Links' Seminars and Public Events | ![]() ![]() |
2024 | |
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Fri 7th Jun 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Sam Van Gool dualité de Stone |
Thu 30th May to Fri 31st May all day | Pysemigroup Hackaton |
Fri 24th May 11:00 am 11:30 am | Séminaire Sophie Tison Speaker: Sophie Tison Title: Containment of Regular Path Queries Under Constraints |
Thu 16th May 2:00 pm 4:00 pm | Seminar Arkaprava Title: Efficient Optimization of Network Metrics in Large Uncertain Graphs Abstract: Graphs constitute an omnipresent data structure that can model objects and their relationships in a wide variety of real-world scenarios. The optimization of network metrics finds use in a plethora of real-world applications. Most of the exact techniques for such tasks turn out to be prohibitively time-consuming and memory-intensive for the huge graphs that are usually encountered. Thus, there is a need for efficient approximation algorithms. This talk focuses on the efficient optimization of network metrics in large uncertain graphs, and specifically the following three research problems. The first problem aims to find, between a given pair of nodes in an uncertain graph, the path having the highest probability of being a shortest path. The second problem aims to find, in an uncertain graph, the subgraph having the highest probability of being densest. The third problem is a novel variant of the well-known opinion maximization problem where, given a social network of users with real-valued opinions (about different candidates), the goal is to choose the top-k seed users maximizing a specific voting-based score at a given finite time horizon. Best Regards, Arkaprava "Lieu : Lille, Salle : B11" |
Fri 19th Apr 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar Pierre Lermusiaux Speaker: Pierre Lermusiaux (plermusi.github.io/) Title: Detection of Uncaught Exceptions in Functional Programs by Abstract Interpretation Abstract: Exception handling is a key feature in modern programming languages. Exceptions can be used to deal with errors, or as a means to control the flow of execution of a program. Since they might unexpectedly terminate a program, unhandled exceptions are a serious safety concern. We propose a static analysis to detect uncaught exceptions in functional programs, that is defined as an abstract interpreter. It computes a description of the values potentially returned by a program using a novel abstract domain, that can express inductively defined sets of values. Simultaneously, the analysis infers the possibly raised exceptions, by computing in the abstract exception monad. This abstract interpreter has been implemented as an effective static analyser for a large subset of OCaml programs, that supports mutable data types, the OCaml module system, and dynamically extensible data types such as the exception type. The analyser has been evaluated on several hundreds of OCaml programs. |
Fri 5th Apr 10:30 am 11:30 am | Séminaire Guillaume Lagarde Titre: Scaling Neural Program Synthesis with Distribution-based Search Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss the problem of automatically constructing computer programs from input-output examples, especially when the target language is domain-specific and defined using a context-free grammar. I will introduce a theoretical framework called distribution-based search, discuss its challenges, and present several search strategies based on learning the weights of a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG) and then using this PCFG to enumerate the most promising candidate programs efficiently. The presentation will be based on the following paper published at AAAI'2022: arxiv.org/abs/2110.12485 Joint work with Nathanaël Fijalkow, Théo Matricon, Kevin Ellis, Pierre Ohlmann, Akarsh Potta |
Fri 2nd Feb 10:30 am 11:30 am | Mikaël Monet: Probabiliste Shapley value |
Fri 26th Jan 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire: Klara Nosan Sujet: TBA |
2023 | |
Thu 14th Dec 2:00 pm 5:00 pm | Claire Soyez-Martin PhD defense Amphi IRCICA |
