeline. We confirm the key finding of the original Monkey VLM work, namely that tiling effectively recovers local details. We then extend this work further, by investigating the effect of the inclusion of the global context, which provide practical insights for future high-resolution multimodal modeling. However, we also report deviations in the results, with the magnitude of these effects depending heavily on task type and tile granularity.

Jules Lahmi, Alexis Roger

Artificial intelligence has made great progress in recent years, particularly in the development of Vision--Language Models (VLMs) that understand both visual and textual data. However, these advancements remain largely limited to English, reducing their accessibility for non--English speakers. It is essential to extend these capabilities to a broader range of languages. This paper explores the challenges of adapting an English-trained VLM to different languages. To this end, we will explore and compare different methods for their performance and computational cost. We consider a translation-based pipeline, LoRA finetuning, and a two-stage finetuning strategy that separates vision adaptation from language adaptation. To evaluate these methods, we use a combination of standard multimodal benchmarks translated into the target language and manual assessments by native experts. The results reveal that dataset translation remains a major bottleneck in multilingual VLM performance, with data quality limiting the effectiveness of training and evaluation. These findings suggest that future efforts should focus on native-language dataset collection and improved translation strategies.

Roland Riachi, Kashif Rasul, Arjun Ashok et al.

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of adapting pre-trained language models (LMs) for forecasting time series in the low-data regime. We build upon these findings by analyzing the effective transfer from language models to time series forecasting under various design choices including upstream post-training, time series tokenizer and language backbone size. In the low-data regime, these design choices have a significant impact on the validation loss, with clear-cut choices that outperform others. Contrary to Hernandez et al. (2021), we observe that the validation loss of the LMs continues to smoothly decrease long after the validation loss of the randomly initialized models has converged, leading to a non-vanishing transfer gap that holds across design choices. These findings not only help shed light on the effective use of compute-efficient training for time series, but also open the way for the study of modality-agnostic properties of data distributions leveraged by these models.

Alexis Roger, Prateek Humane, Daniel Z. Kaplan et al.

The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the past several years calls for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation methods and benchmarks. This work analyzes existing VLM evaluation techniques, including automated metrics, AI-based assessments, and human evaluations across diverse tasks. We first introduce Robin - a novel suite of VLMs that we built by combining Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Encoders (VEs) at multiple scales, and use Robin to identify shortcomings of current evaluation approaches across scales. Next, to overcome the identified limitations, we introduce CHIRP - a new long form response benchmark we developed for more robust and complete VLM evaluation. We provide open access to the Robin training code, model suite, and CHIRP benchmark to promote reproducibility and advance VLM research.