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Dec 8

Can Large Language Models Replace Data Scientists in Clinical Research?

Data science plays a critical role in clinical research, but it requires professionals with expertise in coding and medical data analysis. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in supporting medical tasks and performing well in general coding tests. However, these tests do not assess LLMs' ability to handle data science tasks in medicine, nor do they explore their practical utility in clinical research. To address this, we developed a dataset consisting of 293 real-world data science coding tasks, based on 39 published clinical studies, covering 128 tasks in Python and 165 tasks in R. This dataset simulates realistic clinical research scenarios using patient data. Our findings reveal that cutting-edge LLMs struggle to generate perfect solutions, frequently failing to follow input instructions, understand target data, and adhere to standard analysis practices. Consequently, LLMs are not yet ready to fully automate data science tasks. We benchmarked advanced adaptation methods and found two to be particularly effective: chain-of-thought prompting, which provides a step-by-step plan for data analysis, which led to a 60% improvement in code accuracy; and self-reflection, enabling LLMs to iteratively refine their code, yielding a 38% accuracy improvement. Building on these insights, we developed a platform that integrates LLMs into the data science workflow for medical professionals. In a user study with five medical doctors, we found that while LLMs cannot fully automate coding tasks, they significantly streamline the programming process. We found that 80% of their submitted code solutions were incorporated from LLM-generated code, with up to 96% reuse in some cases. Our analysis highlights the potential of LLMs, when integrated into expert workflows, to enhance data science efficiency in clinical research.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

DS-STAR: Data Science Agent via Iterative Planning and Verification

Data science, which transforms raw data into actionable insights, is critical for data-driven decision-making. However, these tasks are often complex, involving steps for exploring multiple data sources and synthesizing findings to deliver insightful answers. While large language models (LLMs) show significant promise in automating this process, they often struggle with heterogeneous data formats and generate sub-optimal analysis plans, as verifying plan sufficiency is inherently difficult without ground-truth labels for such open-ended tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DS-STAR, a novel data science agent. Specifically, DS-STAR makes three key contributions: (1) a data file analysis module that automatically explores and extracts context from diverse data formats, including unstructured types; (2) a verification step where an LLM-based judge evaluates the sufficiency of the analysis plan at each stage; and (3) a sequential planning mechanism that starts with a simple, executable plan and iteratively refines it based on the DS-STAR's feedback until its sufficiency is verified. This iterative refinement allows DS-STAR to reliably navigate complex analyses involving diverse data sources. Our experiments show that DS-STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three challenging benchmarks: DABStep, KramaBench, and DA-Code. Moreover, DS-STAR particularly outperforms baselines on hard tasks that require processing multiple data files with heterogeneous formats.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25

What Should Data Science Education Do with Large Language Models?

The rapid advances of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are revolutionizing data science and statistics. These state-of-the-art tools can streamline complex processes. As a result, it reshapes the role of data scientists. We argue that LLMs are transforming the responsibilities of data scientists, shifting their focus from hands-on coding, data-wrangling and conducting standard analyses to assessing and managing analyses performed by these automated AIs. This evolution of roles is reminiscent of the transition from a software engineer to a product manager. We illustrate this transition with concrete data science case studies using LLMs in this paper. These developments necessitate a meaningful evolution in data science education. Pedagogy must now place greater emphasis on cultivating diverse skillsets among students, such as LLM-informed creativity, critical thinking, AI-guided programming. LLMs can also play a significant role in the classroom as interactive teaching and learning tools, contributing to personalized education. This paper discusses the opportunities, resources and open challenges for each of these directions. As with any transformative technology, integrating LLMs into education calls for careful consideration. While LLMs can perform repetitive tasks efficiently, it's crucial to remember that their role is to supplement human intelligence and creativity, not to replace it. Therefore, the new era of data science education should balance the benefits of LLMs while fostering complementary human expertise and innovations. In conclusion, the rise of LLMs heralds a transformative period for data science and its education. This paper seeks to shed light on the emerging trends, potential opportunities, and challenges accompanying this paradigm shift, hoping to spark further discourse and investigation into this exciting, uncharted territory.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 6, 2023

KramaBench: A Benchmark for AI Systems on Data-to-Insight Pipelines over Data Lakes

Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.

  • 19 authors
·
Jun 6

Improving FIM Code Completions via Context & Curriculum Based Learning

Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) models play a vital role in code completion tasks, leveraging both prefix and suffix context to provide more accurate and contextually relevant suggestions. This paper presents approaches to improve FIM code completion while addressing the challenge of maintaining low latency for real-time coding assistance. We enhance FIM code completion by incorporating context and curriculum examples in the training process. We identify patterns where completion suggestions fail more frequently, revealing complexities that smaller language models struggle with. To address these challenges, we develop a curriculum dataset by extracting hard-to-complete patterns from code repositories and generate context examples using semantic and static analysis tools (e.g. TSC compiler). We fine-tune various sized models, including StarCoder and DeepSeek, on this enhanced dataset. Our evaluation encompasses three key dimensions: the Santa Coder FIM task, the Amazon CCEval benchmark, and a new Multi-Line Infilling evaluation benchmark derived from SWE-bench. Comprehensive ablation studies across multiple model sizes reveal that while all fine-tuned models show improvements, the performance gains are more pronounced for smaller parameter models and incorporating difficult-to-complete examples, as part of curriculum learning, improves the code completion performance. This finding is particularly significant given the latency constraints of code completion tasks. While larger models like GPT and Claude perform well in multi-line completions but are prohibitively challenging to use given high latency, and our fine-tuned models achieve a balance between performance and latency. Finally, we validate our approach through online A/B testing, demonstrating tangible improvements in Completion Acceptance Rate (CAR) and Completion Persistence Rate (CPR), with zero latency impact.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

The Dataset Nutrition Label: A Framework To Drive Higher Data Quality Standards

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems built on incomplete or biased data will often exhibit problematic outcomes. Current methods of data analysis, particularly before model development, are costly and not standardized. The Dataset Nutrition Label (the Label) is a diagnostic framework that lowers the barrier to standardized data analysis by providing a distilled yet comprehensive overview of dataset "ingredients" before AI model development. Building a Label that can be applied across domains and data types requires that the framework itself be flexible and adaptable; as such, the Label is comprised of diverse qualitative and quantitative modules generated through multiple statistical and probabilistic modelling backends, but displayed in a standardized format. To demonstrate and advance this concept, we generated and published an open source prototype with seven sample modules on the ProPublica Dollars for Docs dataset. The benefits of the Label are manyfold. For data specialists, the Label will drive more robust data analysis practices, provide an efficient way to select the best dataset for their purposes, and increase the overall quality of AI models as a result of more robust training datasets and the ability to check for issues at the time of model development. For those building and publishing datasets, the Label creates an expectation of explanation, which will drive better data collection practices. We also explore the limitations of the Label, including the challenges of generalizing across diverse datasets, and the risk of using "ground truth" data as a comparison dataset. We discuss ways to move forward given the limitations identified. Lastly, we lay out future directions for the Dataset Nutrition Label project, including research and public policy agendas to further advance consideration of the concept.

