Author name cluster

Sai Rajeswar

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13 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

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

Gaurav Sahu
Abhay Puri
Juan A. Rodríguez
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Mohammad Chegini
Alexandre Drouin
Perouz Taslakian
Valentina Zantedeschi

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 incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents’ ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics and can be accessed here: https://github.com/ServiceNow/insight-bench.

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ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Representing Positional Information in Generative World Models for Object Manipulation

Stefano Ferraro
Pietro Mazzaglia
Tim Verbelen
Bart Dhoedt
Sai Rajeswar

Object manipulation capabilities are essential skills that set apart embodied agents engaging with the world, especially in the realm of robotics. The ability to predict outcomes of interactions with objects is paramount in this setting. Although model-based control methods have started to be employed to tackle manipulation tasks, they have faced challenges in accurately manipulating objects. As we analyze the causes of this limitation, we identify the cause of underperformance in the way current world models represent crucial positional information, especially about the target’s goal specification for object positioning tasks. We introduce a general approach that empowers world model-based agents to effectively solve object positioning tasks. We propose two declinations of this approach for generative world models: position-conditioned (PCP) and latent-conditioned (LCP) policy learning. In particular, LCP employs object-centric latent representations that explicitly capture object positional information for goal specification. This naturally leads to the emergence of multimodal capabilities, enabling the specification of goals through spatial coordinates or a visual goal. Our methods are rigorously evaluated across several manipulation environments, showing favorable performance compared to current model-based control approaches.

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AAAI Conference 2025 System Paper

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images and Text

Juan A. Rodriguez
Abhay Puri
Shubham Agarwal
Issam H. Laradji
Sai Rajeswar
David Vazquez
Christopher Pal
Marco Pedersoli

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 the rise of large language models, which excel at generating code in various languages, we aim to generate SVG code in a similar way. Our findings show that a vision-language model can be conditioned to produce valid SVG code that closely resembles input images, effectively enabling vectorization. Additionally, we harness the rich SVG syntax, encompassing all possible primitives—such as lines, paths, polygons, text, and effects like color gradients—that previous methods often missed. We briefly explain how the StarVector model operates, primarily leveraging a vision-language transformer architecture to generate SVG code. We also detail our training and inference procedures. Finally, we provide an interactive demo that allows users to input an image and generate its SVG code autoregressively, featuring real-time rendering that visually demonstrates the SVG generation process.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

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

Shravan Nayak
Xiangru Jian
Kevin Qinghong Lin
Juan A. Rodríguez
Montek Kalsi
Nicolas Chapados
M. Tamer Özsu
Aishwarya Agrawal

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 underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks—Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction—with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents’ performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer-use agents. With UI-Vision, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

VCR: A Task for Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Restoring Occluded Text

Tianyu Zhang
Suyuchen Wang
Lu Li
Ge Zhang 0009
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Jie Fu 0001
Bang Liu 0003

We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured texts using pixel-level hints within images through complex reasoning. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images intrinsically differs from common visual elements and text due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While many works incorporate text into images for visual question answering, they mostly rely on OCR or masked language modeling, reducing the task to text-based processing. However, text-based processing becomes ineffective in VCR as accurate text restoration depends on the combined information from provided images, context, and subtle cues from the tiny, exposed areas of masked texts. We develop a pipeline to generate synthetic images for the VCR task using image-caption pairs, with adjustable caption visibility to control the task difficulty. With this pipeline, we construct VCR-WIKI for VCR using Wikipedia images with captions, including 2.11M English and 346K Chinese training entities, plus 5K validation and 5K test entities in both languages, each in easy and hard configurations. We also make a hidden test set, VCR-HIDDEN, to avoid potential overfitting on VCR-WIKI. Our results reveal that current vision-language models significantly lag behind human performance in the VCR task, and merely fine-tuning the models on our dataset does not lead to notable improvements. We release VCR-WIKI and the data construction code to facilitate future research.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Efficient Dynamics Modeling in Interactive Environments with Koopman Theory

Arnab Kumar Mondal
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Sai Rajeswar
Kaleem Siddiqi
Siamak Ravanbakhsh

The accurate modeling of dynamics in interactive environments is critical for successful long-range prediction. Such a capability could advance Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Planning algorithms, but achieving it is challenging. Inaccuracies in model estimates can compound, resulting in increased errors over long horizons. We approach this problem from the lens of Koopman theory, where the nonlinear dynamics of the environment can be linearized in a high-dimensional latent space. This allows us to efficiently parallelize the sequential problem of long-range prediction using convolution while accounting for the agent's action at every time step. Our approach also enables stability analysis and better control over gradients through time. Taken together, these advantages result in significant improvement over the existing approaches, both in the efficiency and the accuracy of modeling dynamics over extended horizons. We also show that this model can be easily incorporated into dynamics modeling for model-based planning and model-free RL and report promising experimental results.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

GenRL: Multimodal-foundation world models for generalization in embodied agents

Pietro Mazzaglia
Tim Verbelen
Bart Dhoedt
Aaron Courville
Sai Rajeswar

Learning generalist embodied agents, able to solve multitudes of tasks in different domains is a long-standing problem. Reinforcement learning (RL) is hard to scale up as it requires a complex reward design for each task. In contrast, language can specify tasks in a more natural way. Current foundation vision-language models (VLMs) generally require fine-tuning or other adaptations to be adopted in embodied contexts, due to the significant domain gap. However, the lack of multimodal data in such domains represents an obstacle to developing foundation models for embodied applications. In this work, we overcome these problems by presenting multimodal-foundation world models, able to connect and align the representation of foundation VLMs with the latent space of generative world models for RL, without any language annotations. The resulting agent learning framework, GenRL, allows one to specify tasks through vision and/or language prompts, ground them in the embodied domain’s dynamics, and learn the corresponding behaviors in imagination. As assessed through large-scale multi-task benchmarking in locomotion and manipulation domains, GenRL enables multi-task generalization from language and visual prompts. Furthermore, by introducing a data-free policy learning strategy, our approach lays the groundwork for foundational policy learning using generative world models. Website, code and data: https: //mazpie. github. io/genrl/

