Publications

Performance Control in Early Exiting to Deploy Large Models at the Same Cost of Smaller Ones
Joao Monteiro
Valentina Zantedeschi
APPL: A Prompt Programming Language for Harmonious Integration of Programs and Large Language Model Prompts
Honghua Dong
Qidong Su
Yubo Gao
Zhaoyu Li
Yangjun Ruan
Gennady G. Pekhimenko
Chris J. Maddison
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of handling diverse tasks with the aid of well-crafted prompts and integration… (voir plus) of external tools, but as task complexity rises, the workflow involving LLMs can be complicated and thus challenging to implement and maintain. To address this challenge, we propose APPL, A Prompt Programming Language that acts as a bridge between computer programs and LLMs, allowing seamless embedding of prompts into Python functions, and vice versa. APPL provides an intuitive and Python-native syntax, an efficient parallelized runtime with asynchronous semantics, and a tracing module supporting effective failure diagnosis and replaying without extra costs. We demonstrate that APPL programs are intuitive, concise, and efficient through three representative scenarios: Chain-of-Thought with self-consistency (CoT-SC), ReAct tool use agent, and multi-agent chat. Experiments on three parallelizable workflows further show that APPL can effectively parallelize independent LLM calls, with a significant speedup ratio that almost matches the estimation.
Functional Acceleration for Policy Mirror Descent
GAPS phase II: development and pilot results of the global assessment in pediatric surgery, an evidence-based pediatric surgical capacity assessment tool for low-resource settings.
Yasmine Yousef
Sarah Cairo
Etienne St-Louis
Laura F. Goodman
Doulia M. Hamad
Robert Baird
Emily R. Smith
Sherif Emil
Jean Martin Laberge
Mohamed Abdelmalak
Zipporah Gathuy
Faye Evans
Maryam Ghavami Adel
Ki K. Bertille
Milind Chitnis
Leecarlo Millano
Peter Nthumba
Sergio d’Agostino
Bruno Cigliano
Luis Enrique Zea-Salazar … (voir 4 de plus)
Emmanuel Ameh
Doruk Ozgediz
Elena Guadagno
Handling Delay in Reinforcement Learning Caused by Parallel Computations of Neurons
Rishav
Stephen Chung
S Ebrahimi Kahou
Biological neural networks operate in parallel, a feature that sets them apart from artificial neural networks and can significantly enhance… (voir plus) inference speed. However, this parallelism introduces challenges: when each neuron operates asynchronously with a fixed execution time, an
Realtime Reinforcement Learning: Towards Rapid Asynchronous Deployment of Large Models
Realtime environments change even as agents perform action inference and learning, thus requiring high interaction frequencies to effectivel… (voir plus)y minimize long-term regret. However, recent advances in machine learning involve larger neural networks with longer inference times, raising questions about their applicability in realtime systems where reaction time is crucial. We present an analysis of lower bounds on regret in realtime environments to show that minimizing long-term regret is generally impossible within the typical sequential interaction and learning paradigm, but often becomes possible when sufficient asynchronous compute is available. We propose novel algorithms for staggering asynchronous inference processes to ensure that actions are taken at consistent time intervals, and demonstrate that use of models with high action inference times is only constrained by the environment's effective stochasticity over the inference horizon, and not by action frequency. Our analysis shows that the number of inference processes needed scales linearly with increasing inference times while enabling use of models that are multiple orders of magnitude larger than existing approaches when learning from a realtime simulation of Game Boy games such as Pokemon and Tetris.
A deeper look at depth pruning of LLMs
Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui
Xin Dong
Greg Heinrich
Thomas Breuel
Jan Kautz
David M. Krueger
Pavlo Molchanov
Large Language Models (LLMs) are not only resource-intensive to train but even more costly to deploy in production. Therefore, recent work h… (voir plus)as attempted to prune blocks of LLMs based on cheap proxies for estimating block importance, effectively removing 10% of blocks in well-trained LLaMa-2 and Mistral 7b models without any significant degradation of downstream metrics. In this paper, we explore different block importance metrics by considering adaptive metrics such as Shapley value in addition to static ones explored in prior work. We show that *adaptive metrics exhibit a trade-off in performance between tasks i.e., improvement on one task may degrade performance on the other due to differences in the computed block influences*. Furthermore, we extend this analysis from a complete block to individual self-attention and feed-forward layers, highlighting the propensity of the self-attention layers to be more amendable to pruning, even allowing ***removal of upto 33% of the self-attention layers without incurring any performance degradation on MMLU for Mistral 7b*** (significant reduction in costly maintenance of KV-cache). Finally, we look at simple performance recovery techniques to emulate the pruned layers by training lightweight additive bias or low-rank linear adapters. *Performance recovery using emulated updates avoids performance degradation for the initial blocks (up to 5% absolute improvement on MMLU)*, which is either competitive or superior to the learning-based technique.
