Researcher profile

François Fleuret

François Fleuret contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

12 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Leveraging the true depth of LLMs

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are overshadowed by their immense computational cost. While recent work has shown that many LLM layers can be reordered or even removed with minimal impact on accuracy, these insights have not been translated into significant inference speedups. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel method that restructures the computational graph by grouping and evaluating consecutive layer pairs in parallel. This approach, requiring no retraining, yields a 1.19x throughput gain on Llama 2 7B while reducing the average benchmark accuracy by only 1.5\%. We demonstrate the practical value of this method for large-scale LLM deployment and show that some of the lost accuracy can be recovered with lightweight fine-tuning of the parallelized layers.

preprint2026arXiv

Normalization Equivariance for Arbitrary Backbones, with Application to Image Denoising

Normalization Equivariance (NE) is a structural prior that improves robustness to distribution shift in image-to-image tasks. A function $f$ is normalization equivariant iff $f(a y + b\mathbf{1}) = a f(y) + b\mathbf{1}$ for all $a>0$ and $b\in\mathbb{R}$. Existing NE methods constrain every internal layer to NE-compatible operations. These constraints add runtime cost and exclude standard transformer components such as softmax attention and LayerNorm. We introduce Wrapped Normalization Equivariance (WNE), a parameter-free wrapper that normalizes the input, applies any backbone, and denormalizes the output. We prove every NE function admits this factorization, so the wrapper exactly parameterizes the class of NE functions. On blind denoising, wrapping CNN and transformer architectures improves robustness under noise-level mismatch with no measurable GPU overhead, while architectural NE baselines are up to $1.6\times$ slower.

preprint2022arXiv

Borrowing from yourself: Faster future video segmentation with partial channel update

Semantic segmentation is a well-addressed topic in the computer vision literature, but the design of fast and accurate video processing networks remains challenging. In addition, to run on embedded hardware, computer vision models often have to make compromises on accuracy to run at the required speed, so that a latency/accuracy trade-off is usually at the heart of these real-time systems' design. For the specific case of videos, models have the additional possibility to make use of computations made for previous frames to mitigate the accuracy loss while being real-time. In this work, we propose to tackle the task of fast future video segmentation prediction through the use of convolutional layers with time-dependent channel masking. This technique only updates a chosen subset of the feature maps at each time-step, bringing simultaneously less computation and latency, and allowing the network to leverage previously computed features. We apply this technique to several fast architectures and experimentally confirm its benefits for the future prediction subtask.

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient Wind Speed Nowcasting with GPU-Accelerated Nearest Neighbors Algorithm

This paper proposes a simple yet efficient high-altitude wind nowcasting pipeline. It processes efficiently a vast amount of live data recorded by airplanes over the whole airspace and reconstructs the wind field with good accuracy. It creates a unique context for each point in the dataset and then extrapolates from it. As creating such context is computationally intensive, this paper proposes a novel algorithm that reduces the time and memory cost by efficiently fetching nearest neighbors in a data set whose elements are organized along smooth trajectories that can be approximated with piece-wise linear structures. We introduce an efficient and exact strategy implemented through algebraic tensorial operations, which is well-suited to modern GPU-based computing infrastructure. This method employs a scalable Euclidean metric and allows masking data points along one dimension. When applied, this method is more efficient than plain Euclidean k-NN and other well-known data selection methods such as KDTrees and provides a several-fold speedup. We provide an implementation in PyTorch and a novel data set to allow the replication of empirical results.

preprint2022arXiv

GeoNeRF: Generalizing NeRF with Geometry Priors

We present GeoNeRF, a generalizable photorealistic novel view synthesis method based on neural radiance fields. Our approach consists of two main stages: a geometry reasoner and a renderer. To render a novel view, the geometry reasoner first constructs cascaded cost volumes for each nearby source view. Then, using a Transformer-based attention mechanism and the cascaded cost volumes, the renderer infers geometry and appearance, and renders detailed images via classical volume rendering techniques. This architecture, in particular, allows sophisticated occlusion reasoning, gathering information from consistent source views. Moreover, our method can easily be fine-tuned on a single scene, and renders competitive results with per-scene optimized neural rendering methods with a fraction of computational cost. Experiments show that GeoNeRF outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable neural rendering models on various synthetic and real datasets. Lastly, with a slight modification to the geometry reasoner, we also propose an alternative model that adapts to RGBD images. This model directly exploits the depth information often available thanks to depth sensors. The implementation code is available at https://www.idiap.ch/paper/geonerf.