  • 5 authors
·
May 9, 2018

SynthCoder: A Synthetical Strategy to Tune LLMs for Code Completion

Code completion is a prominent application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering. Due to the near real-time response requirements of this task, base models with small to medium-sized parameters are typically employed, supplemented by various optimization and post-training techniques. However, these optimization methods often have trade-offs, leading to a seesaw effect where performance improvements on certain datasets or metrics are accompanied by degradations on others -- sometimes even falling below the baseline model's performance. This paper proposes SynthCoder, a model that integrates leading industry practices to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) code completion task. In specific, we first construct a diverse dataset by combining Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) node extraction with heuristics that simulate developer behavior. Then we enrich our training corpus with cross-file contextual information using the BM25 algorithm and call graphs, enhancing the model's ability to perform code completion in both file-level and repository-level scenarios. As the last step, we employ a two-stage training process using the Seed-Coder-8B-Base as the base model. First, we fine-tune the model using Curriculum Learning technology. Following this, we perform alignment using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with preference pairs generated through Rejection Sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that our final model excels on mainstream repository-level code completion benchmarks, including aiXcoder, ExecRepoBench, CrossCodeEval, and CoLT. Furthermore, our carefully curated training set effectively mitigates the model's tendency to just repeat existing code, a common issue existing in various code completion models.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 21

SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature

We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following demonstrations for 54 tasks covering five essential scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF demonstrations are notable for their long input contexts, detailed task specifications, and complex structured outputs. While instruction-following resources are available in specific domains such as clinical medicine and chemistry, SciRIFF is the first dataset focused on extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across a wide range of scientific fields. To demonstrate the utility of SciRIFF, we develop a sample-efficient strategy to adapt a general instruction-following model for science by performing additional finetuning on a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF demonstrations. In evaluations on nine held-out scientific tasks, our model -- called SciTulu -- improves over a strong LLM baseline by 28.1% and 6.5% at the 7B and 70B scales respectively, while maintaining general instruction-following performance within 2% of the baseline. We are optimistic that SciRIFF will facilitate the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the ever-growing body of scientific literature. We release our dataset, model checkpoints, and data processing and evaluation code to enable further research.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

SCP-116K: A High-Quality Problem-Solution Dataset and a Generalized Pipeline for Automated Extraction in the Higher Education Science Domain

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) exemplified by the impressive mathematical and scientific reasoning capabilities of the o1 model have spotlighted the critical importance of high-quality training data in advancing LLM performance across STEM disciplines. While the mathematics community has benefited from a growing body of curated datasets, the scientific domain at the higher education level has long suffered from a scarcity of comparable resources. To address this gap, we present SCP-116K, a new large-scale dataset of 116,756 high-quality problem-solution pairs, automatically extracted from heterogeneous sources using a streamlined and highly generalizable pipeline. Our approach involves stringent filtering to ensure the scientific rigor and educational level of the extracted materials, while maintaining adaptability for future expansions or domain transfers. By openly releasing both the dataset and the extraction pipeline, we seek to foster research on scientific reasoning, enable comprehensive performance evaluations of new LLMs, and lower the barrier to replicating the successes of advanced models like o1 in the broader science community. We believe SCP-116K will serve as a critical resource, catalyzing progress in high-level scientific reasoning tasks and promoting further innovations in LLM development. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/AQA6666/SCP-116K-open.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 26

Programming Puzzles

We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by a short Python program f, and the goal is to find an input which makes f return True. The puzzles are objective in that each one is specified entirely by the source code of its verifier f, so evaluating f is all that is needed to test a candidate solution. They do not require an answer key or input/output examples, nor do they depend on natural language understanding. The dataset is comprehensive in that it spans problems of a range of difficulties and domains, ranging from trivial string manipulation problems, to classic programming puzzles (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), to interview/competitive-programming problems (e.g., dynamic programming), to longstanding open problems in algorithms and mathematics (e.g., factoring). We develop baseline enumerative program synthesis, GPT-3 and Codex solvers that are capable of solving puzzles -- even without access to any reference solutions -- by learning from their own past solutions. Codex performs best, solving up to 18% of 397 test problems with a single try and 80% of the problems with 1,000 tries per problem. In a small user study, we find a positive correlation between puzzle-solving performance and coding experience, and between the puzzle difficulty for humans and AI solvers. Therefore, further improvements on P3 could have a significant impact on many program synthesis areas.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 10, 2021

A Prescriptive Learning Analytics Framework: Beyond Predictive Modelling and onto Explainable AI with Prescriptive Analytics and ChatGPT

A significant body of recent research in the field of Learning Analytics has focused on leveraging machine learning approaches for predicting at-risk students in order to initiate timely interventions and thereby elevate retention and completion rates. The overarching feature of the majority of these research studies has been on the science of prediction only. The component of predictive analytics concerned with interpreting the internals of the models and explaining their predictions for individual cases to stakeholders has largely been neglected. Additionally, works that attempt to employ data-driven prescriptive analytics to automatically generate evidence-based remedial advice for at-risk learners are in their infancy. eXplainable AI is a field that has recently emerged providing cutting-edge tools which support transparent predictive analytics and techniques for generating tailored advice for at-risk students. This study proposes a novel framework that unifies both transparent machine learning as well as techniques for enabling prescriptive analytics, while integrating the latest advances in large language models. This work practically demonstrates the proposed framework using predictive models for identifying at-risk learners of programme non-completion. The study then further demonstrates how predictive modelling can be augmented with prescriptive analytics on two case studies in order to generate human-readable prescriptive feedback for those who are at risk using ChatGPT.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 30, 2022

Language Models for Code Completion: A Practical Evaluation

Transformer-based language models for automatic code completion have shown great promise so far, yet the evaluation of these models rarely uses real data. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative assessments of three public code language models when completing real-world code. We first developed an open-source IDE extension, Code4Me, for the online evaluation of the models. We collected real auto-completion usage data for over a year from more than 1200 users, resulting in over 600K valid completions. These models were then evaluated using six standard metrics across twelve programming languages. Next, we conducted a qualitative study of 1690 real-world completion requests to identify the reasons behind the poor model performance. A comparative analysis of the models' performance in online and offline settings was also performed, using benchmark synthetic datasets and two masking strategies. Our findings suggest that while developers utilize code completion across various languages, the best results are achieved for mainstream languages such as Python and Java. InCoder outperformed the other models across all programming languages, highlighting the significance of training data and objectives. Our study also revealed that offline evaluations do not accurately reflect real-world scenarios. Upon qualitative analysis of the model's predictions, we found that 66.3% of failures were due to the models' limitations, 24.4% occurred due to inappropriate model usage in a development context, and 9.3% were valid requests that developers overwrote. Given these findings, we propose several strategies to overcome the current limitations. These include refining training objectives, improving resilience to typographical errors, adopting hybrid approaches, and enhancing implementations and usability.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 25, 2024

