activity
20162026
most citedBottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering

93 citations · 446 across the 32 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

37 papers

cs.LG2026

Lasting Effects of Abstract Pretraining Beyond Perplexity

Zachary Shinnick, Hemanth Saratchandran, Damien Teney +1

Language models are typically pretrained from random initialization. Recent work challenges this convention, showing that a brief warm-up on abstract, algorithmically generated dat…

cs.LG2026

Procedural Core: A Compact Recurrent Initialization for Vision Transformers

Zachary Shinnick, Christian Internò, Hemanth Saratchandran +2

Transformers are typically trained from random initialization, requiring all their capabilities to emerge from large-scale optimization. Recent work showed that a small amount of a…

cs.CL2026

Procedural Pretraining: Warming Up Language Models with Abstract Data

Liangze Jiang, Zachary Shinnick, Anton van den Hengel +2

Pretraining language models directly on web-scale corpora is the de facto paradigm. We study an alternative where the model is initially exposed to abstract structured data to ease…

cs.CV2025

Can You Learn to See Without Images? Procedural Warm-Up for Vision Transformers

Zachary Shinnick, Liangze Jiang, Hemanth Saratchandran +2

Transformers are remarkably versatile, suggesting the existence of generic inductive biases beneficial across modalities. In this work, we explore a new way to instil such biases i…

cs.LG2025

Transformers Pretrained on Procedural Data Contain Modular Structures for Algorithmic Reasoning

Zachary Shinnick, Liangze Jiang, Hemanth Saratchandran +2

Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally thr…

cs.LG2025

Leaner Transformers: More Heads, Less Depth

Hemanth Saratchandran, Damien Teney, Simon Lucey

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. Thi…

cs.CV2024

Synergy and Diversity in CLIP: Enhancing Performance Through Adaptive Backbone Ensembling

Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Damien Teney +3

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) stands out as a prominent method for image representation learning. Various architectures, from vision transformers (ViTs) to convolut…

cs.CV2023

Zero-shot Retrieval: Augmenting Pre-trained Models with Search Engines

Hamed Damirchi, Cristian Rodríguez-Opazo, Ehsan Abbasnejad +4

Large pre-trained models can dramatically reduce the amount of task-specific data required to solve a problem, but they often fail to capture domain-specific nuances out of the box…

cs.CV2023

Learning Diverse Features in Vision Transformers for Improved Generalization

Armand Mihai Nicolicioiu, Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu, Bogdan Alexe +1

Deep learning models often rely only on a small set of features even when there is a rich set of predictive signals in the training data. This makes models brittle and sensitive to…

cs.LG2023★ 1 cited

Selective Mixup Helps with Distribution Shifts, But Not (Only) because of Mixup

Damien Teney, Jindong Wang, Ehsan Abbasnejad

Mixup is a highly successful technique to improve generalization of neural networks by augmenting the training data with combinations of random pairs. Selective mixup is a family o…

cs.CV2023★ 6 cited

Candidate Set Re-ranking for Composed Image Retrieval with Dual Multi-modal Encoder

Zheyuan Liu, Weixuan Sun, Damien Teney +1

Composed image retrieval aims to find an image that best matches a given multi-modal user query consisting of a reference image and text pair. Existing methods commonly pre-compute…

cs.CL2023

A Symbolic Framework for Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning and Generalisation with Transformers

Jordan Meadows, Marco Valentino, Damien Teney +1

This paper proposes a methodology for generating and perturbing detailed derivations of equations at scale, aided by a symbolic engine, to evaluate the generalisability of Transfor…

cs.CV2023★ 2 cited

Bi-directional Training for Composed Image Retrieval via Text Prompt Learning

Zheyuan Liu, Weixuan Sun, Yicong Hong +2

Composed image retrieval searches for a target image based on a multi-modal user query comprised of a reference image and modification text describing the desired changes. Existing…

cs.CV2022★ 4 cited

SelecMix: Debiased Learning by Contradicting-pair Sampling

Inwoo Hwang, Sangjun Lee, Yunhyeok Kwak +4

Neural networks trained with ERM (empirical risk minimization) sometimes learn unintended decision rules, in particular when their training data is biased, i.e., when training labe…

cs.LG2022★ 7 cited

ID and OOD Performance Are Sometimes Inversely Correlated on Real-world Datasets

Damien Teney, Yong Lin, Seong Joon Oh +1

Several studies have compared the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of models in computer vision and NLP. They report a frequent positive correlation a…

cs.LG2022

Predicting is not Understanding: Recognizing and Addressing Underspecification in Machine Learning

Damien Teney, Maxime Peyrard, Ehsan Abbasnejad

Machine learning (ML) models are typically optimized for their accuracy on a given dataset. However, this predictive criterion rarely captures all desirable properties of a model,…

cs.CV2022

EBMs vs. CL: Exploring Self-Supervised Visual Pretraining for Visual Question Answering

Violetta Shevchenko, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Anthony Dick +2

The availability of clean and diverse labeled data is a major roadblock for training models on complex tasks such as visual question answering (VQA). The extensive work on large vi…

cs.CV2022

Active Learning by Feature Mixing

Amin Parvaneh, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Damien Teney +3

The promise of active learning (AL) is to reduce labelling costs by selecting the most valuable examples to annotate from a pool of unlabelled data. Identifying these examples is e…

cs.CV2021★ 8 cited

Image Retrieval on Real-life Images with Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models

Zheyuan Liu, Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Damien Teney +1

We extend the task of composed image retrieval, where an input query consists of an image and short textual description of how to modify the image. Existing methods have only been…

cs.LG2021

Evading the Simplicity Bias: Training a Diverse Set of Models Discovers Solutions with Superior OOD Generalization

Damien Teney, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Simon Lucey +1

Neural networks trained with SGD were recently shown to rely preferentially on linearly-predictive features and can ignore complex, equally-predictive ones. This simplicity bias ca…

cs.CV2021★ 67 cited

Beyond Question-Based Biases: Assessing Multimodal Shortcut Learning in Visual Question Answering

Corentin Dancette, Remi Cadene, Damien Teney +1

We introduce an evaluation methodology for visual question answering (VQA) to better diagnose cases of shortcut learning. These cases happen when a model exploits spurious statisti…

cs.CV2021★ 2 cited

Reasoning over Vision and Language: Exploring the Benefits of Supplemental Knowledge

Violetta Shevchenko, Damien Teney, Anthony Dick +1

The limits of applicability of vision-and-language models are defined by the coverage of their training data. Tasks like vision question answering (VQA) often require commonsense a…

cs.CV2020★ 76 cited

On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law

Damien Teney, Kushal Kafle, Robik Shrestha +3

Out-of-distribution (OOD) testing is increasingly popular for evaluating a machine learning system's ability to generalize beyond the biases of a training set. OOD benchmarks are d…

cs.CV2020★ 4 cited

Visual Question Answering with Prior Class Semantics

Violetta Shevchenko, Damien Teney, Anthony Dick +1

We present a novel mechanism to embed prior knowledge in a model for visual question answering. The open-set nature of the task is at odds with the ubiquitous approach of training…