Seminars

Links' Seminars and Public Events Add to google calendar
2024
Fri 7th Jun
10:00 am
11:00 am
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Séminaire Sam Van Gool dualité de Stone

Thu 30th May
to Fri 31st May
 all day
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Pysemigroup Hackaton

Fri 24th May
11:00 am
11:30 am
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Séminaire Sophie Tison
Speaker: Sophie Tison

Title: Containment of Regular Path Queries Under Constraints
Thu 16th May
2:00 pm
4:00 pm
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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
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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
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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
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Mikaël Monet: Probabiliste Shapley value

Fri 26th Jan
10:00 am
11:00 am
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Séminaire: Klara Nosan
Sujet: TBA

2023
Thu 14th Dec
2:00 pm
5:00 pm
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Claire Soyez-Martin PhD defense
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Amphi IRCICA
Fri 1st Dec
10:00 am
11:00 am
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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
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Séminaire Pierre Vandenhove

Fri 17th Nov
10:00 am
11:00 am
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Séminaire Charles (RsonPath)
TBA
Fri 10th Nov
10:00 am
11:00 am
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Séminaire Nils Vortmeier
title: TBA
Fri 20th Oct
10:30 am
12:30 pm
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Aurelien part II

Fri 22nd Sep
11:00 am
12:00 pm
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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
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Charles: Présentation de rsonpath

Fri 23rd Jun
11:00 am
12:00 pm
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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.
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B21
Fri 2nd Jun
11:00 am
12:30 pm
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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
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Séminaire Yann Strozecki

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Esprit salle Agora 2 (rez-de-chaussée)
Tue 11th Apr
2:00 pm
3:00 pm
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Séminaire Mamadou

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Esprit Agora 1 (rez-de-chaussée)
Fri 24th Mar
10:00 am
11:00 am
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Séminaire Mamadou KANTE

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Fri 20th Jan
11:00 am
12:00 pm
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Online
Fri 30th Sep
10:00 am
11:30 am
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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
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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
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Séminaire Arnaud Durand

Fri 10th Jun
10:00 am
11:00 am
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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
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Séminaire Nico

Permanent link to this article: https://team.inria.fr/links/seminars/