Portrait of Quentin Cappart

Quentin Cappart

Affiliate Member
Associate Professor, Polytechnique Montréal, Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering
Research Topics
Graph Neural Networks
Learning on Graphs
Reasoning

Biography

Quentin Cappart is an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal and an Affiliate member at Mila. He leads the CORAIL research group, which he co-founded with Louis-Martin Rousseau. Cappart obtained a BSc in engineering (2012), a MSc in computer engineering (2014), a MSc in management (2018) and a PhD (2017) at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).

After his PhD, he joined Polytechnique Montréal and the International Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) as a postdoctoral fellow (2018–2020). During these two years, he was also a research intern at ElementAI. Cappart’s main research area is the integration of machine learning with search procedures for solving combinatorial problems.

Publications

Learning Valid Dual Bounds in Constraint Programming: Boosted Lagrangian Decomposition with Self-Supervised Learning
Swann Bessa
Darius Dabert
Max Bourgeat
Louis-Martin Rousseau
WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
Tom Marty
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Tasks
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
Massimo Caccia
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Alexandre Lacoste
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to mimic human-like intelligence has led to a surge in LLM-based autonomous agents. Though recen… (see more)t LLMs seem capable of planning and reasoning given user instructions, their effectiveness in applying these capabilities for autonomous task solving remains underexplored. This is especially true in enterprise settings, where automated agents hold the promise of a high impact. To fill this gap, we propose WorkArena++, a novel benchmark consisting of 682 tasks corresponding to realistic workflows routinely performed by knowledge workers. WorkArena++ is designed to evaluate the planning, problem-solving, logical/arithmetic reasoning, retrieval, and contextual understanding abilities of web agents. Our empirical studies across state-of-the-art LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), as well as human workers, reveal several challenges for such models to serve as useful assistants in the workplace. In addition to the benchmark, we provide a mechanism to effortlessly generate thousands of ground-truth observation/action traces, which can be used for fine-tuning existing models. Overall, we expect this work to serve as a useful resource to help the community progress toward capable autonomous agents. The benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ServiceNow/WorkArena/tree/workarena-plus-plus.
Global rewards in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning for autonomous mobility on demand systems
Heiko Hoppe
Tobias Enders
Maximilian Schiffer
We study vehicle dispatching in autonomous mobility on demand (AMoD) systems, where a central operator assigns vehicles to customer requests… (see more) or rejects these with the aim of maximizing its total profit. Recent approaches use multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) to realize scalable yet performant algorithms, but train agents based on local rewards, which distorts the reward signal with respect to the system-wide profit, leading to lower performance. We therefore propose a novel global-rewards-based MADRL algorithm for vehicle dispatching in AMoD systems, which resolves so far existing goal conflicts between the trained agents and the operator by assigning rewards to agents leveraging a counterfactual baseline. Our algorithm shows statistically significant improvements across various settings on real-world data compared to state-of-the-art MADRL algorithms with local rewards. We further provide a structural analysis which shows that the utilization of global rewards can improve implicit vehicle balancing and demand forecasting abilities. An extended version of our paper, including an appendix, can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08884. Our code is available at https://github.com/tumBAIS/GR-MADRL-AMoD.
Towards a Generic Representation of Combinatorial Problems for Learning-Based Approaches
Léo Boisvert
Hélène Verhaeghe
WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
Tom Marty
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.
WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
Tom Marty
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.
Deep Learning for Data-Driven Districting-and-Routing
Arthur Ferraz
Thibaut Vidal
An Improved Neuro-Symbolic Architecture to Fine-Tune Generative AI Systems
Chao Yin
Gilles Pesant
Learning Lagrangian Multipliers for the Travelling Salesman Problem
Augustin Parjadis
Bistra Dilkina
Aaron M. Ferber
Louis-Martin Rousseau
Learning Precedences for Scheduling Problems with Graph Neural Networks
Hélène Verhaeghe
Gilles Pesant
Claude-Guy Quimper
Global Rewards in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems
Heiko Hoppe
Tobias Enders
Maximilian Schiffer