Publications

Neural networks with optimized single-neuron adaptation uncover biologically plausible regularization
Victor Geadah
Stefan Horoi
Giancarlo Kerg
Guy Wolf
Guillaume Lajoie
Neurons in the brain have rich and adaptive input-output properties. Features such as heterogeneous f-I curves and spike frequency adaptatio… (voir plus)n are known to place single neurons in optimal coding regimes when facing changing stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how brain circuits exploit single-neuron flexibility, and how network-level requirements may have shaped such cellular function. To answer this question, a multi-scaled approach is needed where the computations of single neurons and neural circuits must be considered as a complete system. In this work, we use artificial neural networks to systematically investigate single-neuron input-output adaptive mechanisms, optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Throughout the optimization process, each neuron has the liberty to modify its nonlinear activation function, parametrized to mimic f-I curves of biological neurons, and to learn adaptation strategies to modify activation functions in real-time during a task. We find that such networks show much-improved robustness to noise and changes in input statistics. Importantly, we find that this procedure recovers precise coding strategies found in biological neurons, such as gain scaling and fractional order differentiation/integration. Using tools from dynamical systems theory, we analyze the role of these emergent single-neuron properties and argue that neural diversity and adaptation play an active regularization role, enabling neural circuits to optimally propagate information across time.
2024-12-13
PLOS Computational Biology (publié)
doi.org
Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models
Mohammad Reza Samsami
M. L. Richter
Juan Rodriguez
Megh Thakkar
Sarath Chandar
Maxime Gasse
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.
2024-12-13
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models
Mohammad Reza Samsami
M. L. Richter
Juan Rodriguez
Megh Thakkar
Sarath Chandar
Maxime Gasse
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.
2024-12-13
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models
Mohammad Reza Samsami
M. L. Richter
Juan Rodriguez
Megh Thakkar
Sarath Chandar
Maxime Gasse
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.
2024-12-13
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Too Big to Fool: Resisting Deception in Language Models
Mohammad Reza Samsami
Mats Leon Richter
Juan A. Rodriguez
Megh Thakkar
Sarath Chandar
Maxime Gasse
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. T… (voir plus)his paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same family handle intentionally misleading in-context information. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models exhibit higher resilience to deceptive prompts, showcasing an advanced ability to interpret and integrate prompt information with their internal knowledge. Furthermore, we find that larger models outperform smaller ones in following legitimate instructions, indicating that their resilience is not due to disregarding in-context information. We also show that this phenomenon is likely not a result of memorization but stems from the models' ability to better leverage implicit task-relevant information from the prompt alongside their internally stored knowledge.
2024-12-13
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
openreview.net
The Software Documentor Mindset
Deeksha M. Arya
Jin Guo
Martin P. Robillard
Software technologies are used by programmers with diverse backgrounds. To fulfill programmers' need for information, enthusiasts contribute… (voir plus) numerous learning resources that vary in style and content, which act as documentation for the corresponding technology. We interviewed 26 volunteer documentation contributors, i.e. documentors, to understand why and how they create such documentation. From a qualitative analysis of our interviews, we identified a total of sixteen considerations that documentors have during the documentation contribution process, along three dimensions, namely motivations, topic selection techniques, and styling objectives. We grouped related considerations based on common underlying themes, to elicit five software documentor mindsets that occur during documentation contribution activities. We propose a structure of mindsets, and their associated considerations across the three dimensions, as a framework for reasoning about the documentation contribution process. This framework can inform information seeking as well as documentation creation tools about the context in which documentation was contributed.
