Perouz Taslakian

Perouz Taslakian

Research Scientist and Program Lead in Machine Learning

Service Now AI Research


Adjunct Professor at McGill University
Associate Industry Member at MILA - Quebec AI Institute

Biography

I am a Research Scientist in machine learning at Service Now Research in Montreal, and lead the Multimodal Learning Program.

My research at Service Now focuses on developing deep learning techniques to enhance large language models, and study their reasoning capacity through causal representation learning.

Previously, I was a research scientist at Samsung Research, where I developed AI techniques to address challenges that come up in wireless communication networks.

For a long time, I was also a Research Scientist and Research Lead at Element AI (currently Service Now), where I conducted fundamental research in machine learning, specializing in the area of graph learning and causality. I was concurrently the research lead of the Human Decision Support Program, whose goal was to develop decision-making models in a setting where data is volatile, relations are ambiguous, and past is not a good predictor of the future. The program effectively combined time-series analysis with graph and causal representation learning.

I obtained my PhD in Computer Science from McGill University. My academic research focused on theoretical and algorithmic aspect of discrete structures, with problems on coloring and guarding line arrangements, aligning necklaces, deflating polygons, flipping linkages, and proving things about of geometric graphs. Among my own papers, one of my favourites is perhaps Transversals in Trees, mainly because I had a lot fun working with Vašek, Luc, and Victor. But also because it shrank my Erdős number to 2, and gave me a flaming grade on Vašek’s course The mathematics of Paul Erdős.

I used to be a professor and chair of the BS in Computational Sciences Program at the American University of Armenia.

For about four years, I ran a local meetup group called All-Girl Hack Night, whose purpose was to bring together, support and empower women in IT.

Download my resumé.

Interests
  • Learning from graph-like data
  • Relational Reasoning
  • Causal Discovery
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2009

    McGill University

  • MSc in Computer Science, 2004

    Concordia University

  • BSc in Computer Science, 1998

    Haigazian University

Publications

(2026). Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

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(2026). StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs from Sketch Images. European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).

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(2025). Rendering-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Vector Graphics Generation. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

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(2025). AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Understanding. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track.

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(2025). WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

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(2025). UI-Vision: Desktop-Centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction. Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

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(2025). InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

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(2025). BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

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Conference Organization

BCL 2024

BCL 2024

Bellairs Workshop on Causality - Inference and Representation Learning

BCL 2023

BCL 2023

Bellairs Workshop on Causality - Inference and Representation Learning

GCP 2022

GCP 2022

Armenian Workshop On Graphs, Combinatorics, Probability

GroundedML 2022

GroundedML 2022

Workshop on Anchoring Machine Learning in Classical Algorithmic Theory (@ICLR)

GCP 2019

GCP 2019

Armenian Workshop On Graphs, Combinatorics, Probability