Valentin Barriere, Sebastian Cifuentes. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Salvatore Giorgi, João Sedoc, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi. Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis. 2024.

Valentin Barriere, Nahuel Gomez, Léo Hemamou, Sofia Callejas, Brian Ravenet. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025. 2025.

Early wildfire detection (EWD) is of the utmost importance to enable rapid response efforts and thus minimize the negative impacts of wildfire spreads. To this end, we present PyroNear₂₀₂₅, a new dataset composed of both images and videos, allowing for the training and evaluation of smoke plume detection models, including sequential models. The data is sourced from the following: (i) web-scraped videos of wildfires from public networks of cameras for wildfire detection in-the-wild, (ii) videos from our in-house network of cameras, and (iii) a small portion of synthetic and real images. This dataset includes around 150,000 manual annotations on 50,000 images, covering 640 wildfires; PyroNear₂₀₂₅ surpasses existing datasets in size and diversity. It includes data from France, Spain, Chile, and the United States. Finally, it is composed of both images and videos, allowing for the training and evaluation of smoke plume detection models, including sequential models. We ran cross-dataset experiments using a lightweight state-of-the-art object detection model, similar to the ones used in real-world applications, and found that the proposed dataset is particularly challenging, with an F1 score of around 70%, but it is more stable than existing datasets. Finally, its use in concordance with other public datasets helps to reach higher results overall. Last but not least, the video part of the dataset enables another technical contribution, as it can be used to train a lightweight sequential model, improving global recall while maintaining precision for earlier detections. The output of this work has real-life implications, as it is used to automatically detect wildfires, with our models running on Raspberry Pi in several countries. We will make both our code and data available online.

Felipe Urrutia, Cristian Buc, Roberto Araya, Valentin Barriere. Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025). 2025.

Deep Learning models tend to learn correlations of patterns on huge datasets. The bigger these systems are, the more complex are the phenomena they can detect, and the more data they need for this. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our society, and its impact is growing everyday. The promises it holds strongly depend on their fair and universal use, such as access to information or education for all. In a world of inequalities, they can help to reach the most disadvantaged areas. However, such a universal systems must be able to represent society, without benefiting some at the expense of others. We must not reproduce the inequalities observed throughout the world, but educate these IAs to go beyond them. We have seen cases where these systems use gender, race, or even class information in ways that are not appropriate for resolving their tasks. Instead of real causal reasoning, they rely on spurious correlations, which is what we usually call a bias. In this paper, we first attempt to define what is a bias in general terms. It helps us to demystify the concept of bias, to understand why we can find them everywhere and why they are sometimes useful. Second, we focus over the notion of what is generally seen as negative bias, the one we want to avoid in machine learning, before presenting a general zoology containing the most common of these biases. We finally conclude by looking at classical methods to detect them, by means of specially crafted datasets of templates and specific algorithms, and also classical methods to mitigate them.1