David Vazquez
Author directory2026
VectorGym: A Multi-Task Benchmark for SVG Code Generation, Sketching and Editing
Joan Rodriguez | Haotian Zhang | Abhay Puri | Haoran Dai | Tianyang Zhang | Meng Lin | Rishav Pramanik | Xiaoqing Xie | Marco Terral Rodriguez | Darsh Kaushik | Aly Shariff | Sai Rajeswar | Perouz Taslakian | Spandana Gella | David Vazquez | Christopher Pal | Marco Pedersoli
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Joan Rodriguez | Haotian Zhang | Abhay Puri | Haoran Dai | Tianyang Zhang | Meng Lin | Rishav Pramanik | Xiaoqing Xie | Marco Terral Rodriguez | Darsh Kaushik | Aly Shariff | Sai Rajeswar | Perouz Taslakian | Spandana Gella | David Vazquez | Christopher Pal | Marco Pedersoli
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We introduce VectorGym, a comprehensive benchmark suite for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that spans generation from text and sketches, complex editing, and visual understanding. VectorGym addresses the lack of realistic, challenging benchmarks aligned with professional design workflows. Our benchmark comprises four tasks with expert human-authored annotations: the novel Sketch2SVG task (VG-Sketch); a new SVG editing dataset (VG-Edit) featuring complex, multi-step edits with higher-order primitives; Text2SVG generation (VG-Text); and SVG captioning (VG-Cap). Unlike prior benchmarks that rely on synthetic edits, VectorGym provides gold-standard human annotations that require semantic understanding and design intent. We also provide a multi-task reinforcement learning baseline that jointly optimizes across all four tasks using rendering-based rewards. This baseline, built on GRPO with curriculum learning, trains a Qwen3-VL 8B model that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, surpassing much larger models including Qwen3-VL 235B and matching GPT-4o. We also introduce a VLM-as-a-Judge metric for SVG generation, validated through human correlation studies. Our evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals significant performance gaps, positioning VectorGym as a rigorous framework for advancing visual code generation.
StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images
Patrice Bechard | Chao Wang | Amirhossein Abaskohi | Juan A. Rodriguez | Christopher Pal | David Vazquez | Spandana Gella | Sai Rajeswar | Perouz Taslakian
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Patrice Bechard | Chao Wang | Amirhossein Abaskohi | Juan A. Rodriguez | Christopher Pal | David Vazquez | Spandana Gella | Sai Rajeswar | Perouz Taslakian
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Workflows are a fundamental component of automation in enterprise platforms, enabling the orchestration of tasks, data processing, and system integrations. Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. To simplify this process, we explore the use of generative foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), to automatically generate structured workflows from visual inputs. Translating hand-drawn sketches or computer-generated diagrams into executable workflows is challenging due to the ambiguity of free-form drawings, variations in diagram styles, and the difficulty of inferring execution logic from visual elements. To address this, we introduce StarFlow, a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models. We curate a diverse dataset of workflow diagrams – including synthetic, manually annotated, and real-world samples – to enable robust training and evaluation. We finetune and benchmark multiple vision-language models, conducting a series of ablation studies to analyze the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our results show that finetuning significantly enhances structured workflow generation, outperforming large vision-language models on this task.
2025
WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation
Rabiul Awal | Mahsa Massoud | Aarash Feizi | Zichao Li | Suyuchen Wang | Christopher Pal | Aishwarya Agrawal | David Vazquez | Siva Reddy | Juan A. Rodriguez | Perouz Taslakian | Spandana Gella | Sai Rajeswar
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Rabiul Awal | Mahsa Massoud | Aarash Feizi | Zichao Li | Suyuchen Wang | Christopher Pal | Aishwarya Agrawal | David Vazquez | Siva Reddy | Juan A. Rodriguez | Perouz Taslakian | Spandana Gella | Sai Rajeswar
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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-annotated, real-world web data to assess models’ abilities in complex multi-step reasoning, precise element grounding, and functional UI comprehension and coding. Our evaluation shows that while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on basic information extraction, they struggle with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. These findings reveal key limitations in current MLLMs and underscore the need for improved multimodal and cross-lingual reasoning to build future web agents capable of automating diverse web development tasks.
