Bernard Ghanem


2025

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CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents
Tianqi Xu | Linyao Chen | Dai-Jie Wu | Yanjun Chen | Zecheng Zhang | Xiang Yao | Zhiqiang Xie | Yongchao Chen | Shilong Liu | Bochen Qian | Anjie Yang | Zhaoxuan Jin | Jianbo Deng | Philip Torr | Bernard Ghanem | Guohao Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and thecomplexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CRAB, the first cross-environment agent benchmark framework, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient task generation method. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging CRAB, we develope CRAB Benchmark-v0 comprising 120 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated 6 advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 38.01%.

2024

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Model Merging and Safety Alignment: One Bad Model Spoils the Bunch
Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud | Umberto Michieli | Fabio Pizzati | Philip Torr | Adel Bibi | Bernard Ghanem | Mete Ozay
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of safety alignment during merging, leading to highly misaligned models. This work investigates the effects of model merging on alignment. We evaluate several popular model merging techniques, demonstrating that existing methods do not only transfer domain expertise but also propagate misalignment. We propose a simple two-step approach to address this problem: (i) generating synthetic safety and domain-specific data, and (ii) incorporating these generated data into the optimization process of existing data-aware model merging techniques. This allows us to treat alignment as a skill that can be maximized in the resulting merged LLM. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of integrating alignment-related data during merging, resulting in models that excel in both domain expertise and alignment.

2021

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Relation-aware Video Reading Comprehension for Temporal Language Grounding
Jialin Gao | Xin Sun | Mengmeng Xu | Xi Zhou | Bernard Ghanem
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Temporal language grounding in videos aims to localize the temporal span relevant to the given query sentence. Previous methods treat it either as a boundary regression task or a span extraction task. This paper will formulate temporal language grounding into video reading comprehension and propose a Relation-aware Network (RaNet) to address it. This framework aims to select a video moment choice from the predefined answer set with the aid of coarse-and-fine choice-query interaction and choice-choice relation construction. A choice-query interactor is proposed to match the visual and textual information simultaneously in sentence-moment and token-moment levels, leading to a coarse-and-fine cross-modal interaction. Moreover, a novel multi-choice relation constructor is introduced by leveraging graph convolution to capture the dependencies among video moment choices for the best choice selection. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet-Captions, TACoS, and Charades-STA demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Huntersxsx/RaNet.