2024-12-12
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
The Software Documentor Mindset
Deeksha M. Arya
Jin Guo
Martin P. Robillard
Software technologies are used by programmers with diverse backgrounds. To fulfill programmers' need for information, enthusiasts contribute… (voir plus) numerous learning resources that vary in style and content, which act as documentation for the corresponding technology. We interviewed 26 volunteer documentation contributors, i.e. documentors, to understand why and how they create such documentation. From a qualitative analysis of our interviews, we identified a total of sixteen considerations that documentors have during the documentation contribution process, along three dimensions, namely motivations, topic selection techniques, and styling objectives. We grouped related considerations based on common underlying themes, to elicit five software documentor mindsets that occur during documentation contribution activities. We propose a structure of mindsets, and their associated considerations across the three dimensions, as a framework for reasoning about the documentation contribution process. This framework can inform information seeking as well as documentation creation tools about the context in which documentation was contributed.
2024-12-12
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The Software Documentor Mindset
Deeksha M. Arya
Jin Guo
Martin P. Robillard
Software technologies are used by programmers with diverse backgrounds. To fulfill programmers' need for information, enthusiasts contribute… (voir plus) numerous learning resources that vary in style and content, which act as documentation for the corresponding technology. We interviewed 26 volunteer documentation contributors, i.e. documentors, to understand why and how they create such documentation. From a qualitative analysis of our interviews, we identified a total of sixteen considerations that documentors have during the documentation contribution process, along three dimensions, namely motivations, topic selection techniques, and styling objectives. We grouped related considerations based on common underlying themes, to elicit five software documentor mindsets that occur during documentation contribution activities. We propose a structure of mindsets, and their associated considerations across the three dimensions, as a framework for reasoning about the documentation contribution process. This framework can inform information seeking as well as documentation creation tools about the context in which documentation was contributed.
2024-12-12
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Effects of gene dosage on cognitive ability: A function-based association study across brain and non-brain processes
Guillaume Huguet
Thomas Renne
Cécile Poulain
Alma Dubuc
Kuldeep Kumar
Sayeh Kazem
Worrawat Engchuan
Omar Shanta
Elise Douard
Catherine Proulx
Martineau Jean-Louis
Zohra Saci
Josephine Mollon
Laura Schultz
Emma E M Knowles
Simon R. Cox
David Porteous
Gail Davies
Paul Redmond
Sarah E. Harris … (voir 10 de plus)
Gunter Schumann
Guillaume Dumas
Aurélie Labbe
Zdenka Pausova
Tomas Paus
Stephen W Scherer
Jonathan Sebat
Laura Almasy
David C. Glahn
Sébastien Jacquemont
2024-12-11
Cell Genomics (publié)
doi.org
From Multimodal LLMs to Generalist Embodied Agents: Methods and Lessons
Andrew Szot
Bogdan Mazoure
Omar Attia
Aleksei Timofeev
Harsh Agrawal
(Rex) Devon Hjelm
Zhe Gan
Zsolt Kira
Alexander T Toshev
We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language … (voir plus)and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and with online RL in interactive simulators. We explore the data and algorithmic choices necessary to develop such a model. Our findings reveal the importance of training with cross-domain data and online RL for building generalist agents. The final GEA model achieves strong generalization performance to unseen tasks across diverse benchmarks compared to other generalist models and benchmark-specific approaches.
2024-12-11
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
From Multimodal LLMs to Generalist Embodied Agents: Methods and Lessons
Andrew Szot
Bogdan Mazoure
Omar Attia
Aleksei Timofeev
Harsh Agrawal
(Rex) Devon Hjelm
Zhe Gan
Zsolt Kira
Alexander T Toshev
We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language … (voir plus)and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and with online RL in interactive simulators. We explore the data and algorithmic choices necessary to develop such a model. Our findings reveal the importance of training with cross-domain data and online RL for building generalist agents. The final GEA model achieves strong generalization performance to unseen tasks across diverse benchmarks compared to other generalist models and benchmark-specific approaches.
2024-12-11
ArXiv (prépublication)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Harnessing pre-trained generalist agents for software engineering tasks
Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom
Amin Nikanjam
Foutse Khomh
2024-12-11
Empirical Software Engineering (publié)
doi.org