Portrait de Foutse Khomh

Foutse Khomh

Membre académique associé
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur, Polytechnique Montréal, Département de génie informatique et génie logiciel
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage de la programmation
Apprentissage par renforcement
Apprentissage profond
Exploration des données
Modèles génératifs
Systèmes distribués
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

Foutse Khomh est professeur titulaire de génie logiciel à Polytechnique Montréal, titulaire d'une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR dans le domaine des systèmes logiciels d'apprentissage automatique fiables, et titulaire d'une chaire de recherche FRQ-IVADO sur l'assurance qualité des logiciels pour les applications d'apprentissage automatique.

Il a obtenu un doctorat en génie logiciel de l'Université de Montréal en 2011, avec une bourse d'excellence. Il a également reçu le prix CS-Can/Info-Can du meilleur jeune chercheur en informatique en 2019. Ses recherches portent sur la maintenance et l'évolution des logiciels, l'ingénierie des systèmes d'apprentissage automatique, l'ingénierie en nuage et l’IA/apprentissage automatique fiable et digne de confiance.

Ses travaux ont été récompensés par quatre prix de l’article le plus important Most Influential Paper en dix ans et six prix du meilleur article ou de l’article exceptionnel (Best/Distinguished Paper). Il a également siégé au comité directeur de plusieurs conférences et rencontres : SANER (comme président), MSR, PROMISE, ICPC (comme président) et ICSME (en tant que vice-président). Il a initié et coorganisé le symposium Software Engineering for Machine Learning Applications (SEMLA) et la série d'ateliers Release Engineering (RELENG).

Il est cofondateur du projet CRSNG CREATE SE4AI : A Training Program on the Development, Deployment, and Servicing of Artificial Intelligence-based Software Systems et l'un des chercheurs principaux du projet Dependable Explainable Learning (DEEL). Il est également cofondateur de l'initiative québécoise sur l'IA digne de confiance (Confiance IA Québec). Il fait partie du comité de rédaction de plusieurs revues internationales de génie logiciel (dont IEEE Software, EMSE, JSEP) et est membre senior de l'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Étudiants actuels

Collaborateur·rice alumni - Polytechnique
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Postdoctorat - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique
Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique
Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique