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

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

João Monteiro
Pierre-André Noël
Étienne Marcotte
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
David Vázquez
Nicolas Chapados
Christopher Pal

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 evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and depicting an imaginary scenario ( e. g. , a news article) absent from the internet; (2) a question about the document’s topic; (3) a ground-truth answer derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting. Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here: https: //huggingface. co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Choreographer: Learning and Adapting Skills in Imagination

Pietro Mazzaglia
Tim Verbelen
Bart Dhoedt
Alexandre Lacoste
Sai Rajeswar

Unsupervised skill learning aims to learn a rich repertoire of behaviors without external supervision, providing artificial agents with the ability to control and influence the environment. However, without appropriate knowledge and exploration, skills may provide control only over a restricted area of the environment, limiting their applicability. Furthermore, it is unclear how to leverage the learned skill behaviors for adapting to downstream tasks in a data-efficient manner. We present Choreographer, a model-based agent that exploits its world model to learn and adapt skills in imagination. Our method decouples the exploration and skill learning processes, being able to discover skills in the latent state space of the model. During adaptation, the agent uses a meta-controller to evaluate and adapt the learned skills efficiently by deploying them in parallel in imagination. Choreographer is able to learn skills both from offline data, and by collecting data simultaneously with an exploration policy. The skills can be used to effectively adapt to downstream tasks, as we show in the URL benchmark, where we outperform previous approaches from both pixels and states inputs. The skills also explore the environment thoroughly, finding sparse rewards more frequently, as shown in goal-reaching tasks from the DMC Suite and Meta-World. Project website: https://skillchoreographer.github.io/

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EWRL Workshop 2023 Workshop Paper

Efficient Dynamics Modeling in Interactive Environments with Koopman Theory

Arnab Kumar Mondal
Siba Smarak Panigrahi
Sai Rajeswar
Kaleem Siddiqi
Siamak Ravanbakhsh

The accurate modeling of dynamics in interactive environments is critical for successful long-range prediction. Such a capability could advance Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Planning algorithms, but achieving it is challenging. Inaccuracies in model estimates can compound, resulting in increased errors over long horizons. We approach this problem from the lens of Koopman theory, where the nonlinear dynamics of the environment can be linearized in a high-dimensional latent space. This allows us to efficiently parallelize the sequential problem of long-range prediction using convolution while accounting for the agent’s action at every time step. Our approach also enables stability analysis and better control over gradients through time. Taken together, these advantages result in significant improvement over the existing approaches, both in the efficiency and the accuracy of modeling dynamics over extended horizons. We also show that this model can be easily incorporated into dynamics modeling for model-based planning and model-free RL and report promising experimental results.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Mastering the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark from Pixels

Sai Rajeswar
Pietro Mazzaglia
Tim Verbelen
Alexandre Piché
Bart Dhoedt
Aaron C. Courville
Alexandre Lacoste

Controlling artificial agents from visual sensory data is an arduous task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can succeed but require large amounts of interactions between the agent and the environment. To alleviate the issue, unsupervised RL proposes to employ self-supervised interaction and learning, for adapting faster to future tasks. Yet, as shown in the Unsupervised RL Benchmark (URLB; Laskin et al. 2021), whether current unsupervised strategies can improve generalization capabilities is still unclear, especially in visual control settings. In this work, we study the URLB and propose a new method to solve it, using unsupervised model-based RL, for pre-training the agent, and a task-aware fine-tuning strategy combined with a new proposed hybrid planner, Dyna-MPC, to adapt the agent for downstream tasks. On URLB, our method obtains 93. 59% overall normalized performance, surpassing previous baselines by a staggering margin. The approach is empirically evaluated through a large-scale empirical study, which we use to validate our design choices and analyze our models. We also show robust performance on the Real-Word RL benchmark, hinting at resiliency to environment perturbations during adaptation. Project website: https: //masteringurlb. github. io/

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Augmented CycleGAN: Learning Many-to-Many Mappings from Unpaired Data

Amjad Almahairi
Sai Rajeswar
Alessandro Sordoni
Philip Bachman
Aaron C. Courville

Learning inter-domain mappings from unpaired data can improve performance in structured prediction tasks, such as image segmentation, by reducing the need for paired data. CycleGAN was recently proposed for this problem, but critically assumes the underlying inter-domain mapping is approximately deterministic and one-to-one. This assumption renders the model ineffective for tasks requiring flexible, many-to-many mappings. We propose a new model, called Augmented CycleGAN, which learns many-to-many mappings between domains. We examine Augmented CycleGAN qualitatively and quantitatively on several image datasets.

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Mutual Information Neural Estimation

Mohamed Ishmael Belghazi
Aristide Baratin
Sai Rajeswar
Sherjil Ozair
Yoshua Bengio
R. Devon Hjelm
Aaron C. Courville

We argue that the estimation of mutual information between high dimensional continuous random variables can be achieved by gradient descent over neural networks. We present a Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) that is linearly scalable in dimensionality as well as in sample size, trainable through back-prop, and strongly consistent. We present a handful of applications on which MINE can be used to minimize or maximize mutual information. We apply MINE to improve adversarially trained generative models. We also use MINE to implement the Information Bottleneck, applying it to supervised classification; our results demonstrate substantial improvement in flexibility and performance in these settings.

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