Portrait de Nizar Islah

Nizar Islah

Doctorat - UdeM
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e
Co-supervisor
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage continu
Apprentissage de représentations
Apprentissage profond
Neurosciences computationnelles

Publications

Revisiting Replay and Gradient Alignment for Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models
Istabrak Abbes
Matthew D Riemer
Tsuguchika Tabaru
Hiroaki Kingetsu
Training large language models (LLMs) typically involves pre-training on massive corpora, only to restart the process entirely when new data… (voir plus) becomes available. A more efficient and resource-conserving approach would be continual pre-training, where models are updated with new data rather than retraining from scratch. However, the introduction of new data often causes distribution shifts, leading to performance degradation on previously learned tasks. In this paper, we take a deeper look at two popular proposals for addressing this distribution shift within the continual learning literature: experience replay and gradient alignment. We consider continual pre-training of models within the Llama family of architectures at a large scale across languages with 100 billion tokens of training data in each language, finding that both replay and gradient alignment lead to more stable learning without forgetting. This conclusion holds both as we vary the model scale and as we vary the number and diversity of tasks. Moreover, we are the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of gradient alignment techniques in the context of LLM pre-training and propose an efficient implementation of meta-experience replay (MER) that imbues experience replay with the benefits of gradient alignment despite negligible compute and memory overhead. Our scaling analysis across model sizes and replay rates indicates that small rates of replaying old examples are definitely a more valuable use of compute than investing in model size, but that it is more compute efficient to scale the size of the model than invest in high rates of replaying old examples.
Revisiting Replay and Gradient Alignment for Continual Pre-Training of Large Language Models
Istabrak Abbes
Matthew D Riemer
Tsuguchika Tabaru
Hiroaki Kingetsu
GitChameleon: Evaluating AI Code Generation Against Python Library Version Incompatibilities
The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent v… (voir plus)ersion updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51\% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.
GitChameleon: Evaluating AI Code Generation Against Python Library Version Incompatibilities
The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent v… (voir plus)ersion updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51\% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.
GitChameleon 2.0: Evaluating AI Code Generation Against Python Library Version Incompatibilities
The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent v… (voir plus)ersion updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon 2.0, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon 2.0 rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon 2.0 enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.
Learning to combine top-down context and feed-forward representations under ambiguity with apical and basal dendrites
GitChameleon: Unmasking the Version-Switching Capabilities of Code Generation Models
Justine Gehring
Terry Yue Zhuo
Massimo Caccia