Going Further: Late Interaction Beats Single Vector Limits

Antoine is an R&D Machine Learning Engineer currently working at LightOn. During his thesis, he explored guiding generative models to create better synthetic data and train multimodal retrieval models to fight misinformation.

After joining LightOn, he has focused on Information Retrieval, notably by co-leading the ModernBERT project and co-creating PyLate, a library to train and experiment with multi-vector retrieval, which lead to state-of-the-art models such as GTE-ModernColBERT and Reason-ModernColBERT.  Antoine also continues to work on multimodal projects, notably by the creation of OCR-free retrieval pipelines and visual document rerankers such as MonoQwen.

Hamel is a machine learning engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.

Shreya is an experienced ML Engineer who is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at UC Berkeley, where she builds systems that help people use AI to work with data effectively. Her research focuses on developing practical tools and frameworks for building reliable ML systems, with recent groundbreaking work on LLM evaluation and data quality. She has published influential papers on evaluating and aligning LLM systems, including "Who Validates the Validators?" which explores how to systematically align LLM evaluations with human preferences.

Prior to her PhD, Shreya worked as an ML engineer in industry and completed her BS and MS in computer science at Stanford. Her work appears in top data management and HCI venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, and UIST. She is currently supported by the