IRCoCo: Immediate Rewards-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Code Completion

Code completion aims to enhance programming productivity by predicting potential code based on the current programming context. Recently, pretrained language models (LMs) have become prominent in this field. Various approaches have been proposed to fine-tune LMs using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) techniques for code completion. However, the inherent exposure bias of these models can cause errors to accumulate early in the sequence completion, leading to even more errors in subsequent completions. To address this problem, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is an alternative technique for fine-tuning LMs for code completion, which can improve the generalization capabilities and overall performance. Nevertheless, integrating DRL-based strategies into code completion faces two major challenges: 1) The dynamic nature of the code context requires the completion model to quickly adapt to changes, which poses difficulties for conventional DRL strategies that focus on delayed rewarding of the final code state. 2) It is difficult to evaluate the correctness of partial code, thus the reward redistribution-based strategies cannot be adapted to code completion. To tackle these challenges, we propose IRCoCo, a code completion-specific DRL-based fine-tuning framework. This framework is designed to provide immediate rewards as feedback for detecting dynamic context changes arising from continuous edits during code completion. With the aid of immediate feedback, the fine-tuned LM can gain a more precise understanding of the current context, thereby enabling effective adjustment of the LM and optimizing code completion in a more refined manner. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning pretrained LMs with IRCoCo leads to significant improvements in the code completion task, outperforming both SFT-based and other DRL-based baselines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

DeepAnalyze: Agentic Large Language Models for Autonomous Data Science

Autonomous data science, from raw data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports, has been a long-standing challenge, and is now becoming feasible with the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). Recent workflow-based data agents have shown promising results on specific data tasks but remain fundamentally limited in achieving fully autonomous data science due to their reliance on predefined workflows. In this paper, we introduce DeepAnalyze-8B, the first agentic LLM designed for autonomous data science, capable of automatically completing the end-toend pipeline from data sources to analyst-grade deep research reports. To tackle high-complexity data science tasks, we propose a curriculum-based agentic training paradigm that emulates the learning trajectory of human data scientists, enabling LLMs to progressively acquire and integrate multiple capabilities in real-world environments. We also introduce a data-grounded trajectory synthesis framework that constructs high-quality training data. Through agentic training, DeepAnalyze learns to perform a broad spectrum of data tasks, ranging from data question answering and specialized analytical tasks to open-ended data research. Experiments demonstrate that, with only 8B parameters, DeepAnalyze outperforms previous workflow-based agents built on most advanced proprietary LLMs. The model, code, and training data of DeepAnalyze are open-sourced, paving the way toward autonomous data science.

RUC-DataLab RUC-DataLab
·
Oct 19 4

From Words to Code: Harnessing Data for Program Synthesis from Natural Language

Creating programs to correctly manipulate data is a difficult task, as the underlying programming languages and APIs can be challenging to learn for many users who are not skilled programmers. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential for generating code from natural language, but in the data manipulation domain, apart from the natural language (NL) description of the intended task, we also have the dataset on which the task is to be performed, or the "data context". Existing approaches have utilized data context in a limited way by simply adding relevant information from the input data into the prompts sent to the LLM. In this work, we utilize the available input data to execute the candidate programs generated by the LLMs and gather their outputs. We introduce semantic reranking, a technique to rerank the programs generated by LLMs based on three signals coming the program outputs: (a) semantic filtering and well-formedness based score tuning: do programs even generate well-formed outputs, (b) semantic interleaving: how do the outputs from different candidates compare to each other, and (c) output-based score tuning: how do the outputs compare to outputs predicted for the same task. We provide theoretical justification for semantic interleaving. We also introduce temperature mixing, where we combine samples generated by LLMs using both high and low temperatures. We extensively evaluate our approach in three domains, namely databases (SQL), data science (Pandas) and business intelligence (Excel's Power Query M) on a variety of new and existing benchmarks. We observe substantial gains across domains, with improvements of up to 45% in top-1 accuracy and 34% in top-3 accuracy.

  • 12 authors
·
May 2, 2023

Deep Learning-based Code Completion: On the Impact on Performance of Contextual Information

Code completion aims at speeding up code writing by recommending to developers the next tokens they are likely to type. Deep Learning (DL) models pushed the boundaries of code completion by redefining what these coding assistants can do: We moved from predicting few code tokens to automatically generating entire functions. One important factor impacting the performance of DL-based code completion techniques is the context provided as input. With "context" we refer to what the model knows about the code to complete. In a simple scenario, the DL model might be fed with a partially implemented function to complete. In this case, the context is represented by the incomplete function and, based on it, the model must generate a prediction. It is however possible to expand such a context to include additional information, like the whole source code file containing the function to complete, which could be useful to boost the prediction performance. In this work, we present an empirical study investigating how the performance of a DL-based code completion technique is affected by different contexts. We experiment with 8 types of contexts and their combinations. These contexts include: (i) coding contexts, featuring information extracted from the code base in which the code completion is invoked (e.g., code components structurally related to the one to "complete"); (ii) process context, with information aimed at depicting the current status of the project in which a code completion task is triggered (e.g., a textual representation of open issues relevant for the code to complete); and (iii) developer contexts, capturing information about the developer invoking the code completion (e.g., the APIs frequently used). Our results show that additional contextual information can benefit the performance of DL-based code completion, with relative improvements up to +22% in terms of correct predictions.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 9

Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery

Data-driven scientific discovery requires iterative cycles of literature search, hypothesis generation, and data analysis. Substantial progress has been made towards AI agents that can automate scientific research, but all such agents remain limited in the number of actions they can take before losing coherence, thus limiting the depth of their findings. Here we present Kosmos, an AI scientist that automates data-driven discovery. Given an open-ended objective and a dataset, Kosmos runs for up to 12 hours performing cycles of parallel data analysis, literature search, and hypothesis generation before synthesizing discoveries into scientific reports. Unlike prior systems, Kosmos uses a structured world model to share information between a data analysis agent and a literature search agent. The world model enables Kosmos to coherently pursue the specified objective over 200 agent rollouts, collectively executing an average of 42,000 lines of code and reading 1,500 papers per run. Kosmos cites all statements in its reports with code or primary literature, ensuring its reasoning is traceable. Independent scientists found 79.4% of statements in Kosmos reports to be accurate, and collaborators reported that a single 20-cycle Kosmos run performed the equivalent of 6 months of their own research time on average. Furthermore, collaborators reported that the number of valuable scientific findings generated scales linearly with Kosmos cycles (tested up to 20 cycles). We highlight seven discoveries made by Kosmos that span metabolomics, materials science, neuroscience, and statistical genetics. Three discoveries independently reproduce findings from preprinted or unpublished manuscripts that were not accessed by Kosmos at runtime, while four make novel contributions to the scientific literature.