Fri 1st Dec 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Oliver Titre: Direct Access for Conjunctive Queries with Negation Abstract: Direct Access is the operation of returning, given an index j, the jth answer of a conjunctive query on a given database for a given order. While this problem is #P-hard in general (wrt combined complexity), many conjunctive queries are structured enough so that for some lexicographical ordering of their answers, one can have a direct access to the answer set of a query Q that takes polylogarithmic time in the size of the database after a polynomial time precomputation. Previous work has precisely characterised the tractable classes and given fined-grained lower bounds on the time needed for precomputation depending on the structure of the query. We give a generalisation of these tractability results to the case of signed conjunctive queries, that is, conjunctive queries that may contain negative atoms. Our technique is based on solving the direct access task for a class of circuits that can represent relational data. Our result then follows from the fact that the tractable (signed) conjunctive queries can be transformed into polynomial size circuits. We recover the known tractable classes from the literature in the case of positive conjunctive queries using this technique and also discover new islands of tractability for signed conjunctive queries. In particular, our result generalises to the Direct Access Problem the known tractabilities of counting the number of answers to beta-acyclic negative queries and of deciding whether a negative query with bounded nested-width has an answer. This is joint work with Florent Capelli. |
Fri 24th Nov 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Pierre Vandenhove |
Fri 17th Nov 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Charles (RsonPath) TBA |
Fri 10th Nov 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Nils Vortmeier title: TBA |
Fri 20th Oct 10:30 am 12:30 pm | Aurelien part II |
Fri 22nd Sep 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Théo Losekoot Title: Automata-based verification of relational properties of functions over algebraic data structures |
Fri 15th Sep 11:00 am 12:30 pm | Charles: Présentation de rsonpath |
Fri 23rd Jun 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Florent Capelli Speaker: Florent Capelli — florent.capelli.me/ Title: A simpler FPRAS for nOBDD Abstract: A simpler FPRAS for nOBDD Abstract: In this talk, we revisit the algorithm by Arenas, Croquevielle, Jayaram and Riveros that allows to approximate the number of words of length n of a non deterministic finite automaton. We explain the algorithm and techniques in a modular and general way, without relating to the particular case of counting words in automaton. We illustrate the soundness of the approach by applying it to the problem of approximatively counting the number of satisfying assignments of a non-deterministic OBDD. B21 |
Fri 2nd Jun 11:00 am 12:30 pm | Séminaire Martin Berger Title: Search-Based Regular Expression Inference on a GPU Abstract: Regular expression inference (REI) is a supervised machine learning and program synthesis problem that takes a cost metric for regular expressions, and positive and negative examples of strings as input. It outputs a regular expression that is precise (i.e., accepts all positive and rejects all negative examples), and minimal w.r.t. to the cost metric. We present a novel algorithm for REI over arbitrary alphabets that is enumerative and trades off time for space. Our main algorithmic idea is to implement the search space of regular expressions succinctly as a contiguous matrix of bitvectors. Collectively, the bitvectors represent, as characteristic sequences, all sub-languages of the infix-closure of the union of positive and negative examples. Mathematically, this is a semiring of (a variant of) formal power series. Infix-closure enables bottom-up compositional construction of larger from smaller regular expressions using the operations of our semiring. This minimises data movement and data-dependent branching, hence maximises data-parallelism. In addition, the infix-closure remains unchanged during the search, hence search can be staged: first pre-compute various expensive operations, and then run the compute intensive search process. We provide two C++ implementations, one for general purpose CPUs and one for Nvidia GPUs (using CUDA). We benchmark both on Google Colab Pro: the GPU implementation is on average over 1000x faster than the CPU implementation on the hardest benchmarks. Joint work with Mojtaba Valizadeh Download: martinfriedrichberger.net/pldi2023.html |
Thu 13th Apr 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Yann Strozecki Esprit salle Agora 2 (rez-de-chaussée) |
Tue 11th Apr 2:00 pm 3:00 pm | Séminaire Mamadou Esprit Agora 1 (rez-de-chaussée) |
Fri 24th Mar 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Mamadou KANTE |