2024
XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Joao Monteiro | Étienne Marcotte | Pierre-Andre Noel | Valentina Zantedeschi | David Vazquez | Nicolas Chapados | Christopher Pal | Perouz Taslakian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Joao Monteiro | Étienne Marcotte | Pierre-Andre Noel | Valentina Zantedeschi | David Vazquez | Nicolas Chapados | Christopher Pal | Perouz Taslakian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
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 as much space as the model parameters. When the right context is not known in advance, caching the prompt can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform prompt-based inference methods, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude. Specifically, we introduced XC-Llama which converts a pre-trained Llama 2 into an encoder-decoder architecture by integrating cross-attention layers interleaved in between existing self-attention layers.
2023
TK-KNN: A Balanced Distance-Based Pseudo Labeling Approach for Semi-Supervised Intent Classification
Nicholas Botzer | David Vazquez | Tim Weninger | Issam Laradji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Nicholas Botzer | David Vazquez | Tim Weninger | Issam Laradji
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
The ability to detect intent in dialogue systems has become increasingly important in modern technology. These systems often generate a large amount of unlabeled data, and manually labeling this data requires substantial human effort. Semi-supervised methods attempt to remedy this cost by using a model trained on a few labeled examples and then by assigning pseudo-labels to further a subset of unlabeled examples that has a model prediction confidence higher than a certain threshold. However, one particularly perilous consequence of these methods is the risk of picking an imbalanced set of examples across classes, which could lead to poor labels. In the present work, we describe Top-K K-Nearest Neighbor (TK-KNN), which uses a more robust pseudo-labeling approach based on distance in the embedding space while maintaining a balanced set of pseudo-labeled examples across classes through a ranking-based approach. Experiments on several datasets show that TK-KNN outperforms existing models, particularly when labeled data is scarce on popular datasets such as CLINC150 and Banking77.
2022
Data Augmentation for Intent Classification with Off-the-shelf Large Language Models
Gaurav Sahu | Pau Rodriguez | Issam Laradji | Parmida Atighehchian | David Vazquez | Dzmitry Bahdanau
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI
Gaurav Sahu | Pau Rodriguez | Issam Laradji | Parmida Atighehchian | David Vazquez | Dzmitry Bahdanau
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI
Data augmentation is a widely employed technique to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. In this work, we propose a prompting-based approach to generate labelled training data for intent classification with off-the-shelf language models (LMs) such as GPT-3. An advantage of this method is that no task-specific LM-fine-tuning for data generation is required; hence the method requires no hyper parameter tuning and is applicable even when the available training data is very scarce. We evaluate the proposed method in a few-shot setting on four diverse intent classification tasks. We find that GPT-generated data significantly boosts the performance of intent classifiers when intents in consideration are sufficiently distinct from each other. In tasks with semantically close intents, we observe that the generated data is less helpful. Our analysis shows that this is because GPT often generates utterances that belong to a closely-related intent instead of the desired one. We present preliminary evidence that a prompting-based GPT classifier could be helpful in filtering the generated data to enhance its quality.
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Co-authors
- Christopher Pal 4
- Perouz Taslakian 4
- Spandana Gella 3
- Sai Rajeswar 3
- Issam Laradji 2
- Juan A. Rodriguez 2
- Amirhossein Abaskohi 1
- Aishwarya Agrawal 1
- Parmida Atighehchian 1
- Rabiul Awal 1
- Dzmitry Bahdanau 1
- Nicholas Botzer 1
- Patrice Béchard 1
- Nicolas Chapados 1
- Haoran Dai 1
- Aarash Feizi 1
- Darsh Kaushik 1
- Zichao Li 1
- Meng Lin 1
- Étienne Marcotte 1
- Mahsa Massoud 1
- Joao Monteiro 1
- Pierre-Andre Noel 1
- Marco Pedersoli 1
- Rishav Pramanik 1
- Abhay Puri 1
- Siva Reddy 1
- Joan Rodriguez 1
- Marco Terral Rodriguez 1
- Pau Rodriguez 1
- Gaurav Sahu 1
- Aly Shariff 1
- Chao Wang 1
- Suyuchen Wang 1
- Tim Weninger 1
- Xiaoqing Xie 1
- Valentina Zantedeschi 1
- Haotian Zhang 1
- Tianyang Zhang 1