  • 37 authors
·
Nov 4

Contextual API Completion for Unseen Repositories Using LLMs

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

  • 4 authors
·
May 7, 2024

Codev-Bench: How Do LLMs Understand Developer-Centric Code Completion?

Code completion, a key downstream task in code generation, is one of the most frequent and impactful methods for enhancing developer productivity in software development. As intelligent completion tools evolve, we need a robust evaluation benchmark that enables meaningful comparisons between products and guides future advancements. However, existing benchmarks focus more on coarse-grained tasks without industrial analysis resembling general code generation rather than the real-world scenarios developers encounter. Moreover, these benchmarks often rely on costly and time-consuming human annotation, and the standalone test cases fail to leverage minimal tests for maximum repository-level understanding and code coverage. To address these limitations, we first analyze business data from an industrial code completion tool and redefine the evaluation criteria to better align with the developer's intent and desired completion behavior throughout the coding process. Based on these insights, we introduce Codev-Agent, an agent-based system that automates repository crawling, constructs execution environments, extracts dynamic calling chains from existing unit tests, and generates new test samples to avoid data leakage, ensuring fair and effective comparisons. Using Codev-Agent, we present the Code-Development Benchmark (Codev-Bench), a fine-grained, real-world, repository-level, and developer-centric evaluation framework. Codev-Bench assesses whether a code completion tool can capture a developer's immediate intent and suggest appropriate code across diverse contexts, providing a more realistic benchmark for code completion in modern software development.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

CursorCore: Assist Programming through Aligning Anything

Large language models have been successfully applied to programming assistance tasks, such as code completion, code insertion, and instructional code editing. However, these applications remain insufficiently automated and struggle to effectively integrate various types of information during the programming process, including coding history, current code, and user instructions. In this work, we propose a new conversational framework that comprehensively integrates these information sources, collect data to train our models and evaluate their performance. Firstly, to thoroughly evaluate how well models align with different types of information and the quality of their outputs, we introduce a new benchmark, APEval (Assist Programming Eval), to comprehensively assess the performance of models in programming assistance tasks. Then, for data collection, we develop a data generation pipeline, Programming-Instruct, which synthesizes training data from diverse sources, such as GitHub and online judge platforms. This pipeline can automatically generate various types of messages throughout the programming process. Finally, using this pipeline, we generate 219K samples, fine-tune multiple models, and develop the CursorCore series. We show that CursorCore outperforms other models of comparable size. This framework unifies applications such as inline chat and automated editing, contributes to the advancement of coding assistants. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/TechxGenus/CursorCore.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024 2

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 24, 2024

SustainBench: Benchmarks for Monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

Progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been hindered by a lack of data on key environmental and socioeconomic indicators, which historically have come from ground surveys with sparse temporal and spatial coverage. Recent advances in machine learning have made it possible to utilize abundant, frequently-updated, and globally available data, such as from satellites or social media, to provide insights into progress toward SDGs. Despite promising early results, approaches to using such data for SDG measurement thus far have largely evaluated on different datasets or used inconsistent evaluation metrics, making it hard to understand whether performance is improving and where additional research would be most fruitful. Furthermore, processing satellite and ground survey data requires domain knowledge that many in the machine learning community lack. In this paper, we introduce SustainBench, a collection of 15 benchmark tasks across 7 SDGs, including tasks related to economic development, agriculture, health, education, water and sanitation, climate action, and life on land. Datasets for 11 of the 15 tasks are released publicly for the first time. Our goals for SustainBench are to (1) lower the barriers to entry for the machine learning community to contribute to measuring and achieving the SDGs; (2) provide standard benchmarks for evaluating machine learning models on tasks across a variety of SDGs; and (3) encourage the development of novel machine learning methods where improved model performance facilitates progress towards the SDGs.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 8, 2021

BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 18, 2024

Machine learning-driven Anomaly Detection and Forecasting for Euclid Space Telescope Operations

State-of-the-art space science missions increasingly rely on automation due to spacecraft complexity and the costs of human oversight. The high volume of data, including scientific and telemetry data, makes manual inspection challenging. Machine learning offers significant potential to meet these demands. The Euclid space telescope, in its survey phase since February 2024, exemplifies this shift. Euclid's success depends on accurate monitoring and interpretation of housekeeping telemetry and science-derived data. Thousands of telemetry parameters, monitored as time series, may or may not impact the quality of scientific data. These parameters have complex interdependencies, often due to physical relationships (e.g., proximity of temperature sensors). Optimising science operations requires careful anomaly detection and identification of hidden parameter states. Moreover, understanding the interactions between known anomalies and physical quantities is crucial yet complex, as related parameters may display anomalies with varied timing and intensity. We address these challenges by analysing temperature anomalies in Euclid's telemetry from February to August 2024, focusing on eleven temperature parameters and 35 covariates. We use a predictive XGBoost model to forecast temperatures based on historical values, detecting anomalies as deviations from predictions. A second XGBoost model predicts anomalies from covariates, capturing their relationships to temperature anomalies. We identify the top three anomalies per parameter and analyse their interactions with covariates using SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations), enabling rapid, automated analysis of complex parameter relationships. Our method demonstrates how machine learning can enhance telemetry monitoring, offering scalable solutions for other missions with similar data challenges.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

Job-SDF: A Multi-Granularity Dataset for Job Skill Demand Forecasting and Benchmarking

In a rapidly evolving job market, skill demand forecasting is crucial as it enables policymakers and businesses to anticipate and adapt to changes, ensuring that workforce skills align with market needs, thereby enhancing productivity and competitiveness. Additionally, by identifying emerging skill requirements, it directs individuals towards relevant training and education opportunities, promoting continuous self-learning and development. However, the absence of comprehensive datasets presents a significant challenge, impeding research and the advancement of this field. To bridge this gap, we present Job-SDF, a dataset designed to train and benchmark job-skill demand forecasting models. Based on 10.35 million public job advertisements collected from major online recruitment platforms in China between 2021 and 2023, this dataset encompasses monthly recruitment demand for 2,324 types of skills across 521 companies. Our dataset uniquely enables evaluating skill demand forecasting models at various granularities, including occupation, company, and regional levels. We benchmark a range of models on this dataset, evaluating their performance in standard scenarios, in predictions focused on lower value ranges, and in the presence of structural breaks, providing new insights for further research. Our code and dataset are publicly accessible via the https://github.com/Job-SDF/benchmark.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