Fri 20th Jan 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Tito Speaker: Lê Thành Dũng Nguyễn, aka “Tito” — nguyentito.eu/ Title: Polyregular functions: some recent developments Abstract: The class of polyregular functions is composed of the string-to-string functions computed by pebble transducers. While this machine model (which extends two-way finite transducers) is two decades old, several alternative characterizations of polyregular functions have been discovered recently [Bojańczyk 2018; Bojańczyk, Kiefer & Lhote 2019], demonstrating their canonicity. The name comes from the polynomial bound on the growth rate of these functions: |f(w)| = |w|^O(1) where |w| is the length of the string w. In this talk, after recalling this context, I will present some subsequent developments in which I have been involved: * the subclass of comparison-free polyregular (or “polyblind”) functions, definable through a natural restriction of pebble transducers, which Pierre Pradic and I actually discovered while studying a linear λ-calculus; * some results that either relate the growth rate of a polyregular function (comparison-free or not) to the “resources” needed to compute it, or show that there is no such relationship. |
Fri 13th Jan 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Sarah Winter Speaker: Sarah Winter — sarahwinter.net/ Title: A Regular and Complete Notion of Delay for Streaming String Transducers Abstract: The notion of delay between finite transducers is a core element of numerous fundamental results of transducer theory. The goal of this work is to provide a similar notion for more complex abstract machines: we introduce a new notion of delay tailored to measure the similarity between streaming string transducers (SST). We show that our notion is regular: we design a finite automaton that can check whether the delay between any two SSTs executions is smaller than some given bound. As a consequence, our notion enjoys good decidability properties: in particular, while equivalence between non-deterministic SSTs is undecidable, we show that equivalence up to fixed delay is decidable. Moreover, we show that our notion has good completeness properties: we prove that two SSTs are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent up to some (computable) bounded delay. Together with the regularity of our delay notion, it provides an alternative proof that SSTs equivalence is decidable. Finally, the definition of our delay notion is machine-independent, as it only depends on the origin semantics of SSTs. As a corollary, the completeness result also holds for equivalent machine models such as deterministic two-way transducers, or MSO transducers. This is joint work with Emmanuel Filiot, Ismaël Jecker, and Christof Löding. |
2022 | |
Fri 16th Dec 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Sandra Kiefer CANCELLED: we will attempt to reschedule this seminar to early 2023. Speaker: Sandra Kiefer — www.lics.rwth-aachen.d.....dx/1/ Title: TBA Abstract: TBA |
Fri 9th Dec 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Rémi Morvan Speaker: Rémi Morvan — www.morvan.xyz/ Titre: Approximation and Semantic Tree-width of Conjunctive Regular Path Queries Abstract: We show that the problem of whether a query is equivalent to a query of tree-width k is decidable, for the class of Unions of Conjunctive Regular Path Queries with two-way navigation (UC2RPQs). A previous result by Barceló, Romero, and Vardi has shown decidability for the case k=1, and here we show that decidability in fact holds for any arbitrary k>1. The algorithm is in 2ExpSpace, but we show that the complexity drops to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy for a restricted but practically relevant case of queries obtained by only allowing simple regular expressions. We also investigate the related problem of approximating a UC2RPQ by queries of small tree-width. We exhibit an algorithm which, for any fixed number k, builds the maximal under-approximation of tree-width k of a UC2RPQ. The maximal under-approximation of tree-width k of a query q is a query q' of tree-width k which is contained in q in a maximal and unique way, that is, such that for every query q'' of tree-width k, if q'' is contained in q then q'' is also contained in q'. Joint work with Diego Figueira. |
Fri 18th Nov 11:00 am 11:30 am | Seminar by Sarah Winter CANCELLED for COVID: we will attempt to reschedule this seminar to early 2023 Speaker: Sarah Winter — sarahwinter.net/ Title: A Regular and Complete Notion of Delay for Streaming String Transducers Abstract: The notion of delay between finite transducers is a core element of numerous fundamental results of transducer theory. The goal of this work is to provide a similar notion for more complex abstract machines: we introduce a new notion of delay tailored to measure the similarity between streaming string transducers (SST). We show that our notion is regular: we design a finite automaton that can check whether the delay between any two SSTs executions is smaller than some given bound. As a consequence, our notion enjoys good decidability properties: in particular, while equivalence