Publications

Harnessing Pre-trained Generalist Agents for Software Engineering Tasks
Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom
Amin Nikanjam
Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop techniques aimed at improving the reliability,… (voir plus) 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.
Harnessing pre-trained generalist agents for software engineering tasks
Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom
Amin Nikanjam
Harnessing pre-trained generalist agents for software engineering tasks
Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom
Amin Nikanjam
Leveraging Data Characteristics for Bug Localization in Deep Learning Programs
Ruchira Manke
Mohammad Wardat
Hridesh Rajan
Deep Learning (DL) is a class of machine learning algorithms that are used in a wide variety of applications. Like any software system, DL p… (voir plus)rograms can have bugs. To support bug localization in DL programs, several tools have been proposed in the past. As most of the bugs that occur due to improper model structure known as structural bugs lead to inadequate performance during training, it is challenging for developers to identify the root cause and address these bugs. To support bug detection and localization in DL programs, in this paper, we propose Theia, which detects and localizes structural bugs in DL programs. Unlike the previous works, Theia considers the training dataset characteristics to automatically detect bugs in DL programs developed using two deep learning libraries, Keras and PyTorch. Since training the DL models is a time-consuming process, Theia detects these bugs at the beginning of the training process and alerts the developer with informative messages containing the bug's location and actionable fixes which will help them to improve the structure of the model. We evaluated Theia on a benchmark of 40 real-world buggy DL programs obtained from Stack Overflow. Our results show that Theia successfully localizes 57/75 structural bugs in 40 buggy programs, whereas NeuraLint, a state-of-the-art approach capable of localizing structural bugs before training localizes 17/75 bugs.
Leveraging Data Characteristics for Bug Localization in Deep Learning Programs
Ruchira Manke
Mohammad Wardat
Hridesh Rajan
Deep Learning (DL) is a class of machine learning algorithms that are used in a wide variety of applications. Like any software system, DL p… (voir plus)rograms can have bugs. To support bug localization in DL programs, several tools have been proposed in the past. As most of the bugs that occur due to improper model structure known as structural bugs lead to inadequate performance during training, it is challenging for developers to identify the root cause and address these bugs. To support bug detection and localization in DL programs, in this paper, we propose Theia, which detects and localizes structural bugs in DL programs. Unlike the previous works, Theia considers the training dataset characteristics to automatically detect bugs in DL programs developed using two deep learning libraries, Keras and PyTorch . Since training the DL models is a time-consuming process, Theia detects these bugs at the beginning of the training process and alerts the developer with informative messages containing the bug's location and actionable fixes which will help them to improve the structure of the model. We evaluated Theia on a benchmark of 40 real-world buggy DL programs obtained from Stack Overflow . Our results show that Theia successfully localizes 57/75 structural bugs in 40 buggy programs, whereas NeuraLint, a state-of-the-art approach capable of localizing structural bugs before training localizes 17/75 bugs.
Leveraging Data Characteristics for Bug Localization in Deep Learning Programs
Ruchira Manke
Mohammad Wardat
Hridesh Rajan
Deep Learning (DL) is a class of machine learning algorithms that are used in a wide variety of applications. Like any software system, DL p… (voir plus)rograms can have bugs. To support bug localization in DL programs, several tools have been proposed in the past. As most of the bugs that occur due to improper model structure known as structural bugs lead to inadequate performance during training, it is challenging for developers to identify the root cause and address these bugs. To support bug detection and localization in DL programs, in this paper, we propose Theia, which detects and localizes structural bugs in DL programs. Unlike the previous works, Theia considers the training dataset characteristics to automatically detect bugs in DL programs developed using two deep learning libraries, Keras and PyTorch . Since training the DL models is a time-consuming process, Theia detects these bugs at the beginning of the training process and alerts the developer with informative messages containing the bug's location and actionable fixes which will help them to improve the structure of the model. We evaluated Theia on a benchmark of 40 real-world buggy DL programs obtained from Stack Overflow . Our results show that Theia successfully localizes 57/75 structural bugs in 40 buggy programs, whereas NeuraLint, a state-of-the-art approach capable of localizing structural bugs before training localizes 17/75 bugs.
Leveraging Data Characteristics for Bug Localization in Deep Learning Programs
Ruchira Manke
Mohammad Wardat
Hridesh Rajan
Deep Learning (DL) is a class of machine learning algorithms that are used in a wide variety of applications. Like any software system, DL p… (voir plus)rograms can have bugs. To support bug localization in DL programs, several tools have been proposed in the past. As most of the bugs that occur due to improper model structure known as structural bugs lead to inadequate performance during training, it is challenging for developers to identify the root cause and address these bugs. To support bug detection and localization in DL programs, in this paper, we propose Theia, which detects and localizes structural bugs in DL programs. Unlike the previous works, Theia considers the training dataset characteristics to automatically detect bugs in DL programs developed using two deep learning libraries, Keras and PyTorch . Since training the DL models is a time-consuming process, Theia detects these bugs at the beginning of the training process and alerts the developer with informative messages containing the bug's location and actionable fixes which will help them to improve the structure of the model. We evaluated Theia on a benchmark of 40 real-world buggy DL programs obtained from Stack Overflow . Our results show that Theia successfully localizes 57/75 structural bugs in 40 buggy programs, whereas NeuraLint, a state-of-the-art approach capable of localizing structural bugs before training localizes 17/75 bugs.
An Efficient Model Maintenance Approach for MLOps
Heng Li
Amin Nikanjam
In recent years, many industries have utilized machine learning models (ML) in their systems. Ideally, machine learning models should be tra… (voir plus)ined on and applied to data from the same distributions. However, the data evolves over time in many application areas, leading to data and concept drift, which in turn causes the performance of the ML models to degrade over time. Therefore, maintaining up to date ML models plays a critical role in the MLOps pipeline. Existing ML model maintenance approaches are often computationally resource intensive, costly, time consuming, and model dependent. Thus, we propose an improved MLOps pipeline, a new model maintenance approach and a Similarity Based Model Reuse (SimReuse) tool to address the challenges of ML model maintenance. We identify seasonal and recurrent distribution patterns in time series datasets throughout a preliminary study. Recurrent distribution patterns enable us to reuse previously trained models for similar distributions in the future, thus avoiding frequent retraining. Then, we integrated the model reuse approach into the MLOps pipeline and proposed our improved MLOps pipeline. Furthermore, we develop SimReuse, a tool to implement the new components of our MLOps pipeline to store models and reuse them for inference of data segments with similar data distributions in the future. Our evaluation results on four time series datasets demonstrate that our model reuse approach can maintain the performance of models while significantly reducing maintenance time and costs. Our model reuse approach achieves ML performance comparable to the best baseline, while being 15 times more efficient in terms of computation time and costs. Therefore, industries and practitioners can benefit from our approach and use our tool to maintain the performance of their ML models in the deployment phase to reduce their maintenance costs.
