Publications

Harnessing Pre-trained Generalist Agents for Software Engineering Tasks
Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom
Amin Nikanjam
Foutse Khomh
Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop techniques aimed at improving the reliability,… (see more) effectiveness, and overall quality of software systems. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been successfully used for automation in complex tasks such as game testing and solving the job-shop scheduling problem. However, these specialized DRL agents, trained from scratch on specific tasks, suffer from a lack of generalizability to other tasks and they need substantial time to be developed and re-trained effectively. Recently, DRL researchers have begun to develop generalist agents, able to learn a policy from various environments and capable of achieving performances similar to or better than specialist agents in new tasks. In the Natural Language Processing or Computer Vision domain, these generalist agents are showing promising adaptation capabilities to never-before-seen tasks after a light fine-tuning phase and achieving high performance. This paper investigates the potential of generalist agents for solving SE tasks. Specifically, we conduct an empirical study aimed at assessing the performance of two generalist agents on two important SE tasks: the detection of bugs in games (for two games) and the minimization of makespan in a scheduling task, to solve the job-shop scheduling problem (for two instances). Our results show that the generalist agents outperform the specialist agents with very little effort for fine-tuning, achieving a 20% reduction of the makespan over specialized agent performance on task-based scheduling. In the context of game testing, some generalist agent configurations detect 85% more bugs than the specialist agents. Building on our analysis, we provide recommendations for researchers and practitioners looking to select generalist agents for SE tasks, to ensure that they perform effectively.
2023-12-24
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Neural manifolds and learning regimes in neural-interface tasks
Alexandre Payeur
Amy L. Orsborn
Guillaume Lajoie
2023-12-23
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
GROOD: GRadient-aware Out-Of-Distribution detection in interpolated manifolds
Mostafa ElAraby
Sabyasachi Sahoo
Yann Pequignot
Paul Novello
Liam Paull
2023-12-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A landmark environmental law looks ahead
Robert L. Fischman
J. B. Ruhl
Brenna R. Forester
Tanya M. Lama
Marty Kardos
Grethel Aguilar Rojas
Nicholas A. Robinson
Patrick D. Shirey
Gary A. Lamberti
Amy W. Ando
Stephen Palumbi
Michael Wara
Mark W. Schwartz
Matthew A. Williamson
Tanya Berger-Wolf
Sara Beery
David Rolnick
Justin Kitzes
David Thau
Devis Tuia … (see 8 more)
Daniel Rubenstein
Caleb R. Hickman
Julie Thorstenson
Gregory E. Kaebnick
James P. Collins
Athmeya Jayaram
Thomas Deleuil
Ying Zhao
2023-12-22
Science (published)
doi.org
Learning Lagrangian Multipliers for the Travelling Salesman Problem
Augustin Parjadis
Quentin Cappart
Bistra N. Dilkina
Aaron M. Ferber
Louis-Martin Rousseau
2023-12-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Less or More From Teacher: Exploiting Trilateral Geometry For Knowledge Distillation
Chengming Hu
Haolun Wu
Xuan Li
Chen Ma
Xi Chen
Jun Yan
Boyu Wang
Xue (Steve) Liu
2023-12-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Specific inhibition and disinhibition in the higher-order structure of a cortical connectome
Michael W. Reimann
Daniela Egas Santander
András Ecker
Eilif Benjamin Muller
Neuronal network activity is thought to be structured around the activation of assemblies, or low-dimensional manifolds describing states of… (see more) activity. Both views describe neurons acting not independently, but in concert, likely facilitated by strong recurrent excitation between them. The role of inhibition in these frameworks – if considered at all – is often reduced to blanket inhibition with no specificity with respect to which excitatory neurons are targeted. We analyzed the structure of excitation and inhibition in the MICrONS 1mm3 dataset, an electron microscopic reconstruction of a piece of cortical tissue. We found that excitation was structured around a feed-forward flow in non-random motifs of seven or more neurons. This revealed a structure of information flow from a small number of sources to a larger number of potential targets that became only visible when larger motifs were considered instead of individual pairs. Inhibitory neurons targeted and were targeted by neurons in specific sequential positions of these motifs. Additionally, disynaptic inhibition was strongest between target motifs excited by the same group of source neurons, implying competition between them. The structure of this inhibition was also highly specific and symmetrical, contradicting the idea of non-specific blanket inhibition. None of these trends are detectable in only pairwise connectivity, demonstrating that inhibition is specifically structured by these large motifs. Further, we found that these motifs represent higher order connectivity patterns which are present, but to a lesser extent in a recently released, detailed computational model, and not at all in a distance-dependent control. These findings have important implications for how synaptic plasticity reorganizes neocortical connectivity to implement learning and for the specific role of inhibition in this process.
2023-12-22
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
When Nash Meets Stackelberg
Margarida Carvalho
Gabriele Dragotto
Felipe Feijoo
Andrea Lodi
Sriram Sankaranarayanan
2023-12-22
Management Science (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models
Issam Hadj Laradji
Perouz Taslakian
Sai Rajeswar
Valentina Zantedeschi
Alexandre Lacoste
Nicolas Chapados
David Vazquez
Chris Pal
Alexandre Drouin
The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. Howev… (see more)er, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a"capture the flag"principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.
2023-12-21
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
CODA: an open-source platform for federated analysis and machine learning on distributed healthcare data
Louis Mullie
Jonathan Afilalo
Patrick Archambault
Rima Bouchakri
Kip Brown
David Buckeridge
Yiorgos Alexandros Cavayas
Alexis F Turgeon
Denis Martineau
François Lamontagne
Martine Lebrasseur
Renald Lemieux
Jeffrey Li
Michaël Sauthier
Pascal St-Onge
An Tang
William Witteman
Michael Chassé
2023-12-21
J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc. (published)
doi.org
Extended Lyman-alpha emission towards the SPT2349-56 protocluster at $z=4.3$
Yordanka Apostolovski
Manuel Aravena
Timo Anguita
Matthieu Béthermin
James R. Burgoyne
Scott Chapman
C. Breuck
Anthony R Gonzalez
Max Gronke
Lucia Guaita
Yashar Hezaveh
Ryley Hill
Sreevani Jarugula
E. Johnston
M. Malkan
Desika Narayanan
Cassie Reuter
Manuel Solimano
Justin Spilker
Nikolaus Sulzenauer … (see 5 more)
Joaquin Vieira
Joaquin Daniel Vieira
David Vizgan
Axel Wei
Axel Weiß
Deep spectroscopic surveys with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed that some of the brightest infrared so… (see more)urces in the sky correspond to concentrations of submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at high redshift. Among these, the SPT2349-56 protocluster system is amongst the most extreme examples given its high source density and integrated star formation rate. We conducted a deep Lyman-alpha line emission survey around SPT2349-56 using the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in order to characterize this uniquely dense environment. Taking advantage of the deep three-dimensional nature of this survey, we performed a sensitive search for Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) toward the core and northern extension of the protocluster, which correspond to the brightest infrared regions in this field. Using a smoothed narrowband image extracted from the MUSE datacube around the protocluster redshift, we searched for possible extended structures. We identify only three LAEs at
2023-12-20
Astronomy & Astrophysics (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Towards Machines that Trust: AI Agents Learn to Trust in the Trust Game
Ardavan S. Nobandegani
Irina Rish
Thomas Shultz
Widely considered a cornerstone of human morality, trust shapes many aspects of human social interactions. In this work, we present a theore… (see more)tical analysis of the
2023-12-20
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org