Portrait de Maxime Gasse

Maxime Gasse

Membre industriel associé
Professeur associé, Polytechnique Montréal, Département de génie informatique et génie logiciel
Chercheur scientifique principal, ServiceNow
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage par renforcement
Causalité
Modèles probabilistes

Biographie

Je suis chercheur principal chez ServiceNow à Montréal, où je fais de la recherche à l'intersection de l'inférence causale et de l'apprentissage par renforcement. Je suis professeur adjoint à Polytechnique Montréal et membre associé de Mila – Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle.

Je suis fasciné par la question de l'intelligence artificielle : pouvons-nous construire des machines qui pensent? Je crois humblement que nos tentatives de concevoir des machines pensantes peuvent être un chemin vers une compréhension fondamentale de l'intelligence et de nous-mêmes. Actuellement, je m'intéresse à la question consistant à savoir si et comment les idées du domaine de la causalité peuvent contribuer à la conception d'agents d'apprentissage autonomes. Je suis à la recherche de stagiaires motivé·e·s, doté·e·s de solides compétences techniques et d'une expérience dans l'apprentissage par renforcement et/ou la causalité.

Étudiants actuels

Publications

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… (voir plus)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.
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… (voir plus)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… (voir plus)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.
Pruning Sparse Tensor Neural Networks Enables Deep Learning for 3D Ultrasound Localization Microscopy
Brice Rauby
Paul Xing
Jonathan Por'ee
Jean Provost
The Unsolved Challenges of LLMs as Generalist Web Agents: A Case Study
Rim Assouel
Tom Marty
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Sai Rajeswar
Hector Palacios
David Vazquez
Alexandre Lacoste
Using Confounded Data in Latent Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Damien GRASSET
Guillaume Gaudron
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Lookback for Learning to Branch
Prateek Gupta
Elias Boutros Khalil
Didier Chételat
M. Pawan Kumar
The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights
Simon Bowly
Jonas Charfreitag
Didier Chételat
Antonia Chmiela
Justin Dumouchelle
Ambros Gleixner
Aleksandr Kazachkov
Elias Boutros Khalil
Paweł Lichocki
Miles Lubin
Chris J. Maddison
Christopher Morris
D. Papageorgiou
Augustin Parjadis
Sebastian Pokutta
Antoine Prouvost … (voir 22 de plus)
Lara Scavuzzo
Giulia Zarpellon
Linxin Yangm
Sha Lai
Akang Wang
Xiaodong Luo
Xiang Zhou
Haohan Huang
Sheng Cheng Shao
Yuanming Zhu
Dong Dong Zhang
Tao Manh Quan
Zixuan Cao
Yang Xu
Zhewei Huang
Shuchang Zhou
C. Binbin
He Minggui
Haoren Ren Hao
Zhang Zhiyu
An Zhiwu
Mao Kun
Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused … (voir plus)on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.
On generalized surrogate duality in mixed-integer nonlinear programming
Benjamin Müller
Gonzalo Muñoz
Ambros Gleixner
Felipe Serrano
On the Effectiveness of Two-Step Learning for Latent-Variable Models
Latent-variable generative models offer a principled solution for modeling and sampling from complex probability distributions. Implementing… (voir plus) a joint training objective with a complex prior, however, can be a tedious task, as one is typically required to derive and code a specific cost function for each new type of prior distribution. In this work, we propose a general framework for learning latent variable generative models in a two-step fashion. In the first step of the framework, we train an autoencoder, and in the second step we fit a prior model on the resulting latent distribution. This two-step approach offers a convenient alternative to joint training, as it allows for a straightforward combination of existing models without the hustle of deriving new cost functions, and the need for coding the joint training objectives. Through a set of experiments, we demonstrate that two-step learning results in performances similar to joint training, and in some cases even results in more accurate modeling.
On generalized surrogate duality in mixed-integer nonlinear programming
Benjamin Müller
Gonzalo Muñoz
Ambros Gleixner
Felipe Serrano