The advent of Foundation Models (FMs) and AI-powered copilots has transformed the landscape of software development, offering unprecedented code completion capabilities and enhancing developer productivity. However, the current task-driven nature of these copilots falls short in addressing the broader goals and complexities inherent in software engineering (SE). In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift towards goal-driven AI-powered pair programmers that collaborate with human developers in a more holistic and context-aware manner. We envision AI pair programmers that are goal-driven, human partners, SE-aware, and self-learning. These AI partners engage in iterative, conversation-driven development processes, aligning closely with human goals and facilitating informed decision-making. We discuss the desired attributes of such AI pair programmers and outline key challenges that must be addressed to realize this vision. Ultimately, our work represents a shift from AI-augmented SE to AI-transformed SE by replacing code completion with a collaborative partnership between humans and AI that enhances both productivity and software quality.

Code understanding and generation have fast become some of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs (i.e., LMs for code generation) such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR) - shared across programming languages - to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging in size from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across a wide variety of code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.

Several previous studies have considered language- and domain-specific large language models (LLMs) as separate topics. This study explores the combination of a non-English language and a high-demand industry domain, focusing on a Japanese business-specific LLM. This type of a model requires expertise in the business domain, strong language skills, and regular updates of its knowledge. We trained a 13-billion-parameter LLM from scratch using a new dataset of business texts and patents, and continually pretrained it with the latest business documents. Further we propose a new benchmark for Japanese business domain question answering (QA) and evaluate our models on it. The results show that our pretrained model improves QA accuracy without losing general knowledge, and that continual pretraining enhances adaptation to new information. Our pretrained model and business domain benchmark are publicly available.

Event log records all events that occur during the execution of business processes, so detecting and correcting anomalies in event log can provide reliable guarantee for subsequent process analysis. The previous works mainly include next event prediction based methods and autoencoder-based methods. These methods cannot accurately and efficiently detect anomalies and correct anomalies at the same time, and they all rely on the set threshold to detect anomalies. To solve these problems, we propose a business process anomaly correction method based on Transformer autoencoder. By using self-attention mechanism and autoencoder structure, it can efficiently process event sequences of arbitrary length, and can directly output corrected business process instances, so that it can adapt to various scenarios. At the same time, the anomaly detection is transformed into a classification problem by means of selfsupervised learning, so that there is no need to set a specific threshold in anomaly detection. The experimental results on several real-life event logs show that the proposed method is superior to the previous methods in terms of anomaly detection accuracy and anomaly correction results while ensuring high running efficiency.

This paper studies the problem of action model learning with full observability. Following the learning by search paradigm by Mitchell, we develop a theory for action model learning based on version spaces that interprets the task as search for hypothesis that are consistent with the learning examples. Our theoretical findings are instantiated in an online algorithm that maintains a compact representation of all solutions of the problem. Among these range of solutions, we bring attention to actions models approximating the actual transition system from below (sound models) and from above (complete models). We show how to manipulate the output of our learning algorithm to build deterministic and non-deterministic formulations of the sound and complete models and prove that, given enough examples, both formulations converge into the very same true model. Our experiments reveal their usefulness over a range of planning domains.

In a hyper-relational knowledge graph (HKG), each fact is composed of a main triple associated with attribute-value qualifiers, which express additional factual knowledge. The hyper-relational knowledge graph completion (HKGC) task aims at inferring plausible missing links in a HKG. Most existing approaches to HKGC focus on enhancing the communication between qualifier pairs and main triples, while overlooking two important properties that emerge from the monotonicity of the hyper-relational graphs representation regime. Stage Reasoning allows for a two-step reasoning process, facilitating the integration of coarse-grained inference results derived solely from main triples and fine-grained inference results obtained from hyper-relational facts with qualifiers. In the initial stage, coarse-grained results provide an upper bound for correct predictions, which are subsequently refined in the fine-grained step. More generally, Qualifier Monotonicity implies that by attaching more qualifier pairs to a main triple, we may only narrow down the answer set, but never enlarge it. This paper proposes the HyperMono model for hyper-relational knowledge graph completion, which realizes stage reasoning and qualifier monotonicity. To implement qualifier monotonicity HyperMono resorts to cone embeddings. Experiments on three real-world datasets with three different scenario conditions demonstrate the strong performance of HyperMono when compared to the SoTA.

Climate and weather prediction traditionally relies on complex numerical simulations of atmospheric physics. Deep learning approaches, such as transformers, have recently challenged the simulation paradigm with complex network forecasts. However, they often act as data-driven black-box models that neglect the underlying physics and lack uncertainty quantification. We address these limitations with ClimODE, a spatiotemporal continuous-time process that implements a key principle of advection from statistical mechanics, namely, weather changes due to a spatial movement of quantities over time. ClimODE models precise weather evolution with value-conserving dynamics, learning global weather transport as a neural flow, which also enables estimating the uncertainty in predictions. Our approach outperforms existing data-driven methods in global and regional forecasting with an order of magnitude smaller parameterization, establishing a new state of the art.

One of the objectives of continual learning is to prevent catastrophic forgetting in learning multiple tasks sequentially, and the existing solutions have been driven by the conceptualization of the plasticity-stability dilemma. However, the convergence of continual learning for each sequential task is less studied so far. In this paper, we provide a convergence analysis of memory-based continual learning with stochastic gradient descent and empirical evidence that training current tasks causes the cumulative degradation of previous tasks. We propose an adaptive method for nonconvex continual learning (NCCL), which adjusts step sizes of both previous and current tasks with the gradients. The proposed method can achieve the same convergence rate as the SGD method when the catastrophic forgetting term which we define in the paper is suppressed at each iteration. Further, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of continual learning over existing methods for several image classification tasks.

Washington, DC – The response from US President Joe Biden's administration to Iran's historic missile and drone attack on Israel has been two-fold: Washington has re-upped its pledge to always stand by its "ironclad" ally Israel, while also appealing to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu not to take further action that could drag the region into wider war. The days ahead will show if those two options are compatible, or if the two governments' priorities are on collision course, analysts told Al Jazeera. In the short term, the Iranian attack is a coup for both Israel and its backers in the US: From their perspective, it offers renewed justification for military support to Israel while weakening the world's focus on alleged abuses committed in Gaza in seven months of war, according to Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Washington-based Quincy Institute. But defiance from Netanyahu to US calls for restraint could find the Biden administration further hamstrung by its political and ideological commitments to Israel, which could eventually drag Washington into a wider war, he added. "The Israelis have been told by Biden to take this as a win and stop here," Parsi told Al Jazeera.

Video game conventions are typically boisterous affairs, as thousands of visitors queue under a constellation of screens for the chance to play one of the hundreds of as-yet unreleased titles on display. Now in its 10th year, Somerset House's Now Play This is to mainstream exhibitions what folk festivals are to raves. None of the experimental games presented here are destined to be advertised on the sides of buses, not least because many are one-offs that use bespoke controllers – a hatching of thick ropes and copper bands, or an old suitcase lined with speakers – connected to laptops via an umbilical tangle of wires. Few of these games adhere to the conventional rules or fashions seen in mainstream video game design, either. They might have no "win state", or provide an "open play" tool set with which visitors can create their own rules.