Papers by Christopher Pal
StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images (2026.eacl-long)
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Patrice Bechard, Chao Wang, Amirhossein Abaskohi, Juan A. Rodriguez, Christopher Pal, David Vazquez, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar, Perouz Taslakian
| Challenge: | Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models to automate the process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large vision-language models in the task of generating structured workflow outputs from sketches and diagrams. |
XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Joao Monteiro, Étienne Marcotte, Pierre-Andre Noel, Valentina Zantedeschi, David Vazquez, Nicolas Chapados, Christopher Pal, Perouz Taslakian
| Challenge: | XC-Llama uses pre-trained decoder-only models to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform prompt-based inference methods and reduce space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude. |
Reducing Hallucinations in Language Model-based SPARQL Query Generation Using Post-Generation Memory Retrieval (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations and out-of-distribution errors when generating KG elements, such as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). |
| Approach: | They propose a SPARQL query-generating framework that uses natural language placeholders and a non-parametric memory module to retrieve and resolve the correct KG URIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances query correctness across various LLMs, datasets, and distribution shifts while achieving the near-complete suppression of URI hallucinations. |
Structure Learning for Neural Module Networks (D19-64)
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| Challenge: | Neural Module Networks are a class of neural networks that involve human-specified neural modules . current models only learn the parameters of the modules and/or the order of their execution . |
| Approach: | They propose to learn internal structure and sequence without extra supervisory signals . they use dynamically composable modules which are then assembled into a layout . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to models using hand-designed modules. |
GeoCoder: Solving Geometry Problems by Generating Modular Code through Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Various vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in multimodal tasks, but they still struggle with geometry problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model that leverages modular code-finetuning to generate and execute code using a predefined geometry function library. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves geometric reasoning abilities by 16% on a GeomVerse dataset compared to other methods. |
Generative Floor Plan Design with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (2026.findings-acl)
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Luis Lara, Aristides Milios, ZhiHao Luo, Aditya Sharma, Ge Ya Luo, Christopher Beckham, Florian Golemo, Christopher Pal
| Challenge: | Existing generative models focus on respecting the requested connectivity between rooms, but do not support generating floor plans that respect numerical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based approach that fine-tunes a large language model on real plans and applies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to improve adherence to topological and numerical constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on Realism, Compatibility, Diversity metrics. |
WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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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
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific aspects of web tasks but lack comprehensive coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose 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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on basic information extraction, but struggles with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. |