← Search

Marc-Alexandre Côté

15 accepted papers

2026

Gistify: Codebase-Level Understanding via Runtime Execution

ICLR 2026poster

As coding agents are increasingly deployed in large codebases, the need to automatically design challenging, codebase-level evaluation is central. We propose Gistify, a task where a coding LLM must create a single, minimal, self-contained file that can reproduce a specific functionality of a codebas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?

ACL 2024short

Virtual environments play a key role in benchmarking advances in complex planning and decision-making tasks but are expensive and complicated to build by hand. Can current language models themselves serve as world simulators, correctly predicting how actions change different world states, thus bypas…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

DiscoveryWorld: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains, but evaluating an agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DiscoveryWorld,…

2024

Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast amounts of internet data, have developed a broad understanding of the world, enhancing the decision-making capabilities of embodied agents. This success is largely due to the comprehensive and in-depth domain knowledge within their training datasets. How…

2024

Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference

ICML 2024poster

We present an algorithm for skill discovery from expert demonstrations. The algorithm first utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to propose an initial segmentation of the trajectories. Following that, a hierarchical variational inference framework incorporates the LLM-generated segmentation informa…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following

ACL 2024long

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framewor…

2024

Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour --- actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to…

2023

ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games

EMNLP 2023long main

In this work we investigate the capacity of language models to generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks. We operationalize this as a task of generating text games, expressed as hundreds of lines of Python code. To facilitate this…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Joint Prompt Optimization of Stacked LLMs using Variational Inference

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large language models (LLMs) can be seen as atomic units of computation mapping sequences to a distribution over sequences. Thus, they can be seen as stochastic language layers in a language network, where the learnable parameters are the natural language prompts at each layer. By stacking two such…

2022

Asking for Knowledge (AFK): Training RL Agents to Query External Knowledge Using Language

ICML 2022spotlight

To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few present-day environments support querying for knowledge. In order…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2022

ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?

EMNLP 2022main

We present ScienceWorld, a benchmark to test agents’ scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that cu…

2020

Graph Policy Network for Transferable Active Learning on Graphs

NeurIPS 2020poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been attracting increasing popularity due to their simplicity and effectiveness in a variety of fields. However, a large number of labeled data is generally required to train these networks, which could be very expensive to obtain in some domains. In this paper, we…

2020

Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games

NeurIPS 2020poster

Playing text-based games requires skills in processing natural language and sequential decision making. Achieving human-level performance on text-based games remains an open challenge, and prior research has largely relied on hand-crafted structured representations and heuristics. In this work, we i…

2019

Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari

NeurIPS 2019poster

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations in an unsupervised manner without supervision from rewards is an open problem. We in…

2017

Z-Forcing: Training Stochastic Recurrent Networks

NeurIPS 2017poster

Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in natural sequential data such as speech. We unify successful id…