between non-deterministic SSTs is undecidable, we show that equivalence up to fixed delay is decidable. Moreover, we show that our notion has good completeness properties: we prove that two SSTs are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent up to some (computable) bounded delay. Together with the regularity of our delay notion, it provides an alternative proof that SSTs equivalence is decidable. Finally, the definition of our delay notion is machine-independent, as it only depends on the origin semantics of SSTs. As a corollary, the completeness result also holds for equivalent machine models such as deterministic two-way transducers, or MSO transducers. This is joint work with Emmanuel Filiot, Ismaël Jecker, and Christof Löding. |
Fri 21st Oct 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Online seminar by Pierre Pradic Speaker: Pierre Pradic — perso.ens-lyon.fr/pierre.pradic/ Title: Synthesizing Nested Relational Queries from Implicit Specifications Abstract: Derived datasets can be defined implicitly or explicitly. An implicit definition (of dataset O in terms of datasets I⃗ ) is a logical specification involving the source data I⃗ and the interface data O. It is a valid definition of O in terms of I⃗ , if any two models of the specification agreeing on I⃗ agree on O. In contrast, an explicit definition is a query that produces O from I⃗ . Variants of Beth's theorem state that one can convert implicit definitions to explicit ones. Further, this conversion can be done effectively given a proof witnessing implicit definability in a suitable proof system. In this talk, I will discuss an analogous effective implicit-to-explicit result for nested relations: implicit definitions, given in the natural logic for nested relations, can be effectively converted to explicit definitions in the nested relational calculus NRC. I will first spend some time explaining what NRC is and what logic we use to describe implicit definitions of nested queries. Then I will present the results obtained in our papers, attempt to give some intuitions on the proof of the main theorem and say a few words on in particular the proof-theoretic techniques and concerns that come up (namely, cut-elimination and focussing) and how this can impact the complexity of extracting explicit definitions from proofs of implicit definability. Then if time allows I will discuss a more general model-theoretic result that we first used to give a non-constructive proof of our theorem, and some ideas that we have towards making it constructive and bounding the complexity of extracting explicit definitions. This is Joint work with Michael Benedikt and Christoph Wenhard. The main results I will be discussing were written up in arxiv.org/abs/2005.06503 and arxiv.org/abs/2209.08299. Online |
Fri 30th Sep 10:00 am 11:30 am | Seminar by Liat Peterfreund Speaker: Liat Peterfreund — sites.google.com/view/liatpeterfreund/ Title: Querying Incomplete Numerical Data: Between Certain and Possible Answers Abstract: Queries with aggregation and arithmetic operations, as well as incomplete data, are common in real-world databases, but we lack a good understanding of how they should interact. On the one hand, systems based on SQL provide ad-hoc rules for numerical nulls, on the other, theoretical research largely concentrates on the standard notions of certain and possible answers which in the presence of numerical attributes and aggregates are often meaningless. In this work, we define a principled compositional framework for databases with numerical nulls and answering queries with arithmetic and aggregations over them. We assume that missing values are given by probability distributions associated with marked nulls, which yields a model of probabilistic bag databases. We concentrate on queries that resemble standard SQL with arithmetic and aggregation and show that they are measurable, and that their outputs have a finite representation. Moreover, since the classical forms of answers provide little information in the numerical setting, we look at the probability that numerical values in output tuples belong to specific intervals. Even though their exact computation is intractable, we show efficient approximation algorithms to compute such probabilities. The talk is based on joint work with Marco Console and Leonid Libkin, and will be presented in PODS 2023. |
