Antoine Chaffin

CS engineer

ML PhD

Antoine Chaffin

CS Engineer

ML PhD

About me

Driven by a lifelong passion for science and technology, I quickly recognized the potential offered by computer science, particularly using artificial intelligence.
This led me to undertake an engineering school, focusing on computer science and acquiring proper coding practices. To keep studying science and share it with others, I continued my academic journey by pursuing a research-oriented master degree in computer science, which eventually culminated in a Ph.D. program.
Throughout my end-of-study internship and my Ph.D., I studied multimodality and semantic indexation, aiming to effectively bridge the gap between textual and visual modalities to detect and combat misinformation.
Alongside these multimodal aspects, I mostly focused on text generation, with a particular emphasis on cooperative generation that leverages external models to guide the generation process.
I finally studied how reinforcement learning is used to train language models, to both integrate it into the cooperative generation paradigm and study multimodal rewards.

  • Age . . . . . 27
  • Adress . . . . Rennes, France
  • Status . . . . . . . ML PhD, CS Engineer
The First Law Of Papers says that research is a process. Do not look at where we are, look at where we will be two more papers down the line.
Resume
Experience
February 2024 - Today
R&D Machine Learning Engineer
LightOn

I am currently working in LightOn's R&D team to improve the various information retrieval systems and enhance the experience of the company's various text generation tools.

November 2021 - December 2021
Visiting Researcher
Sorbonne University

I have been invited to do a one month internship to work with the MLIA team on the subject of cooperative generation. This collaboration resulted in two study on the subject.

January 2021 - April 2021
Teaching Assistant
ESIR

Supervision of the practical work and the project of the deep learning module of students in 4th year of engineering school, allowing me to deepen some basic notions of the domain, to work on my scientific communication skills and to discover teaching.

February 2021 - March 2021
Teaching Assistant
University of Rennes

Supervision of students in L3 MIAGE at ISTIC during the data analysis module. The module being less advanced than the one I taught at ESIR, it allowed me to focus more on the transmission of elementary notions and the basics of teaching.

February 2020 - July 2020
Trainee
INRIA

End-of-studies internship of my engineering degree as well as my master degree in computer science research at IRISA within the LinkMedia team on the subject of image repurposing detection using multimodal artificial intelligence models.
Image repurposing is a particular case of fake news, in which an image previously posted online is reused out of its context to convey false information. To detect such cases of misinformation, it is necessary to jointly process text and image representations that are originally in disjoint spaces. It is in this difference that the difficulty of multimodal studies lies.
My attached internship report contains the state of the art in the image repurposing field as well as my contributions, the analysis of the results and development paths for future studies.

June 2019 - July 2019
Trainee
Them-is

Realization of a project for the Basel-Mulhouse airport. This project was a responsive and multilingual website allowing to create requests to access applications and manage these requests. The application has two parts : a form in which people can fill a request and a portal for intuitive and efficient management of the requests.
Working independently allowed me to develop my skills in project management and web development through the creation of the data model, the choice of technologies and code structuration.

July 2018 - June 2018
Trainee
Them-is

Rebuilding of the compagny portfolio website using JSP. Creation of a responsive design, functionality addition (real time filtering, autocompletion, image edition tool) and redesign of the data model for performance.
Creation of an XML parsing application to extract log file.

June 2016 - June 2017
Head of logistics
AEIR Bebop

Organisation and management of a team of 15 members to offer student concerts at low prices.
Creation of various visuals to promote events (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro).

June 2016 - July 2016
Trainee
INRS

Implementation of an automation tool for the creation of documents related to the management of INRS training courses, via the creation of document templates in which the values will be replaced by those associated with the dossier in progress (name of the training applicant, duration of the courses, price, etc.).

Education
September 2020 - November 2023
Industrial PhD
ATALA 2024 Thesis Award
INRIA, IMATAG

Following my end-of-studies internship dealing with the use of multimodal artificial intelligence models for image repurposing detection, I decided to continue in this field by working on a thesis on the use of multimodal models in the fight against fake news.
This CIFRE thesis is done in collaboration with IMATAG which collaborates with various journalistic organizations as well as the LinkMedia team of IRISA which is specialized in multimodal studies.
The thesis manuscript, slides and recording of the defense can be found here .

2019-2020
M.Sc. Degree (Research in Computer Science)
First class honours
Rennes 1 University

During last year of engineering school, realization of a double degree in computer science research. The courses were oriented towards artificial intelligence in various domains but more specifically multimedia technologies (images, videos and text).
These courses allowed me to acquire both basic knowledge and advanced concepts in artificial intelligence, but also to discover the research environment through reading and writing papers as well as presentations.

2015 - 2020
Engineering Degree
INSA Rennes

Preparatory class and engineering school, IT department.
Fast pace to learn new skills quickly and acquisition of scientific culture.
Learning of concepts related to computer engineering:

  • • Development in various languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, OCaml, prolog ...)
  • • Database management and associated models (DAO, SQL)
  • • Software engineering (design patterns, test methods, data structure ...)
  • • Various fields specific to information systems (artificial intelligence, computer security, architecture, networks, graph theory, etc.).
Acquisition of project management skills (version management, writing different types of reports, work allocation, time estimation)

January 2019 - May 2019
International Exchange
Polytéchnique Montréal

Deepened my knowledge of entrepreneurship and innovation as well as networks and computer security, discovered multimedia compression methods and learned rigorous software testing methodologies.

Skills
Languages
  • French (native speaker)
  • English
  • German
Coding
  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Java
  • Javascript / Typescript
  • Web dev
Studied domain
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Security
Networks
Projects
PyLate
Python
WTF-RL
Python
Therapy
Python
PPL-MCTS
Python
BibGenerator
Python
Premoji
Python
TSExplanation
Python
Publications
Three Bricks to Consolidate Watermarks for Large Language Models (2023)
Pierre Fernandez, Antoine Chaffin, Karim Tit, Vivien Chappelier, Teddy Furon
WIFS 2023
Generative Cooperative Networks for Natural Language Generation (2022)
Sylvain Lamprier, Thomas Scialom, Antoine Chaffin, Vincent Claveau, Ewa Kijak, Jacopo Staiano, Benjamin Piwowarski
ICML 2022
Which Discriminator for Cooperative Text Generation? (2022)
Antoine Chaffin, Thomas Scialom, Sylvain Lamprier, Jacopo Staiano, Benjamin Piwowarski, Ewa Kijak, Vincent Claveau

SIGIR 2022

Multitask Prompt Tuning Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization (2022)
Victor Sanh, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Stephen H. Bach, Lintang Sutawika, Zaid Alyafeai, Antoine Chaffin, Arnaud Stiegler, Teven Le Scao, Arun Raja, Manan Dey, M Saiful Bari, Canwen Xu, Urmish Thakker, Shanya Sharma Sharma, Eliza Szczechla, Taewoon Kim, Gunjan Chhablani, Nihal Nayak, Debajyoti Datta, Jonathan Chang, Mike Tian-Jian Jiang, Han Wang, Matteo Manica, Sheng Shen, Zheng Xin Yong, Harshit Pandey, Rachel Bawden, Thomas Wang, Trishala Neeraj, Jos Rozen, Abheesht Sharma, Andrea Santilli, Thibault Fevry, Jason Alan Fries, Ryan Teehan, Tali Bers, Stella Biderman, Leo Gao, Thomas Wolf, Alexander M. Rush
ICLR 2022
Contact me