About Research Teaching Education Proficiencies Cool Stuff Depression Fuel

Guilhem Xavier Piat, PhD

My doctorate is in Artificial Intelligence, on the topic of integrating structured knowledge into Transformer-based Language Models. My research interests revolve around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). I got into language models based on the following idea:

As text (often in the form of natural language, but also program source code, mathematical equations, etc.) is the most versatile and universal tool we use to communicate ideas, inputs and outputs for cognitive tasks and descriptions of non-cognitive processes, it appears sensible that proficiency in the communication medium would entail proficiency in reasoning about the concepts being handled.

It has been my opinion since the beginning of my graduate studies in 2016 that mastering this modality is critical for an AGI, and if no new fundamental breakthroughs are necessary, the first AGI will be largely based on language modeling. This belief has driven and shaped my work thus far. My work on language models has been focused on attempting to leverage knowledge without requiring a model to internalize it. This approach makes language models more parameter- and data-efficient, and allows for greater explainability.

In the medium to long term, I intend to pivot my research into AI safety, particularly AI alignment, as current generative language models are exhibiting near-AGI behaviors and characteristics, and it seems likely to me that AGI will be achieved before alignment.

Outside of work, my interests include tabletop RPGs (D&D in particular, but others as well); outdoor sports such as hiking, climbing and skiing; fitness; and free and open-source software. When I can, I advocate for consumer rights, right to repair, independance of governments and people from big tech, and digital privacy.

guilhem.piat[at]proton.me

Research

PIAT G., 2024. Incorporating expert knowledge in deep neural networks for domain adaptation in natural language processing. Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris-Saclay.

PIAT G., Semmar N., Tourille J., Allauzen A., Essafi H., 2023. What does KnowBert-UMLS forget? 20th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2023).

PIAT G., Kirby E., Tourille J., Semmar N., Allauzen A., Essafi H., 2023. Intégration de connaissances structurées par synthèse de texte spécialisé. 30e Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles.

PIAT G., Semmar N., Allauzen A., Essafi H., Gaël B., Tourille J., 2022. Adapting Without Forgetting: KnowBert-UMLS. IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob 2022).

PIAT G., Semmar N., Allauzen A., Essafi H., Tourille J., 2022. Enriching Contextualized Representations with Biomedical Ontologies: Extending KnowBert to UMLS. SAI Computing Conference 2022.

Teaching

2022-2023 : Université Paris Dauphine

1er Semestre

• Encadrant de TD en IA (enseignant responsable: Paolo VIAPPIANI)
• Encadrant de TP en POO (Java) (enseignant responsable: Hugo GILBERT)

2nd Semestre

• Encadrant de TP en Programmation Fonctionnelle (Haskell) (enseignant responsable: Michael Lampis)
• Enseignant responsable de l’option “Projet Machine Learning et Data Science” (Cours repris de Florian Yger et traduit en anglais, puis remplacé en automne 2023 par l’UE de Benjamin Negrevergne)

Other work experience

• Team Lead, AI-Plans AI Alignment Evals Hackathon. I led Team Blue 2 (Electric Boogaloo) to win the vote for best project among 12 teams. Our project automates a residual stream attack jailbreak attempt to verify how resilient generative LLMs are to residual stream attacks.
• Session Chair, WiMob 2022 Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Higher Education

Proficiencies

Cool stuff

Here’s some cool stuff I found.

• Are you wanting to switch operating systems but afraid of breaking your workflow? Did your “perpetual license” to a piece of software get revoked and the studio is mandating that you subscribe to their SaaS platform to keep using it? Have you found a niche piece of software that does exactly what you want but is buggy or no longer supported? Head over to AlternativeTo, a place that catalogs pieces of software and websites that share similar purpose or functionality.

• GrapheneOS is a no-compromise alternative to Android that (among other things) de-escalates Google apps’ priviledges, allowing you to deny them permissions such as access to your location, your sensors, your mirophone, etc. It unfortunately only works on Google Pixel phones (ironically enough).