Datarus-R1: An Adaptive Multi-Step Reasoning LLM for Automated Data Analysis

We present Datarus-R1-14B, a 14 B-parameter open-weights language model fine-tuned from Qwen 2.5-14B-Instruct to act as a virtual data analyst and graduate-level problem solver. Datarus is trained not on isolated question-answer pairs but on full analytical trajectories including reasoning steps, code execution, error traces, self-corrections, and final conclusions, all captured in a ReAct-style notebook format spanning finance, medicine, numerical analysis, and other quantitative domains. Our training pipeline combines (i) a trajectory-centric synthetic data generator that yielded 144 000 tagged notebook episodes, (ii) a dual-reward framework blending a lightweight tag-based structural signal with a Hierarchical Reward Model (HRM) that scores both single-step soundness and end-to-end coherence, and (iii) a memory-optimized implementation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) featuring KV-cache reuse, sequential generation, and reference-model sharding. A cosine curriculum smoothly shifts emphasis from structural fidelity to semantic depth, reducing the format collapse and verbosity that often plague RL-aligned LLMs. A central design choice in Datarus is it dual reasoning interface. In agentic mode the model produces ReAct-tagged steps that invoke Python tools to execute real code; in reflection mode it outputs compact Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces delimited by <think> and <answer> tags. On demanding postgraduate-level problems, Datarus exhibits an "AHA-moment" pattern: it sketches hypotheses, revises them once or twice, and converges avoiding the circular, token-inflating loops common to contemporary systems. Across standard public benchmarks Datarus surpasses similar size models and even reaches the level of larger reasoning models such as QwQ-32B achieving up to 30% higher accuracy on AIME 2024/2025 and LiveCodeBench while emitting 18-49% fewer tokens per solution.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 18

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5-m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high resolution (R~22,500), high S/N (>100), infrared (1.51-1.70 microns) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design---hardware, field placement, target selection, operations---and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12, all of the APOGEE data products are now publicly available.

  • 78 authors
·
Sep 17, 2015

Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development

Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 9, 2021

Data Cards: Purposeful and Transparent Dataset Documentation for Responsible AI

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

Database Systems Course: Service Learning Project

This paper describes a service learning project used in an upper-level and graduate-level database systems course. Students complete a small database project for a real client. The final product must match the client specification and needs, and include the database design and the final working database system with embedded user documentation. The solution must be implemented in a way to make it as easy to use as possible for the client. Students are expected to conduct professional meetings with their clients to understand the project, analyze the project's requirements, as well as design and implement the solution to the project. Students must have each milestone approved before starting the next phase of the project. The student learning objectives of a database system semester project are to: analyze a client's information system problem and determine the requirements for the solution; design a suitable database solution to the problem; use software design and development tools to design and develop a solution to the problem; communicate and interact with a client on a professional level; prepare effective documentation for both non-technical and technical software users; and interact ethically with all persons involved with a project. The broader impact objectives of a database system semester project are to: provide needed database solutions for organizations and businesses in the local area; provide a resume and portfolio-building opportunity for the students; provide a measure for assessing how well the program meets it mission; provide a mechanism for implementing service-based learning; provide a mechanism for outreach to local-area organizations and businesses; and provide a starting-point for undergraduate research projects.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 2, 2024

RLCoder: Reinforcement Learning for Repository-Level Code Completion

Repository-level code completion aims to generate code for unfinished code snippets within the context of a specified repository. Existing approaches mainly rely on retrieval-augmented generation strategies due to limitations in input sequence length. However, traditional lexical-based retrieval methods like BM25 struggle to capture code semantics, while model-based retrieval methods face challenges due to the lack of labeled data for training. Therefore, we propose RLCoder, a novel reinforcement learning framework, which can enable the retriever to learn to retrieve useful content for code completion without the need for labeled data. Specifically, we iteratively evaluate the usefulness of retrieved content based on the perplexity of the target code when provided with the retrieved content as additional context, and provide feedback to update the retriever parameters. This iterative process enables the retriever to learn from its successes and failures, gradually improving its ability to retrieve relevant and high-quality content. Considering that not all situations require information beyond code files and not all retrieved context is helpful for generation, we also introduce a stop signal mechanism, allowing the retriever to decide when to retrieve and which candidates to retain autonomously. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RLCoder consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CrossCodeEval and RepoEval, achieving 12.2% EM improvement over previous methods. Moreover, experiments show that our framework can generalize across different programming languages and further improve previous methods like RepoCoder. We provide the code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/RLCoder.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 28, 2024

Can OpenAI o1 outperform humans in higher-order cognitive thinking?

This study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview model in higher-order cognitive domains, including critical thinking, systematic thinking, computational thinking, data literacy, creative thinking, logical reasoning, and scientific reasoning. Using established benchmarks, we compared the o1-preview models's performance to human participants from diverse educational levels. o1-preview achieved a mean score of 24.33 on the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test (EWCTET), surpassing undergraduate (13.8) and postgraduate (18.39) participants (z = 1.60 and 0.90, respectively). In systematic thinking, it scored 46.1, SD = 4.12 on the Lake Urmia Vignette, significantly outperforming the human mean (20.08, SD = 8.13, z = 3.20). For data literacy, o1-preview scored 8.60, SD = 0.70 on Merk et al.'s "Use Data" dimension, compared to the human post-test mean of 4.17, SD = 2.02 (z = 2.19). On creative thinking tasks, the model achieved originality scores of 2.98, SD = 0.73, higher than the human mean of 1.74 (z = 0.71). In logical reasoning (LogiQA), it outperformed humans with average 90%, SD = 10% accuracy versus 86%, SD = 6.5% (z = 0.62). For scientific reasoning, it achieved near-perfect performance (mean = 0.99, SD = 0.12) on the TOSLS,, exceeding the highest human scores of 0.85, SD = 0.13 (z = 1.78). While o1-preview excelled in structured tasks, it showed limitations in problem-solving and adaptive reasoning. These results demonstrate the potential of AI to complement education in structured assessments but highlight the need for ethical oversight and refinement for broader applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 7, 2024

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. AutoSDT leverages the coding capabilities and parametric knowledge of LLMs to search for diverse sources, select ecologically valid tasks, and synthesize accurate task instructions and code solutions. Using our pipeline, we construct AutoSDT-5K, a dataset of 5,404 coding tasks for data-driven discovery that covers four scientific disciplines and 756 unique Python packages. To the best of our knowledge, AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. Expert feedback on a subset of 256 tasks shows the effectiveness of AutoSDT: 93% of the collected tasks are ecologically valid, and 92.2% of the synthesized programs are functionally correct. Trained on AutoSDT-5K, the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct LLM series, dubbed AutoSDT-Coder, show substantial improvement on two challenging data-driven discovery benchmarks, ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench. Most notably, AutoSDT-Coder-32B reaches the same level of performance as GPT-4o on ScienceAgentBench with a success rate of 7.8%, doubling the performance of its base model. On DiscoveryBench, it lifts the hypothesis matching score to 8.1, bringing a 17.4% relative improvement and closing the gap between open-weight models and GPT-4o.