preprint2022arXiv

Speeding up PCA with priming

We introduce primed-PCA (pPCA), a two-step algorithm for speeding up the approximation of principal components. This algorithm first runs any approximate-PCA method to get an initial estimate of the principal components (priming), and then applies an exact PCA in the subspace they span. Since this subspace is of small dimension in any practical use, the second step is extremely cheap computationally. Nonetheless, it improves accuracy significantly for a given computational budget across datasets. In this setup, the purpose of the priming is to narrow down the search space, and prepare the data for the second step, an exact calculation. We show formally that pPCA improves upon the priming algorithm under very mild conditions, and we provide experimental validation on both synthetic and real large-scale datasets showing that it systematically translates to improved performance. In our experiments we prime pPCA by several approximate algorithms and report an average speedup by a factor of 7.2 over Oja's rule, and a factor of 10.5 over EigenGame.

preprint2022arXiv

The Theoretical Expressiveness of Maxpooling

Over the decade since deep neural networks became state of the art image classifiers there has been a tendency towards less use of max pooling: the function that takes the largest of nearby pixels in an image. Since max pooling featured prominently in earlier generations of image classifiers, we wish to understand this trend, and whether it is justified. We develop a theoretical framework analyzing ReLU based approximations to max pooling, and prove a sense in which max pooling cannot be efficiently replicated using ReLU activations. We analyze the error of a class of optimal approximations, and find that whilst the error can be made exponentially small in the kernel size, doing so requires an exponentially complex approximation. Our work gives a theoretical basis for understanding the trend away from max pooling in newer architectures. We conclude that the main cause of a difference between max pooling and an optimal approximation, a prevalent large difference between the max and other values within pools, can be overcome with other architectural decisions, or is not prevalent in natural images.

preprint2021arXiv

Unsupervised clustering of series using dynamic programming

We are interested in clustering parts of a given single multi-variate series in an unsupervised manner. We would like to segment and cluster the series such that the resulting blocks present in each cluster are coherent with respect to a known model (e.g. physics model). Data points are said to be coherent if they can be described using this model with the same parameters. We have designed an algorithm based on dynamic programming with constraints on the number of clusters, the number of transitions as well as the minimal size of a block such that the clusters are coherent with this process. We present an use-case: clustering of petrophysical series using the Waxman-Smits equation.

preprint2021arXiv

Unsupervised clustering of series using dynamic programming and neural processes

Following the work of arXiv:2101.09512, we are interested in clustering a given multi-variate series in an unsupervised manner. We would like to segment and cluster the series such that the resulting blocks present in each cluster are coherent with respect to a predefined model structure (e.g. a physics model with a functional form defined by a number of parameters). However, such approach might have its limitation, partly because there may exist multiple models that describe the same data, and partly because the exact model behind the data may not immediately known. Hence, it is useful to establish a general framework that enables the integration of plausible models and also accommodates data-driven approach into one approximated model to assist the clustering task. Hence, in this work, we investigate the use of neural processes to build the approximated model while yielding the same assumptions required by the algorithm presented in arXiv:2101.09512.

preprint2020arXiv

Optimizer Benchmarking Needs to Account for Hyperparameter Tuning

The performance of optimizers, particularly in deep learning, depends considerably on their chosen hyperparameter configuration. The efficacy of optimizers is often studied under near-optimal problem-specific hyperparameters, and finding these settings may be prohibitively costly for practitioners. In this work, we argue that a fair assessment of optimizers' performance must take the computational cost of hyperparameter tuning into account, i.e., how easy it is to find good hyperparameter configurations using an automatic hyperparameter search. Evaluating a variety of optimizers on an extensive set of standard datasets and architectures, our results indicate that Adam is the most practical solution, particularly in low-budget scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Reducing Noise in GAN Training with Variance Reduced Extragradient

We study the effect of the stochastic gradient noise on the training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and show that it can prevent the convergence of standard game optimization methods, while the batch version converges. We address this issue with a novel stochastic variance-reduced extragradient (SVRE) optimization algorithm, which for a large class of games improves upon the previous convergence rates proposed in the literature. We observe empirically that SVRE performs similarly to a batch method on MNIST while being computationally cheaper, and that SVRE yields more stable GAN training on standard datasets.

preprint2020arXiv

Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention

Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the self-attention as a linear dot-product of kernel feature maps and make use of the associativity property of matrix products to reduce the complexity from $\mathcal{O}\left(N^2\right)$ to $\mathcal{O}\left(N\right)$, where $N$ is the sequence length. We show that this formulation permits an iterative implementation that dramatically accelerates autoregressive transformers and reveals their relationship to recurrent neural networks. Our linear transformers achieve similar performance to vanilla transformers and they are up to 4000x faster on autoregressive prediction of very long sequences.