• The DuckDuckGo app for Android has a feature that blocks other apps’ tracking requests.

• Doorway pull-up bars are convenient, but most have to be screwed in, which isn’t always an option, or put stress on the top of the door frame which may be fragile. A new, self-expanding type of pull-up bar has emerged, which holds using friction on pads articulated such that the downward force on the bar is redirected to the sides. I think the idea is great, unfortunately I can’t find any major sports brands manufacturing these, likely indicating the mechanism is unreliable.

• The Fediverse is an interesting approach to social media. Anyone can spin up an instance of a service such as Mastodon (alternative to Twitter) or Lemmy (alternative to Reddit). Users are registered with specific instances, but instances of a service can communicate. This means one instance going dark does not take out the entire social network, and rather than maintaining one giant infrastructure, many people can maintain a small part of the infrastructure.

• If you own a lot of DRM-free music but find it difficult to manage, ManaZeak allows you to self-host your own Spotify-like service.

• Java’s Cool is a defunct project by the INRIA for teaching programming. It teaches algorithms and the basic syntax of Java without having to deal with the installation of an IDE and all the boilerplate that make Java so unwieldy to start programming with. You can still build it from source or install the latest Debian build.

• cool-retro-term is a terminal emulator made to look like a CRT with heaps of settings and various presets emulating the style of once-popular computing platforms such as the Apple II. It’s unironically fantastic.

• SikuliX is a multi-platform GUI interaction automation program which can be piloted using Python, Ruby or JS.

• FileLight (find in your package manager) is a concentric-ring-style disk usage visualizer much like Baobab, but it supports viewing distant filesystems over the fish protocol.

• Slingshot is a local 2-player game in which you must take turns shooting at each other’s spacecraft whilst accounting for the gravitational field of nearby planets.

• Obsidian is a versatile Markdown-based note-taking tool.

• Web Plot Digitizer finds data from image plots.

• rpgtex made a LaTeX Template mimicking the look of D&D 5e books. ashonit’s fork and Jendave’s fork have made significant improvements.

• Watawatabou makes small games and procedural generators, often fantasy TTRPG themed. Their city map generator is incredible.

• Need a temporary e-mail for a shady site, but they saw you coming and won’t let you use the standard services? Host your own!

• Have you ever wanted to view OpenStreetMaps in your terminal? Of course you have. Check out MapSCII!

• Diana Smith makes almost photorealistic paintings. Purely in CSS.

• Here are a couple of avatar generators, useful for generating the default avatar for new users on a website: pagan, indenticon

• WaveFunctionCollapse generates images that are locally similar to an input image.

• Combining Terminus and SendCode, you can execute code directly from within Sublime Text.

Depression Fuel

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

• XKCD: We learned about the greenhouse effect 120 years after the industrial revolution. That was in 128 years ago (as of 2024).

• The French postal system sells NFTs

• France is increasingly relying on big tech and forcing its citizens to surrender their privacy

• The French government officially gave itself the right to hack into users’ cell-phones to wiretap them. This is way worse than regular wiretapping because it scales very easily meaning they could virtually wiretap the entire country, and this affects not just phonecalls from a home phone but all conversations held with a phone in your pocket.

• France is working on a law mandating that web browsers implement a blacklist for websites.

• Roku just patented an advertisement injection system to serve you ads when you watch movies (off a DVD for instance) on your TV.

• Ars Technica: Double-screen ‘free’ TV will show you ads, even when not in use. This TV is subsidized by spying on you and constantly serving ads. I don’t know how many units they’re moving, but from what I can tell they unfortunately seem to be doing well.

• The Verge: Texas is replacing thousands of human exam graders with AI. In theory this is great, but we’re not ready technologically or societally. This will not only cause mistakes in grading papers, but also deprive teachers of the opportunity to earn some extra money, worsening the problem underpay.

• PC Mag: Chase Bank to Let Advertisers Target Customers Based on Spending Habits. I invite any and all Chase customers to pull their money out ASAP.