Summary

Second year PhD student at IMT Atlantique. Previously research intern in the Criteo AI Lab. Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning enthusiast. I like to optimize the training and the generation of large language models and diffusion models.

Education

• Ph.D Student in Computer Science

  2027
  IMT Atlantique, BRAIN Team

  Focusing on discrete diffusion models and NLP applications.
  Supervised by Vincent Gripon, Bastien Pasdeloup, Axel Marmoret.
• Engineering Degree

  2021 - 2024
  IMT Atlantique

  Mathematical and Computational Engineering specialization.

  Topics: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Signal Processing, Optimization
• M.Sc. Engineering Sciences and Applications

  2023 - 2024
  University of Rennes 1

  Double degree program with Rennes 1 and CentraleSupélec.
  Signal and Image processing major.

Work Experience

• Visiting Scientist

  2024 - 2025
  Sony Europe, Stuttgart, Germany

  Two visits to EUREC, total of 3 months.

  • Worked on conditional generation for text diffusion models.
  • Studied looped AR LLMs for reasoning tasks.
• Research Intern

  April 2024 - October 2024
  Criteo AI Lab, Paris, France

  Studied diffusion models, for image background generation.
  Supervised by Jaspreet Sandhu, Thibaut Issenhuth, Ludovic Dos Santos

  • Trained large-scale diffusion models up to 6B parameters.
  • Developed an ad background generation pipeline, reducing object extension by 10×, achieving lowest FID and fast inference.
  • Worked on billions of product images, leveraging PySpark and distributed training.
• Research Intern

  Summer 2023
  IMT Atlantique, BRAIN Team, Brest, France

  Studied parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for SAM and attention-based data augmentation techniques. Supervised by Bastien Pasdeloup.

  • Matched the performance of full fine-tuning with a custom LoRA method.
  • Improved the performance of CNNs through attention-based data augmentation.
• Developer Intern

  February 2022
  French Polynesia’s government IT Department, Papeete, French Polynesia

  Development of a Web application for network management, automation of database migrations

Skills

Publications

REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG – Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects

El Ouahidi, Lys, et al. (2025). "REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025).

FICUS: Few-shot Image Classification with Unsupervised Segmentation

Lys, et al. (2024). "FICUS: Few-shot Image Classification with Unsupervised Segmentation." In 2024 32nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)(pp. 1791-1795). IEEE.

Languages

French (Native), English (C1, IELTS 7.5), Mandarin (B2.1, HSK3 equivalent), notions of Spanish and German

Interests

• music (violin for 12 years)
• competitive chess (World top 0.3% online)
• photography

Associations

Secretary, IMTA PhD Student Association; President, IMTA Photography Association (until 2023); President, IMTA Short Film Association (until 2023); Officer, IMTA Sound & Light Association (until 2023); Member, IMTA Arts Association (until 2023); Member, IMTA Chess Association