Path-based reasoning for biomedical knowledge graphs with BioPathNet
Svitlana Oleshko
Samuele Firmani
Hui Cheng
Maria Ulmer
Matthias Arnold
Maria Colomé-Tatché
Annalisa Marsico
Understanding complex interactions in biomedical networks is crucial for advancements in biomedicine, but traditional link prediction (LP) m… (voir plus)ethods are limited in capturing this complexity. Representation-based learning techniques improve prediction accuracy by mapping nodes to low-dimensional embeddings, yet they often struggle with interpretability and scalability. We present BioPathNet, a novel graph neural network framework based on the Neural Bellman-Ford Network (NBFNet), addressing these limitations through path-based reasoning for LP in biomedical knowledge graphs. Unlike node-embedding frameworks, BioPathNet learns representations between node pairs by considering all relations along paths, enhancing prediction accuracy and interpretability. This allows visualization of influential paths and facilitates biological validation. BioPathNet leverages a background regulatory graph (BRG) for enhanced message passing and uses stringent negative sampling to improve precision. In evaluations across various LP tasks, such as gene function annotation, drug-disease indication, synthetic lethality, and lncRNA-mRNA interaction prediction, BioPathNet consistently outperformed shallow node embedding methods, relational graph neural networks and task-specific state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating robust performance and versatility. Our study predicts novel drug indications for diseases like acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and Alzheimer’s, validated by medical experts and clinical trials. We also identified new synthetic lethality gene pairs and regulatory interactions involving lncRNAs and target genes, confirmed through literature reviews. BioPathNet’s interpretability will enable researchers to trace prediction paths and gain molecular insights, making it a valuable tool for drug discovery, personalized medicine and biology in general.
Scalable Approaches for a Theory of Many Minds
A major challenge as we move towards building agents for real-world problems, which could involve a massive number of human and/or machine a… (voir plus)gents, is that we must learn to reason about the behavior of these many other agents. In this paper, we consider the problem of scaling a predictive Theory of Mind (ToM) model to a very large number of interacting agents with a fixed computational budget. Motivated by the limited diversity of agent types, existing approaches to scalable TOM learn versatile single-agent representations for quickly adapting to new agents encountered sequentially. We consider the more general setting that many agents are observed in parallel and formulate the corresponding Theory of Many Minds (ToMM) problem of estimating the joint policy. We frame the scaling behavior of solutions in terms of parameter sharing schemes and in particular propose two parameter-free architectural features that endow models with the ability to exploit action correlations: encoding a multi-agent context, and decoding through an abstracted joint action space. The increased predictive capabilities that have come with foundation models have made it easier to imagine the possibility of using these models to make simulations that imitate the behavior of many agents within complex real-world systems. Being able to perform these simulations in a general-purpose way would not only help make more capable agents, it also would be a very useful capability for applications in social science, political science, and economics.
Assessing the Viability of Generative Modeling in Simulated Astronomical Observations
In this paper, we use methods for assessing the quality of generative models and apply them to a problem from the physical sciences. We turn… (voir plus) our attention to astrophysics, where cosmological simulations are often used to create mock observations that mimic telescope images. These simulations and their mock observations are often slow and challenging to generate, inspiring some to use generative modeling to enhance the amount of data available to study. In this work, we add realism to simulated images of galaxy clusters and use probability mass estimation to assess their fidelity compared to reality. We find that the simulations are biased compared to real observations and suggest that researchers applying generative modeling to these systems should proceed with caution.
Augmenting Evolutionary Models with Structure-based Retrieval
Yining Huang
Debora Susan Marks
Pascal Notin
Bias-inducing geometries: exactly solvable data model with fairness implications
Stefano Sarao Mannelli
Federica Gerace
Luca Saglietti
Machine learning (ML) may be oblivious to human bias but it is not immune to its perpetuation. Marginalisation and iniquitous group represen… (voir plus)tation are often traceable in the very data used for training, and may be reflected or even enhanced by the learning models. In this abstract, we aim to clarify the role played by data geometry in the emergence of ML bias. We introduce an exactly solvable high-dimensional model of data imbalance, where parametric control over the many bias-inducing factors allows for an extensive exploration of the bias inheritance mechanism. Through the tools of statistical physics, we analytically characterise the typical properties of learning models trained in this synthetic framework and obtain exact predictions for the observables that are commonly employed for fairness assessment. Simplifying the nature of the problem to its minimal components, we can retrace and unpack typical unfairness behaviour observed on real-world datasets