Publications

Intersecting perspectives: A participatory street review framework for urban inclusivity
Rashid A. Mushkani
Shin (Alexandre) Koseki
2025-10-01
Habitat International (publié)
doi.org
Intersecting perspectives: A participatory street review framework for urban inclusivity
Rashid A. Mushkani
Shin (Alexandre) Koseki
2025-10-01
Habitat International (publié)
doi.org
Intersecting perspectives: A participatory street review framework for urban inclusivity
Rashid A. Mushkani
Shin (Alexandre) Koseki
2025-10-01
Habitat International (publié)
doi.org
The Three Regimes of Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Li Li
Tianwei Ni
Yihao Sun
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online… (voir plus) interactions for fine-tuning. However, its empirical behavior is highly inconsistent: design choices of online-fine tuning that work well in one setting can fail completely in another. We propose a stability--plasticity principle that can explain this inconsistency: we should preserve the knowledge of pretrained policy or offline dataset during online fine-tuning, whichever is better, while maintaining sufficient plasticity. This perspective identifies three regimes of online fine-tuning, each requiring distinct stability properties. We validate this framework through a large-scale empirical study, finding that the results strongly align with its predictions in 45 of 63 cases. This work provides a principled framework for guiding design choices in offline-to-online RL based on the relative performance of the offline dataset and the pretrained policy.
2025-10-01
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
They Hear Me Rolling: Design and Characterization of a Distributed, Rolling Acoustic-Tactile Sensor
Wilfred Mason
David Brenken
Olivier St-Martin Cormier
Audrey Sedal
Tactile sensor design has been widely explored at the centimeter-scale; fewer explorations exist in larger scale systems with varied geometr… (voir plus)ies. We present a meter-scale tactile sensor for wheeled robotic platforms based on a flexible acoustic waveguide. This sensor architecture performs contact sensing over the surface of a rotating wheel with a single transducer that is separated from the sensing surface. The design and characterization of the sensor are presented, along with a demonstration of a state-estimation framework using tactile sensor feedback to measure surface features.
2025-10-01
IEEE Sensors Letters (publié)
doi.org
VLOD-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Object Detectors
Atif Belal
Heitor Rapela Medeiros
Marco Pedersoli
Eric Granger
Vision-language object detectors (VLODs) such as YOLO-World and Grounding DINO achieve impressive zero-shot recognition by aligning region p… (voir plus)roposals with text representations. However, their performance often degrades under domain shift. We introduce VLOD-TTA, a test-time adaptation (TTA) framework for VLODs that leverages dense proposal overlap and image-conditioned prompt scores. First, an IoU-weighted entropy objective is proposed that concentrates adaptation on spatially coherent proposal clusters and reduces confirmation bias from isolated boxes. Second, image-conditioned prompt selection is introduced, which ranks prompts by image-level compatibility and fuses the most informative prompts with the detector logits. Our benchmarking across diverse distribution shifts -- including stylized domains, driving scenes, low-light conditions, and common corruptions -- shows the effectiveness of our method on two state-of-the-art VLODs, YOLO-World and Grounding DINO, with consistent improvements over the zero-shot and TTA baselines. Code : https://github.com/imatif17/VLOD-TTA
2025-10-01
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
DeepCodeProbe: Evaluating Code Representation Quality in Models Trained on Code
Vahid Majdinasab
Amin Nikanjam
Foutse Khomh
2025-09-30
Empirical Software Engineering (publié)
doi.org
DeepCodeProbe: Evaluating Code Representation Quality in Models Trained on Code
Vahid Majdinasab
Amin Nikanjam
Foutse Khomh
2025-09-30
Empirical Software Engineering (publié)
doi.org
DRBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Enterprise Deep Research
Amirhossein Abaskohi
Tianyi Chen
Miguel Muñoz-Mármol
Curtis Fox
Amrutha Varshini Ramesh
Étienne Marcotte
Xing Han Lu
Nicolas Chapados
Spandana Gella
Chris Pal
Alexandre Drouin
Issam Hadj Laradji
We introduce DRBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on complex, open-ended deep research tasks in enterprise settings. Unlike prior b… (voir plus)enchmarks that focus on simple questions or web-only queries, DRBench evaluates agents on multi-step queries (for example, ``What changes should we make to our product roadmap to ensure compliance with this standard?") that require identifying supporting facts from both the public web and private company knowledge base. Each task is grounded in realistic user personas and enterprise context, spanning a heterogeneous search space that includes productivity software, cloud file systems, emails, chat conversations, and the open web. Tasks are generated through a carefully designed synthesis pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, and agents are evaluated on their ability to recall relevant insights, maintain factual accuracy, and produce coherent, well-structured reports. We release 15 deep research tasks across 10 domains, such as Sales, Cybersecurity, and Compliance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DRBench by evaluating diverse DR agents across open- and closed-source models (such as GPT, Llama, and Qwen) and DR strategies, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and the critical path for advancing enterprise deep research. Code is available at https://github.com/ServiceNow/drbench.
2025-09-30
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
GRPO-$\lambda$: Credit Assignment improves LLM Reasoning
Prasanna Parthasarathi
Mathieu Reymond
Boxing Chen
Yufei Cui
Sarath Chandar
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for tasks requiring complex reasoning, prompting significant interest in improving th… (voir plus)eir reasoning abilities through post-training. Especially RL based methods using verifiable reward, like the state-of-the-art GRPO, have shown to tremendously improve reasoning behaviors when applied as post-training methods. However, the lack of an explicit reward or critic model limits GRPO's ability to assign fine-grained credit across token sequences. In this work, we present GRPO-
2025-09-30
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models
Siddarth Venkatraman
Vineet Jain
Sarthak Mittal
Vedant Shah
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Yoshua Bengio
Brian R. Bartoldson
Bhavya Kailkhura
Guillaume Lajoie
Glen Berseth
Nikolay Malkin
Moksh J. Jain
Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.
2025-09-30
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Asymmetric developmental bifurcations in polarized environments: a new class of human variants, which may include autism.
Laurent Mottron
Alix Lavigne-Champagne
Boris C. Bernhardt
Guillaume Dumas
Sébastien Jacquemont
D. Gagnon
2025-09-29
Molecular Psychiatry (publié)
doi.org