  • 19 authors
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Jun 9

ResearchGPT: Benchmarking and Training LLMs for End-to-End Computer Science Research Workflows

As large language models (LLMs) advance, the ultimate vision for their role in science is emerging: we could build an AI collaborator to effectively assist human beings throughout the entire scientific research process. We refer to this envisioned system as ResearchGPT. Given that scientific research progresses through multiple interdependent phases, achieving this vision requires rigorous benchmarks that evaluate the end-to-end workflow rather than isolated sub-tasks. To this end, we contribute CS-54k, a high-quality corpus of scientific Q&A pairs in computer science, built from 14k CC-licensed papers. It is constructed through a scalable, paper-grounded pipeline that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-stage quality control to ensure factual grounding. From this unified corpus, we derive two complementary subsets: CS-4k, a carefully curated benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to assist scientific research, and CS-50k, a large-scale training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CS-4k stratifies state-of-the-art LLMs into distinct capability tiers. Open models trained on CS-50k with supervised training and reinforcement learning demonstrate substantial improvements. Even 7B-scale models, when properly trained, outperform many larger proprietary systems, such as GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This indicates that making AI models better research assistants relies more on domain-aligned training with high-quality data than on pretraining scale or general benchmark performance. We release CS-4k and CS-50k in the hope of fostering AI systems as reliable collaborators in CS research.

  • 15 authors
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Oct 23

LLM4DS: Evaluating Large Language Models for Data Science Code Generation

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation in data science offers substantial potential for enhancing tasks such as data manipulation, statistical analysis, and visualization. However, the effectiveness of these models in the data science domain remains underexplored. This paper presents a controlled experiment that empirically assesses the performance of four leading LLM-based AI assistants-Microsoft Copilot (GPT-4 Turbo), ChatGPT (o1-preview), Claude (3.5 Sonnet), and Perplexity Labs (Llama-3.1-70b-instruct)-on a diverse set of data science coding challenges sourced from the Stratacratch platform. Using the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, we evaluated each model's effectiveness across task types (Analytical, Algorithm, Visualization) and varying difficulty levels. Our findings reveal that all models exceeded a 50% baseline success rate, confirming their capability beyond random chance. Notably, only ChatGPT and Claude achieved success rates significantly above a 60% baseline, though none of the models reached a 70% threshold, indicating limitations in higher standards. ChatGPT demonstrated consistent performance across varying difficulty levels, while Claude's success rate fluctuated with task complexity. Hypothesis testing indicates that task type does not significantly impact success rate overall. For analytical tasks, efficiency analysis shows no significant differences in execution times, though ChatGPT tended to be slower and less predictable despite high success rates. This study provides a structured, empirical evaluation of LLMs in data science, delivering insights that support informed model selection tailored to specific task demands. Our findings establish a framework for future AI assessments, emphasizing the value of rigorous evaluation beyond basic accuracy measures.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 16, 2024

HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science

We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials science textual data available in the open literature, and HoneyBee is the first billion-parameter language model specialized to materials science. In MatSci-Instruct we improve the trustworthiness of generated data by prompting multiple commercially available large language models for generation with an Instructor module (e.g. Chat-GPT) and verification from an independent Verifier module (e.g. Claude). Using MatSci-Instruct, we construct a dataset of multiple tasks and measure the quality of our dataset along multiple dimensions, including accuracy against known facts, relevance to materials science, as well as completeness and reasonableness of the data. Moreover, we iteratively generate more targeted instructions and instruction-data in a finetuning-evaluation-feedback loop leading to progressively better performance for our finetuned HoneyBee models. Our evaluation on the MatSci-NLP benchmark shows HoneyBee's outperformance of existing language models on materials science tasks and iterative improvement in successive stages of instruction-data refinement. We study the quality of HoneyBee's language modeling through automatic evaluation and analyze case studies to further understand the model's capabilities and limitations. Our code and relevant datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-HoneyBee.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023

ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery

The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent to fully automate scientific discovery, it must be able to complete all essential tasks in the workflow. Thus, we call for rigorous assessment of agents on individual tasks in a scientific workflow before making bold claims on end-to-end automation. To this end, we present ScienceAgentBench, a new benchmark for evaluating language agents for data-driven scientific discovery. To ensure the scientific authenticity and real-world relevance of our benchmark, we extract 102 tasks from 44 peer-reviewed publications in four disciplines and engage nine subject matter experts to validate them. We unify the target output for every task to a self-contained Python program file and employ an array of evaluation metrics to examine the generated programs, execution results, and costs. Each task goes through multiple rounds of manual validation by annotators and subject matter experts to ensure its annotation quality and scientific plausibility. We also propose two effective strategies to mitigate data contamination concerns. Using our benchmark, we evaluate five open-weight and proprietary LLMs, each with three frameworks: direct prompting, OpenHands, and self-debug. Given three attempts for each task, the best-performing agent can only solve 32.4% of the tasks independently and 34.3% with expert-provided knowledge. These results underscore the limited capacities of current language agents in generating code for data-driven discovery, let alone end-to-end automation for scientific research.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 2

O1 Replication Journey: A Strategic Progress Report -- Part 1

This paper introduces a pioneering approach to artificial intelligence research, embodied in our O1 Replication Journey. In response to the announcement of OpenAI's groundbreaking O1 model, we embark on a transparent, real-time exploration to replicate its capabilities while reimagining the process of conducting and communicating AI research. Our methodology addresses critical challenges in modern AI research, including the insularity of prolonged team-based projects, delayed information sharing, and the lack of recognition for diverse contributions. By providing comprehensive, real-time documentation of our replication efforts, including both successes and failures, we aim to foster open science, accelerate collective advancement, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven scientific discovery. Our research progress report diverges significantly from traditional research papers, offering continuous updates, full process transparency, and active community engagement throughout the research journey. Technologically, we proposed the journey learning paradigm, which encourages models to learn not just shortcuts, but the complete exploration process, including trial and error, reflection, and backtracking. With only 327 training samples and without any additional tricks, journey learning outperformed conventional supervised learning by over 8\% on the MATH dataset, demonstrating its extremely powerful potential. We believe this to be the most crucial component of O1 technology that we have successfully decoded. We share valuable resources including technical hypotheses and insights, cognitive exploration maps, custom-developed tools, etc at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/O1-Journey.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 21, 2022

