Nicolas Gontier

News:

[01/2025] Building LLM Agents? We are accepting submissions to our Research on Agent Language Models (REALM) workshop at ACL 2025. Consider submitting your work by March 1st!

[01/2025] Our work Seq-VCR: Preventing Collapse in Intermediate Transformer Representations for Enhanced Reasoning got accepted at ICLR 2025!

[12/2024] Super excited to share TapeAgent! A new python framework to build, debug and maintain your Agents! Try it out now.

Outputs:

• "Seq-VCR: Preventing Collapse in Intermediate Transformer Representations for Enhanced Reasoning" ; Md Rifat Arefin, Gopeshh Subbaraj, Nicolas Gontier, Yann LeCun, Irina Rish, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Christopher Pal ; In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025; [paper]

• "TapeAgents: a Holistic Framework for Agent Development and Optimization" ; Dzmitry Bahdanau, Nicolas Gontier, Gabriel Huang, Ehsan Kamalloo, Rafael Pardinas, Alex Piché, Torsten Scholak, Oleh Shliazhko, Jordan Prince Tremblay, Karam Ghanem, Soham Parikh, Mitul Tiwari, Quaizar Vohra ; [paper] [code] [blog post] 

• "Language Decision Transformers with Exponential Tilt for Interactive Text Environments" ; Nicolas Gontier, Pau Rodriguez, Issam Laradji, David Vazquez, Christopher Pal ; 2023 ; [paper]

• "StarCoder: may the source be with you!" ; Raymond Li, Loubna Ben Allal, Yangtian Zi, Niklas Muennighoff, Denis Kocetkov, Chenghao Mou, Marc Marone, Christopher Akiki, Jia Li, Jenny Chim, Qian Liu, Evgenii Zheltonozhskii, Terry Yue Zhuo, Thomas Wang, Olivier Dehaene, Mishig Davaadorj, Joel Lamy-Poirier, João Monteiro, Oleh Shliazhko, Nicolas Gontier, Nicholas Meade, Armel Zebaze, Ming-Ho Yee, Logesh Kumar Umapathi, Jian Zhu, Benjamin Lipkin, Muhtasham Oblokulov, Zhiruo Wang, Rudra Murthy, Jason Stillerman, Siva Sankalp Patel, Dmitry Abulkhanov, Marco Zocca, Manan Dey, Zhihan Zhang, Nour Fahmy, Urvashi Bhattacharyya, Wenhao Yu, Swayam Singh, Sasha Luccioni, Paulo Villegas, Maxim Kunakov, Fedor Zhdanov, Manuel Romero, Tony Lee, Nadav Timor, Jennifer Ding, Claire Schlesinger, Hailey Schoelkopf, Jan Ebert, Tri Dao, Mayank Mishra, Alex Gu, Jennifer Robinson, Carolyn Jane Anderson, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Danish Contractor, Siva Reddy, Daniel Fried, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Yacine Jernite, Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, Sean Hughes, Thomas Wolf, Arjun Guha, Leandro von Werra, Harm de Vries ;  In Transactions of Machine Learning Research (TMLR) ; 2023 ; [paper] [openreview]

• "Does Entity Abstraction Help Generative Transformers Reason?" ; Nicolas Gontier, Siva Reddy, Christopher Pal ; In Transactions of Machine Learning Research (TMLR) ; 2022 ; [paper] [openreview]

• "Measuring Systematic Generalization in Neural Proof Generation with Transformers"; Nicolas Gontier, Koustuv Sinha, Siva Reddy, Christopher Pal; In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020) ; 2020 ;  [paper] [slides] [poster] [code]

• "Ethical Challenges in Data-Driven Dialogue Systems"; Peter Henderson, Koustuv Sinha, Nicolas Gontier, Nan Rosemary Ke, Genevieve Fried, Ryan Lowe, Joelle Pineau ; In proceedings of the AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) ; 2017 ; [paper] [slides] [poster] [website] [code]

• "Towards an Automatic Turing Test: Learning to Evaluate Dialogue Responses"; Ryan Lowe, Michael Noseworthy, Iulian Serban, Nicolas Gontier, Yoshua Bengio, Joelle Pineau ; In proceedings of the 55th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Outstanding Paper Award); 2017 ; [paper]

Master's Thesis:

• "The Reasoning and Learning Lab Chatbot: a solution to the conversational intelligence challenge"; Nicolas Gontier, Joelle Pineau; McGill Master's thesis 08/2018; [pdf]
  Project Description: Ensemble model with message scoring and selection mechanisms submitted at the NeurIPS 2017 Conversational Intelligence Challenge; 06/2017 - 09/2018; [paper] [code] [poster] [slides]

Old Projects:

• The Rhyming Chatbot; Nicolas Gontier, Chris Pal, David Usher; Trained hierarchical RNNs and GPT models with systematic rhyming; Deployed as a Slack bot at ElementAI; 2019

• On the Sensitivity of RNN decoders; Nicolas Gontier, Chris Pal; Evaluated the impact of different training techniques on RNN decoder sensitivity; 05/2019; [paper] [poster]

• The RLLChatbot: a solution to the ConvAI challenge; Nicolas Gontier, Koustuv Sinha, Peter Henderson, Iulian Serban, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Michael Noseworthy, Joelle Pineau; Ensemble model with message scoring and selection mechanisms submitted at the NeurIPS 2017 Conversational Intelligence Challenge; 06/2017 - 09/2018; [paper] [code] [poster] [slides]

• Caption to Image: Nicolas Gontier, Joshua Romoff, Prasanna Parthasarathi; Variational Encoder-Decoder trained to read math operations and produce the result as an MNIST image; 11-12/2017; [report] [slides] [code]

• Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus with HRED and attention: Nicolas Gontier, Joumana Ghosn; Investigating the generic response generation problem with HRED models at Nuance Communications Summer Internship; 05-09/2017; [report] [poster]

• Policy Gradient Methods for Dialogue Response Generation: Michael Noseworthy, Nicolas Gontier; Investigation of the ADEM score as a Dialog evaluation metric with the REINFORCE algorithm; 2017; [report] [slides]

• Training a Discriminator to Compare Generative Dialogue Models: Nicolas Gontier; Trained RNNs to classify different dialogue responses (random, tf-idf, HRED, VHRED, true); 2017; [report] [slides] [code]

• Sentiment Analysis on Movie Reviews: Nicolas Gontier; Random Forest and LSTM on Movie Reviews; 2016; [report] [slides] [code]

Advisor:

• Scientist in Residence  at Creative Destruction Lab - Montreal: Gave AI track interviews for the Fall 2021, Fall 2022 cohort.

• AI Advisor at TheOneAI: Hired & suppervised AI engineers for the development of the Visual Search feature ("Visual Match").