An Efficient Model Maintenance Approach for MLOps
Heng Li
Amin Nikanjam
In recent years, many industries have utilized machine learning models (ML) in their systems. Ideally, machine learning models should be tra… (voir plus)ined on and applied to data from the same distributions. However, the data evolves over time in many application areas, leading to data and concept drift, which in turn causes the performance of the ML models to degrade over time. Therefore, maintaining up to date ML models plays a critical role in the MLOps pipeline. Existing ML model maintenance approaches are often computationally resource intensive, costly, time consuming, and model dependent. Thus, we propose an improved MLOps pipeline, a new model maintenance approach and a Similarity Based Model Reuse (SimReuse) tool to address the challenges of ML model maintenance. We identify seasonal and recurrent distribution patterns in time series datasets throughout a preliminary study. Recurrent distribution patterns enable us to reuse previously trained models for similar distributions in the future, thus avoiding frequent retraining. Then, we integrated the model reuse approach into the MLOps pipeline and proposed our improved MLOps pipeline. Furthermore, we develop SimReuse, a tool to implement the new components of our MLOps pipeline to store models and reuse them for inference of data segments with similar data distributions in the future. Our evaluation results on four time series datasets demonstrate that our model reuse approach can maintain the performance of models while significantly reducing maintenance time and costs. Our model reuse approach achieves ML performance comparable to the best baseline, while being 15 times more efficient in terms of computation time and costs. Therefore, industries and practitioners can benefit from our approach and use our tool to maintain the performance of their ML models in the deployment phase to reduce their maintenance costs.
An Efficient Model Maintenance Approach for MLOps
Heng Li
Amin Nikanjam
In recent years, many industries have utilized machine learning models (ML) in their systems. Ideally, machine learning models should be tra… (voir plus)ined on and applied to data from the same distributions. However, the data evolves over time in many application areas, leading to data and concept drift, which in turn causes the performance of the ML models to degrade over time. Therefore, maintaining up to date ML models plays a critical role in the MLOps pipeline. Existing ML model maintenance approaches are often computationally resource intensive, costly, time consuming, and model dependent. Thus, we propose an improved MLOps pipeline, a new model maintenance approach and a Similarity Based Model Reuse (SimReuse) tool to address the challenges of ML model maintenance. We identify seasonal and recurrent distribution patterns in time series datasets throughout a preliminary study. Recurrent distribution patterns enable us to reuse previously trained models for similar distributions in the future, thus avoiding frequent retraining. Then, we integrated the model reuse approach into the MLOps pipeline and proposed our improved MLOps pipeline. Furthermore, we develop SimReuse, a tool to implement the new components of our MLOps pipeline to store models and reuse them for inference of data segments with similar data distributions in the future. Our evaluation results on four time series datasets demonstrate that our model reuse approach can maintain the performance of models while significantly reducing maintenance time and costs. Our model reuse approach achieves ML performance comparable to the best baseline, while being 15 times more efficient in terms of computation time and costs. Therefore, industries and practitioners can benefit from our approach and use our tool to maintain the performance of their ML models in the deployment phase to reduce their maintenance costs.
Tracing Optimization for Performance Modeling and Regression Detection
Kaveh Shahedi
Heng Li
Maxime Lamothe
Software performance modeling plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining software systems. A performance model analytically describe… (voir plus)s the relationship between the performance of a system and its runtime activities. This process typically examines various aspects of a system's runtime behavior, such as the execution frequency of functions or methods, to forecast performance metrics like program execution time. By using performance models, developers can predict expected performance and thereby effectively identify and address unexpected performance regressions when actual performance deviates from the model's predictions. One common and precise method for capturing performance behavior is software tracing, which involves instrumenting the execution of a program, either at the kernel level (e.g., system calls) or application level (e.g., function calls). However, due to the nature of tracing, it can be highly resource-intensive, making it impractical for production environments where resources are limited. In this work, we propose statistical approaches to reduce tracing overhead by identifying and excluding performance-insensitive code regions, particularly application-level functions, from tracing while still building accurate performance models that can capture performance degradations. By selecting an optimal set of functions to be traced, we can construct optimized performance models that achieve an R-2 score of up to 99% and, sometimes, outperform full tracing models (models using non-optimized tracing data), while significantly reducing the tracing overhead by more than 80% in most cases. Our optimized performance models can also capture performance regressions in our studied programs effectively, demonstrating their usefulness in real-world scenarios. Our approach is fully automated, making it ready to be used in production environments with minimal human effort.
Tracing Optimization for Performance Modeling and Regression Detection
Kaveh Shahedi
Heng Li
Maxime Lamothe
Software performance modeling plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining software systems. A performance model analytically describe… (voir plus)s the relationship between the performance of a system and its runtime activities. This process typically examines various aspects of a system's runtime behavior, such as the execution frequency of functions or methods, to forecast performance metrics like program execution time. By using performance models, developers can predict expected performance and thereby effectively identify and address unexpected performance regressions when actual performance deviates from the model's predictions. One common and precise method for capturing performance behavior is software tracing, which involves instrumenting the execution of a program, either at the kernel level (e.g., system calls) or application level (e.g., function calls). However, due to the nature of tracing, it can be highly resource-intensive, making it impractical for production environments where resources are limited. In this work, we propose statistical approaches to reduce tracing overhead by identifying and excluding performance-insensitive code regions, particularly application-level functions, from tracing while still building accurate performance models that can capture performance degradations. By selecting an optimal set of functions to be traced, we can construct optimized performance models that achieve an R-2 score of up to 99% and, sometimes, outperform full tracing models (models using non-optimized tracing data), while significantly reducing the tracing overhead by more than 80% in most cases. Our optimized performance models can also capture performance regressions in our studied programs effectively, demonstrating their usefulness in real-world scenarios. Our approach is fully automated, making it ready to be used in production environments with minimal human effort.