AutoClimDS: Climate Data Science Agentic AI -- A Knowledge Graph is All You Need

Climate data science faces persistent barriers stemming from the fragmented nature of data sources, heterogeneous formats, and the steep technical expertise required to identify, acquire, and process datasets. These challenges limit participation, slow discovery, and reduce the reproducibility of scientific workflows. In this paper, we present a proof of concept for addressing these barriers through the integration of a curated knowledge graph (KG) with AI agents designed for cloud-native scientific workflows. The KG provides a unifying layer that organizes datasets, tools, and workflows, while AI agents -- powered by generative AI services -- enable natural language interaction, automated data access, and streamlined analysis. Together, these components drastically lower the technical threshold for engaging in climate data science, enabling non-specialist users to identify and analyze relevant datasets. By leveraging existing cloud-ready API data portals, we demonstrate that "a knowledge graph is all you need" to unlock scalable and agentic workflows for scientific inquiry. The open-source design of our system further supports community contributions, ensuring that the KG and associated tools can evolve as a shared commons. Our results illustrate a pathway toward democratizing access to climate data and establishing a reproducible, extensible framework for human--AI collaboration in scientific research.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 25

R2C2-Coder: Enhancing and Benchmarking Real-world Repository-level Code Completion Abilities of Code Large Language Models

Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years. Recently, repository-level code completion has drawn more attention in modern software development, and several baseline methods and benchmarks have been proposed. However, existing repository-level code completion methods often fall short of fully using the extensive context of a project repository, such as the intricacies of relevant files and class hierarchies. Besides, the existing benchmarks usually focus on limited code completion scenarios, which cannot reflect the repository-level code completion abilities well of existing methods. To address these limitations, we propose the R2C2-Coder to enhance and benchmark the real-world repository-level code completion abilities of code Large Language Models, where the R2C2-Coder includes a code prompt construction method R2C2-Enhance and a well-designed benchmark R2C2-Bench. Specifically, first, in R2C2-Enhance, we first construct the candidate retrieval pool and then assemble the completion prompt by retrieving from the retrieval pool for each completion cursor position. Second, based on R2C2 -Enhance, we can construct a more challenging and diverse R2C2-Bench with training, validation and test splits, where a context perturbation strategy is proposed to simulate the real-world repository-level code completion well. Extensive results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our R2C2-Coder.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

Program Synthesis with Large Language Models

This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The MathQA-Python dataset, a Python version of the MathQA benchmark, contains 23914 problems that evaluate the ability of the models to synthesize code from more complex text. On both datasets, we find that synthesis performance scales log-linearly with model size. Our largest models, even without finetuning on a code dataset, can synthesize solutions to 59.6 percent of the problems from MBPP using few-shot learning with a well-designed prompt. Fine-tuning on a held-out portion of the dataset improves performance by about 10 percentage points across most model sizes. On the MathQA-Python dataset, the largest fine-tuned model achieves 83.8 percent accuracy. Going further, we study the model's ability to engage in dialog about code, incorporating human feedback to improve its solutions. We find that natural language feedback from a human halves the error rate compared to the model's initial prediction. Additionally, we conduct an error analysis to shed light on where these models fall short and what types of programs are most difficult to generate. Finally, we explore the semantic grounding of these models by fine-tuning them to predict the results of program execution. We find that even our best models are generally unable to predict the output of a program given a specific input.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 15, 2021

MegaScience: Pushing the Frontiers of Post-Training Datasets for Science Reasoning

Scientific reasoning is critical for developing AI scientists and supporting human researchers in advancing the frontiers of natural science discovery. However, the open-source community has primarily focused on mathematics and coding while neglecting the scientific domain, largely due to the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality, verifiable scientific reasoning datasets. To bridge this gap, we first present TextbookReasoning, an open dataset featuring truthful reference answers extracted from 12k university-level scientific textbooks, comprising 650k reasoning questions spanning 7 scientific disciplines. We further introduce MegaScience, a large-scale mixture of high-quality open-source datasets totaling 1.25 million instances, developed through systematic ablation studies that evaluate various data selection methodologies to identify the optimal subset for each publicly available scientific dataset. Meanwhile, we build a comprehensive evaluation system covering diverse subjects and question types across 15 benchmarks, incorporating comprehensive answer extraction strategies to ensure accurate evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that our datasets achieve superior performance and training efficiency with more concise response lengths compared to existing open-source scientific datasets. Furthermore, we train Llama3.1, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3 series base models on MegaScience, which significantly outperform the corresponding official instruct models in average performance. In addition, MegaScience exhibits greater effectiveness for larger and stronger models, suggesting a scaling benefit for scientific tuning. We release our data curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and seven trained models to the community to advance scientific reasoning research.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 22 2

Why Personalizing Deep Learning-Based Code Completion Tools Matters

Deep learning (DL)-based code completion tools have transformed software development by enabling advanced code generation. These tools leverage models trained on vast amounts of code from numerous repositories, capturing general coding patterns. However, the impact of fine-tuning these models for specific organizations or developers to boost their performance on such subjects remains unexplored. In this work, we fill this gap by presenting solid empirical evidence answering this question. More specifically, we consider 136 developers from two organizations (Apache and Spring), two model architectures (T5 and Code Llama), and three model sizes (60M, 750M, and 7B trainable parameters). T5 models (60M, 750M) were pre-trained and fine-tuned on over 2,000 open-source projects, excluding the subject organizations' data, and compared against versions fine-tuned on organization- and developer-specific datasets. For the Code Llama model (7B), we compared the performance of the already pre-trained model publicly available online with the same model fine-tuned via parameter-efficient fine-tuning on organization- and developer-specific datasets. Our results show that there is a boost in prediction capabilities provided by both an organization-specific and a developer-specific additional fine-tuning, with the former being particularly performant. Such a finding generalizes across (i) the two subject organizations (i.e., Apache and Spring) and (ii) models of completely different magnitude (from 60M to 7B trainable parameters). Finally, we show that DL models fine-tuned on an organization-specific dataset achieve the same completion performance of pre-trained code models used out of the box and being sim10times larger, with consequent savings in terms of deployment and inference cost (e.g., smaller GPUs needed).

  • 3 authors
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Mar 18 2

Large Language Models Orchestrating Structured Reasoning Achieve Kaggle Grandmaster Level

We introduce Agent K v1.0, an end-to-end autonomous data science agent designed to automate, optimise, and generalise across diverse data science tasks. Fully automated, Agent K v1.0 manages the entire data science life cycle by learning from experience. It leverages a highly flexible structured reasoning framework to enable it to dynamically process memory in a nested structure, effectively learning from accumulated experience stored to handle complex reasoning tasks. It optimises long- and short-term memory by selectively storing and retrieving key information, guiding future decisions based on environmental rewards. This iterative approach allows it to refine decisions without fine-tuning or backpropagation, achieving continuous improvement through experiential learning. We evaluate our agent's apabilities using Kaggle competitions as a case study. Following a fully automated protocol, Agent K v1.0 systematically addresses complex and multimodal data science tasks, employing Bayesian optimisation for hyperparameter tuning and feature engineering. Our new evaluation framework rigorously assesses Agent K v1.0's end-to-end capabilities to generate and send submissions starting from a Kaggle competition URL. Results demonstrate that Agent K v1.0 achieves a 92.5\% success rate across tasks, spanning tabular, computer vision, NLP, and multimodal domains. When benchmarking against 5,856 human Kaggle competitors by calculating Elo-MMR scores for each, Agent K v1.0 ranks in the top 38\%, demonstrating an overall skill level comparable to Expert-level users. Notably, its Elo-MMR score falls between the first and third quartiles of scores achieved by human Grandmasters. Furthermore, our results indicate that Agent K v1.0 has reached a performance level equivalent to Kaggle Grandmaster, with a record of 6 gold, 3 silver, and 7 bronze medals, as defined by Kaggle's progression system.