Fri 16th Sep 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar Luis Galárraga Speaker : Luis Galárraga — luisgalarraga.de/about/ Title: Computing How-Provenance for SPARQL Queries via Query Rewriting Abstract: Over the past few years, we have witnessed the emergence of large knowledge graphs built by extracting and combining information from multiple sources. This has propelled many advances in query processing over knowledge graphs, however the aspect of providing provenance explanations for query results has so far been mostly neglected. In this talk I will present SPARQLprov, a method based on query rewriting, to compute how-provenance polynomials for SPARQL queries over knowledge graphs. Contrary to existing works, SPARQLprov is system-agnostic and can be applied to standard and already deployed SPARQL engines without the need of customized extensions. To do so, we rely on spm-semirings to compute polynomial annotations that respect the property of commutation with homomorphisms on monotonic and non-monotonic SPARQL queries without aggregate functions. An evaluation on real and synthetic data shows that SPARQLprov over standard engines competes with state-of-the-art solutions for how-provenance computation, while covering a larger fragment of the query language. |
Fri 1st Jul 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Arnaud Durand |
Fri 10th Jun 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Corentin Barloy Title:The Regular Languages of First-Order Logic with One Alternation Abstract: The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary Σ2 formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then there is an equivalent Σ2 formula that only uses the order predicate. This shows that the so-called Central Conjecture of Straubing holds for Σ2 over languages with a neutral letter, the first progress on the Conjecture in more than 20 years. To show the characterization, lower bounds against polynomial-size depth-3 Boolean circuits with constant top fan-in are developed. The heart of the combinatorial argument resides in studying how positions within a language are determined from one another, a technique of independent interest. |
Fri 25th Feb 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Nico |
Fri 28th Jan 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Alexandre Vigny (visio) Title: Separator logic, expressive power and algorithmic applications Abstract: First-order logic (FO) can express many algorithmic problems on graphs, but fails to express whether two vertices are connected. We define a new logic (separator logic) by enriching FO with connectivity predicates connk(x, y, z1, . . . , zk) that hold true in a graph if there exists a path between x and y after deletion of z1, . . . , zk. In this talk I will first present a study of the expressive power of this new logic. I will then present algorithmic results for this logic on graph classes that exclude a topological minor. These results were obtained in collaboration with Michał Pilipczuk, Nicole Schirrmacher, Sebastian Siebertz, and Szymon Toruńczyk. |
Fri 21st Jan 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Aurélien Lemay in Seminar |
2021 | |
Fri 10th Dec 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Sebastien Tavenas Title: Bornes inférieures superpolynomiales pour les circuits de profondeur constante Abstract: Tout polynôme multivarié P(X_1,...,X_n) peut être écrit comme une somme de monômes, i.e., une somme de produits de variables et de constantes du corps. La taille naturelle d'une telle expression est le nombre de monômes. Mais, que se passe-t-il si on rajoute un nouveau niveau de complexité en considérant les expressions de la forme : somme de produits de sommes (de variables et de constantes) ? Maintenant, il devient moins clair comment montrer qu'un polynôme donné n'a pas de petite expression. Dans cet exposé nous résoudrons exactement ce problème. Plus précisément, nous prouvons que certains polynômes explicites n'ont pas de représentations "somme de produits de sommes'' (SPS) de taille polynomiale. Nous pouvons aussi obtenir des résultats similaires pour les SPSP, SPSPS, etc... pour toutes les expressions de profondeur constante. " |
Thu 25th Nov 2:00 pm 3:00 pm | Nofar Carmeli in Links' Seminar |
Fri 29th Oct 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Antoine Amarilli |
Fri 22nd Oct 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Mikaël Monet in Links' Seminar |
Fri 15th Oct 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Claire Soyez-Martin in Links' seminar |
Fri 17th Sep 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Corentin Barloy Title: Stackless Processing of Streamed Trees Abstract: Processing tree-structured data in the streaming model is a chal-lenge: capturing regular properties of streamed trees by means of astack is costly in memory, but falling back to finite-state automata drastically limits the computational power. We propose an intermediate stackless model based on register automata equipped with a single counter, used to maintain the current depth in the tree. We explore the power of this model to validate and query streamed trees. Our main result is an effective characterization of regular path queries (RPQs) that can be evaluated stacklessly—with and without registers. In particular, we confirm the conjectured characterization of tree languages defined by DTDs that are recognizable without registers, by Segoufin and Vianu (2002), in the special case of tree languages defined by means of an RPQ. Link: paperman.name/data/pub.....0.pdf lille-Salle |
