Learn how to leverage generative AI to support and improve your productivity at work. The next cohort will take place online on April 28 and 30, 2026, in French.
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Publications
Generative AI in Software Engineering Must Be Human-Centered: The Copenhagen Manifesto
In this work, we investigate the interplay between memorization and learning in the context of \emph{stochastic convex optimization} (SCO). … (see more)We define memorization via the information a learning algorithm reveals about its training data points. We then quantify this information using the framework of conditional mutual information (CMI) proposed by Steinke and Zakynthinou (2020). Our main result is a precise characterization of the tradeoff between the accuracy of a learning algorithm and its CMI, answering an open question posed by Livni (2023). We show that, in the
Efficiently generating statistically independent samples from an unnormalized probability distribution, such as equilibrium samples of many-… (see more)body systems, is a foundational problem in science. In this paper, we propose Iterated Denoising Energy Matching (iDEM), an iterative algorithm that uses a novel stochastic score matching objective leveraging solely the energy function and its gradient -- and no data samples -- to train a diffusion-based sampler. Specifically, iDEM alternates between (I) sampling regions of high model density from a diffusion-based sampler and (II) using these samples in our stochastic matching objective to further improve the sampler. iDEM is scalable to high dimensions as the inner matching objective, is simulation-free, and requires no MCMC samples. Moreover, by leveraging the fast mode mixing behavior of diffusion, iDEM smooths out the energy landscape enabling efficient exploration and learning of an amortized sampler. We evaluate iDEM on a suite of tasks ranging from standard synthetic energy functions to invariant
We present an algorithm for skill discovery from expert demonstrations. The algorithm first utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to propose… (see more) an initial segmentation of the trajectories. Following that, a hierarchical variational inference framework incorporates the LLM-generated segmentation information to discover reusable skills by merging trajectory segments. To further control the trade-off between compression and reusability, we introduce a novel auxiliary objective based on the Minimum Description Length principle that helps guide this skill discovery process. Our results demonstrate that agents equipped with our method are able to discover skills that help accelerate learning and outperform baseline skill learning approaches on new long-horizon tasks in BabyAI, a grid world navigation environment, as well as ALFRED, a household simulation environment.
GFlowNets are probabilistic models that sequentially generate compositional structures through a stochastic policy. Among GFlowNets, tempera… (see more)ture-conditional GFlowNets can introduce temperature-based controllability for exploration and exploitation. We propose \textit{Logit-scaling GFlowNets} (Logit-GFN), a novel architectural design that greatly accelerates the training of temperature-conditional GFlowNets. It is based on the idea that previously proposed approaches introduced numerical challenges in the deep network training, since different temperatures may give rise to very different gradient profiles as well as magnitudes of the policy's logits. We find that the challenge is greatly reduced if a learned function of the temperature is used to scale the policy's logits directly. Also, using Logit-GFN, GFlowNets can be improved by having better generalization capabilities in offline learning and mode discovery capabilities in online learning, which is empirically verified in various biological and chemical tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/dbsxodud-11/logit-gfn
Survival models can help medical practitioners to evaluate the prognostic importance of clinical variables to patient outcomes such as morta… (see more)lity or hospital readmission and subsequently design personalized treatment regimes. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold the promise for large-scale survival analysis based on systematically recorded clinical features for each patient. However, existing survival models either do not scale to high dimensional and multi-modal EHR data or are difficult to interpret. In this study, we present a supervised topic model called MixEHR-SurG to simultaneously integrate heterogeneous EHR data and model survival hazard. Our contributions are three-folds: (1) integrating EHR topic inference with Cox proportional hazards likelihood; (2) integrating patient-specific topic hyperparameters using the PheCode concepts such that each topic can be identified with exactly one PheCode-associated phenotype; (3) multi-modal survival topic inference. This leads to a highly interpretable survival topic model that can infer PheCode-specific phenotype topics associated with patient mortality. We evaluated MixEHR-SurG using a simulated dataset and two real-world EHR datasets: the Quebec Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) data consisting of 8,211 subjects with 75,187 outpatient claim records of 1,767 unique ICD codes; the MIMIC-III consisting of 1,458 subjects with multi-modal EHR records. Compared to the baselines, MixEHR-SurG achieved a superior dynamic AUROC for mortality prediction, with a mean AUROC score of 0.89 in the simulation dataset and a mean AUROC of 0.645 on the CHD dataset. Qualitatively, MixEHR-SurG associates severe cardiac conditions with high mortality risk among the CHD patients after the first heart failure hospitalization and critical brain injuries with increased mortality among the MIMIC-III patients after their ICU discharge.
The recent rapid progress in (self) supervised learning models is in large part predicted by empirical scaling laws: a model's performance s… (see more)cales proportionally to its size. Analogous scaling laws remain elusive for reinforcement learning domains, however, where increasing the parameter count of a model often hurts its final performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that incorporating Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) modules, and in particular Soft MoEs (Puigcerver et al., 2023), into value-based networks results in more parameter-scalable models, evidenced by substantial performance increases across a variety of training regimes and model sizes. This work thus provides strong empirical evidence towards developing scaling laws for reinforcement learning.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human pref… (see more)erences. Traditionally, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from pairwise human feedback, i.e., expressed as preferences between pairs of text generations. Subsequently, the LLM’s policy is fine-tuned to maximize the reward through a reinforcement learning algorithm. In this study, we introduce an alternative pipeline for the fine-tuning of LLMs using pairwise human feedback. Our approach entails the initial learning of a pairwise preference model, which is conditioned on two inputs (instead of a single input in the case of a reward model) given a prompt, followed by the pursuit of a policy that consistently generates responses preferred over those generated by any competing policy, thus defining the Nash equilibrium of this preference model. We term this approach Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF). In the context of a tabular policy representation, we present a novel algorithmic solution, Nash-MD, founded on the principles of mirror descent. This algorithm produces a sequence of policies, with the last iteration converging to the regularized Nash equilibrium. Additionally, we explore parametric representations of policies and introduce gradient descent algorithms for deep-learning architectures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by presenting experimental results on a text summarization task. We believe NLHF offers a compelling avenue for fine-tuning LLMs and enhancing the alignment of LLMs with human preferences.
Performance of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) in Certification Examination of the College of Family Physicians of Canada
Mehdi Mousavi
Shabnam Shafiee
Jason M Harley
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Samira Abbasgholizadeh Rahimi
The application of large language models such as generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) has been promising in medical education, and its… (see more) performance has been tested for different medical exams. This study aims to assess the performance of GPTs in responding to a set of sample questions of short-answer management problems (SAMPs) from the certification exam of the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC).
Between August 8th and 25th, 2023, we used GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in five rounds to answer a sample of 77 SAMPs questions from the CFPC website. Two independent certified family physician reviewers scored AI-generated responses twice: first, according to the CFPC answer key (ie, CFPC score), and second, based on their knowledge and other references (ie, Reviews’ score). An ordinal logistic generalised estimating equations (GEE) model was applied to analyse repeated measures across the five rounds.
According to the CFPC answer key, 607 (73.6%) lines of answers by GPT-3.5 and 691 (81%) by GPT-4 were deemed accurate. Reviewer’s scoring suggested that about 84% of the lines of answers provided by GPT-3.5 and 93% of GPT-4 were correct. The GEE analysis confirmed that over five rounds, the likelihood of achieving a higher CFPC Score Percentage for GPT-4 was 2.31 times more than GPT-3.5 (OR: 2.31; 95% CI: 1.53 to 3.47; p0.001). Similarly, the Reviewers’ Score percentage for responses provided by GPT-4 over 5 rounds were 2.23 times more likely to exceed th