Perouz Taslakian


2025

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WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation
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
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present WebMMU, 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. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat these tasks separately, WebMMU unifies them using expert-annotated, real-world web data to assess models’ abilities in complex multi-step reasoning, precise element grounding, and functional UI comprehension and coding. Our evaluation shows that while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on basic information extraction, they struggle with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. These findings reveal key limitations in current MLLMs and underscore the need for improved multimodal and cross-lingual reasoning to build future web agents capable of automating diverse web development tasks.

2024

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XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference
Joao Monteiro | Étienne Marcotte | Pierre-Andre Noel | Valentina Zantedeschi | David Vazquez | Nicolas Chapados | Christopher Pal | Perouz Taslakian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Prompts are often employed to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference information. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context is not known in advance, caching the prompt can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform prompt-based inference methods, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude. Specifically, we introduced XC-Llama which converts a pre-trained Llama 2 into an encoder-decoder architecture by integrating cross-attention layers interleaved in between existing self-attention layers.