Fri 10th Sep 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire de Patrick Baillot titre: Type-based complexity analysis in a parallel process calculus Abstract: Some type systems have been designed to analyse statically the time coplexity of functional languages. A natural question is whether this approach can be extended to parallel languages. We address this problem for the Pi-calculus, a paradigmatic calculus for parallel and concurrent computation. In Pi-calculus, processes communicate through channels that can carry values and channel names. We will define notions of sequential and parallel complexity for Pi-calculus, and present a type system that provides an upper bound on the time complexity of processes. This is based on joint work with Alexis Ghyselen (ESOP 2021). Based on: link.springer.com/chap.....9-3_3 |
Fri 9th Jul all day | Seminar - Antonio AL SERHALI Title: Integrating Schema-Based Cleaning into Automata Determinization Abstract : Schema-based cleaning for automata on trees or nested words was proposed recently to compute smaller deterministic automata for regular path queries on data trees. The idea is to remove all rules and states, from an automaton for the query, that are not needed to recognize any tree recognized by a given schema automaton. Unfortunately, how- ever, deterministic automata for nested words may still grow large for au- tomata for XPath queries, so that the much smaller schema-cleaned ver- sion cannot always be computed in practice. We therefore propose a new schema-based determinization algorithm that integrates schema-based cleaning directly. We prove that schema-based determinization always produces the same deterministic automaton as schema-based cleaning after standard determinization. Nevertheless, the worst-case complex- ity is considerably lower for schema-based determinization. Experiments confirm the relevance of this result in practice. |
Fri 4th Jun 10:00 am 12:30 pm | Séminaire Pierre Ohlmann Zoom link: univ-lille-fr.zoom.us/j/95419000064 Titre: Lower bound for arithmetic circuits via the Hankel matrix Abstract: We study the complexity of representing polynomials by arithmetic circuits in both the commutative and the non-commutative settings. To analyse circuits we count their number of parse trees, which describe the non-associative computations realised by the circuit. In the non-commutative setting a circuit computing a polynomial of degree d has at most 2^{O(d)} parse trees. Previous superpolynomial lower bounds were known for circuits with up to 2^{d^{1/3-ε}} parse trees, for any ε>0. Our main result is to reduce the gap by showing a superpolynomial lower bound for circuits with just a small defect in the exponent for the total number of parse trees, that is 2^{d^{1-ε}}, for any ε>0. In the commutative setting a circuit computing a polynomial of degree d has at most 2^{O(d \\log d)} parse trees. We show a superpolynomial lower bound for circuits with up to 2^{d^{1/3-ε}} parse trees, for any ε>0. When d is polylogarithmic in n, we push this further to up to 2^{d^{1-ε}} parse trees. While these two main results hold in the associative setting, our approach goes through a precise understanding of the more restricted setting where multiplication is not associative, meaning that we distinguish the polynomials (xy)z and yz). Our first and main conceptual result is a characterization result: we show that the size of the smallest circuit computing a given non-associative polynomial is exactly the rank of a matrix constructed from the polynomial and called the Hankel matrix. This result applies to the class of all circuits in both commutative and non-commutative settings, and can be seen as an extension of the seminal result of Nisan giving a similar characterization for non-commutative algebraic branching programs. Our key technical contribution is to provide generic lower bound theorems based on analyzing and decomposing the Hankel matrix, from which we derive the results mentioned above. The study of the Hankel matrix also provides a unifying approach for proving lower bounds for polynomials in the (classical) associative setting. We demonstrate this by giving alternative proofs of recent lower bounds as corollaries of our generic lower bound results. |