  • 18 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 6

SciKnowEval: Evaluating Multi-level Scientific Knowledge of Large Language Models

The burgeoning utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in scientific research necessitates advanced benchmarks capable of evaluating their understanding and application of scientific knowledge comprehensively. To address this need, we introduce the SciKnowEval benchmark, a novel framework that systematically evaluates LLMs across five progressive levels of scientific knowledge: studying extensively, inquiring earnestly, thinking profoundly, discerning clearly, and practicing assiduously. These levels aim to assess the breadth and depth of scientific knowledge in LLMs, including knowledge coverage, inquiry and exploration capabilities, reflection and reasoning abilities, ethic and safety considerations, as well as practice proficiency. Specifically, we take biology and chemistry as the two instances of SciKnowEval and construct a dataset encompassing 50K multi-level scientific problems and solutions. By leveraging this dataset, we benchmark 20 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies. The results reveal that despite achieving state-of-the-art performance, the proprietary LLMs still have considerable room for improvement, particularly in addressing scientific computations and applications. We anticipate that SciKnowEval will establish a comprehensive standard for benchmarking LLMs in science research and discovery, and promote the development of LLMs that integrate scientific knowledge with strong safety awareness. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/hicai-zju/sciknoweval .

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions

While the history of machine learning so far largely encompasses a series of problems posed by researchers and algorithms that learn their solutions, an important question is whether the problems themselves can be generated by the algorithm at the same time as they are being solved. Such a process would in effect build its own diverse and expanding curricula, and the solutions to problems at various stages would become stepping stones towards solving even more challenging problems later in the process. The Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET) algorithm introduced in this paper does just that: it pairs the generation of environmental challenges and the optimization of agents to solve those challenges. It simultaneously explores many different paths through the space of possible problems and solutions and, critically, allows these stepping-stone solutions to transfer between problems if better, catalyzing innovation. The term open-ended signifies the intriguing potential for algorithms like POET to continue to create novel and increasingly complex capabilities without bound. Our results show that POET produces a diverse range of sophisticated behaviors that solve a wide range of environmental challenges, many of which cannot be solved by direct optimization alone, or even through a direct-path curriculum-building control algorithm introduced to highlight the critical role of open-endedness in solving ambitious challenges. The ability to transfer solutions from one environment to another proves essential to unlocking the full potential of the system as a whole, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of fortuitous stepping stones. We hope that POET will inspire a new push towards open-ended discovery across many domains, where algorithms like POET can blaze a trail through their interesting possible manifestations and solutions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 7, 2019

Leveraging Training Data in Few-Shot Prompting for Numerical Reasoning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with large language models has proven effective in numerous natural language processing tasks, but designing prompts that generalize well to diverse problem types can be challenging, especially in the context of math word problem (MWP) solving. Additionally, it is common to have a large amount of training data that have a better diversity coverage but CoT annotations are not available, which limits the use of supervised learning techniques. To address these issues, we investigate two approaches to leverage the training data in a few-shot prompting scenario: dynamic program prompting and program distillation. Our approach is largely inspired by Gao et al., (2022), where they proposed to replace the CoT with the programs as the intermediate reasoning step. Such a prompting strategy allows us to accurately verify the answer correctness through program execution in MWP solving. Our dynamic program prompting involves annotating the training data by sampling correct programs from a large language model, while program distillation involves adapting a smaller model to the program-annotated training data. Our experiments on three standard MWP datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches, yielding significant improvements over previous baselines for prompting and fine-tuning. Our results suggest that leveraging a large amount of training data can improve the generalization ability of prompts and boost the performance of fine-tuned small models in MWP solving.

  • 2 authors
·
May 29, 2023

CycleResearcher: Improving Automated Research via Automated Review

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper revision. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves a 26.89\% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) over individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating that LLMs can surpass expert-level performance in research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, surpassing the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts and approaching the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and advancing AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at http://github/minjun-zhu/Researcher.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

DAComp: Benchmarking Data Agents across the Full Data Intelligence Lifecycle

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 30, 2018

LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agent

We introduce ``LAMBDA," a novel open-source, code-free multi-agent data analysis system that that harnesses the power of large models. LAMBDA is designed to address data analysis challenges in complex data-driven applications through the use of innovatively designed data agents that operate iteratively and generatively using natural language. At the core of LAMBDA are two key agent roles: the programmer and the inspector, which are engineered to work together seamlessly. Specifically, the programmer generates code based on the user's instructions and domain-specific knowledge, enhanced by advanced models. Meanwhile, the inspector debugs the code when necessary. To ensure robustness and handle adverse scenarios, LAMBDA features a user interface that allows direct user intervention in the operational loop. Additionally, LAMBDA can flexibly integrate external models and algorithms through our knowledge integration mechanism, catering to the needs of customized data analysis. LAMBDA has demonstrated strong performance on various machine learning datasets. It has the potential to enhance data science practice and analysis paradigm by seamlessly integrating human and artificial intelligence, making it more accessible, effective, and efficient for individuals from diverse backgrounds. The strong performance of LAMBDA in solving data science problems is demonstrated in several case studies, which are presented at https://www.polyu.edu.hk/ama/cmfai/lambda.html.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 2

A Reliable Knowledge Processing Framework for Combustion Science using Foundation Models

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 31, 2023

Solar Event Tracking with Deep Regression Networks: A Proof of Concept Evaluation

With the advent of deep learning for computer vision tasks, the need for accurately labeled data in large volumes is vital for any application. The increasingly available large amounts of solar image data generated by the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) mission make this domain particularly interesting for the development and testing of deep learning systems. The currently available labeled solar data is generated by the SDO mission's Feature Finding Team's (FFT) specialized detection modules. The major drawback of these modules is that detection and labeling is performed with a cadence of every 4 to 12 hours, depending on the module. Since SDO image data products are created every 10 seconds, there is a considerable gap between labeled observations and the continuous data stream. In order to address this shortcoming, we trained a deep regression network to track the movement of two solar phenomena: Active Region and Coronal Hole events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of solar event tracking using a deep learning approach. Since it is impossible to fully evaluate the performance of the suggested event tracks with the original data (only partial ground truth is available), we demonstrate with several metrics the effectiveness of our approach. With the purpose of generating continuously labeled solar image data, we present this feasibility analysis showing the great promise of deep regression networks for this task.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 19, 2019