Christian Cabrera

Christian Cabrera, Andrei Paleyes, Pierre Thodoroff et al. · cambridge

Engineers are deploying ML models as parts of real-world systems with the upsurge of AI technologies. Real-world environments challenge the deployment of such systems because these environments produce large amounts of heterogeneous data, and users require increasingly efficient responses. These requirements push prevalent software architectures to the limit when deploying ML-based systems. Data-oriented Architecture (DOA) is an emerging style that equips systems better for integrating ML models. Even though papers on deployed ML systems do not mention DOA, their authors made design decisions that implicitly follow DOA. Implicit decisions create a knowledge gap, limiting the practitioners' ability to implement ML-based systems. \hlb{This paper surveys why, how, and to what extent practitioners have adopted DOA to implement and deploy ML-based systems.} We overcome the knowledge gap by answering these questions and explicitly showing the design decisions and practices behind these systems. The survey follows a well-known systematic and semi-automated methodology for reviewing papers in software engineering. The majority of reviewed works partially adopt DOA. Such an adoption enables systems to address requirements such as Big Data management, low latency processing, resource management, security and privacy. Based on these findings, we formulate practical advice to facilitate the deployment of ML-based systems.

Andrei Paleyes, Christian Cabrera, Neil D. Lawrence · cambridge

As use of data driven technologies spreads, software engineers are more often faced with the task of solving a business problem using data-driven methods such as machine learning (ML) algorithms. Deployment of ML within large software systems brings new challenges that are not addressed by standard engineering practices and as a result businesses observe high rate of ML deployment project failures. Data Oriented Architecture (DOA) is an emerging approach that can support data scientists and software developers when addressing such challenges. However, there is a lack of clarity about how DOA systems should be implemented in practice. This paper proposes to consider Flow-Based Programming (FBP) as a paradigm for creating DOA applications. We empirically evaluate FBP in the context of ML deployment on four applications that represent typical data science projects. We use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a baseline for comparison. Evaluation is done with respect to different application domains, ML deployment stages, and code quality metrics. Results reveal that FBP is a suitable paradigm for data collection and data science tasks, and is able to simplify data collection and discovery when compared with SOA. We discuss the advantages of FBP as well as the gaps that need to be addressed to increase FBP adoption as a standard design paradigm for DOA.

Andrei Paleyes, Radzim Sendyka, Diana Robinson et al.

Code generation is one of the most active areas of application of Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs lower barriers to writing code and accelerate development process, the overall quality of generated programs depends on the quality of given prompts. Specifically, functionality and quality of generated code can be sensitive to user's background and familiarity with software development. It is therefore important to quantify LLM's sensitivity to variations in the input. To this end we propose a synthetic evaluation pipeline for code generation with LLMs, as well as a systematic persona-based evaluation approach to expose qualitative differences of LLM responses dependent on prospective user background. Both proposed methods are completely independent from specific programming tasks and LLMs, and thus are widely applicable. We provide experimental evidence illustrating utility of our methods and share our code for the benefit of the community.

Christian Cabrera, Viviana Bastidas, Jennifer Schooling et al.

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to address critical societal problems requires adopting this novel technology into socio-technical systems. However, the complexity of such systems and the nature of LLMs challenge such a vision. It is unlikely that the solution to such challenges will come from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community itself. Instead, the Systems Engineering approach is better equipped to facilitate the adoption of LLMs by prioritising the problems and their context before any other aspects. This paper introduces the challenges LLMs generate and surveys systems research efforts for engineering AI-based systems. We reveal how the systems engineering principles have supported addressing similar issues to the ones LLMs pose and discuss our findings to provide future directions for adopting LLMs.

Radzim Sendyka, Christian Cabrera, Andrei Paleyes et al.

This paper investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to recognise and solve tasks which have been obfuscated beyond recognition. Focusing on competitive programming and benchmark tasks (LeetCode and MATH), we compare performance across multiple models and obfuscation methods, such as noise and redaction. We demonstrate that all evaluated LLMs can solve tasks obfuscated to a level where the text would be unintelligible to human readers, and does not contain key pieces of instruction or context. We introduce the concept of eager pattern matching to describe this behaviour, which is not observed in tasks published after the models' knowledge cutoff date, indicating strong memorisation or overfitting to training data, rather than legitimate reasoning about the presented problem. We report empirical evidence of distinct performance decay patterns between contaminated and unseen datasets. We discuss the implications for benchmarking and evaluations of model behaviour, arguing for caution when designing experiments using standard datasets. We also propose measuring the decay of performance under obfuscation as a possible strategy for detecting dataset contamination and highlighting potential safety risks and interpretability issues for automated software systems.

Christian Cabrera, Andrei Paleyes, Neil D. Lawrence

Software systems impact society at different levels as they pervasively solve real-world problems. Modern software systems are often so sophisticated that their complexity exceeds the limits of human comprehension. These systems must respond to changing goals, dynamic data, unexpected failures, and security threats, among other variable factors in real-world environments. Systems' complexity challenges their interpretability and requires autonomous responses to dynamic changes. Two main research areas explore autonomous systems' responses: evolutionary computing and autonomic computing. Evolutionary computing focuses on software improvement based on iterative modifications to the source code. Autonomic computing focuses on optimising systems' performance by changing their structure, behaviour, or environment variables. Approaches from both areas rely on feedback loops that accumulate knowledge from the system interactions to inform autonomous decision-making. However, this knowledge is often limited, constraining the systems' interpretability and adaptability. This paper proposes a new concept for interpretable and adaptable software systems: self-sustaining software systems (S4). S4 builds knowledge loops between all available knowledge sources that define modern software systems to improve their interpretability and adaptability. This paper introduces and discusses the S4 concept.

Andrei Paleyes, Christian Cabrera, Neil D. Lawrence

Despite huge successes reported by the field of machine learning, such as voice assistants or self-driving cars, businesses still observe very high failure rate when it comes to deployment of ML in production. We argue that part of the reason is infrastructure that was not designed for data-oriented activities. This paper explores the potential of flow-based programming (FBP) for simplifying data discovery and collection in software systems. We compare FBP with the currently prevalent service-oriented paradigm to assess characteristics of each paradigm in the context of ML deployment. We develop a data processing application, formulate a subsequent ML deployment task, and measure the impact of the task implementation within both programming paradigms. Our main conclusion is that FBP shows great potential for providing data-centric infrastructural benefits for deployment of ML. Additionally, we provide an insight into the current trend that prioritizes model development over data quality management.

Gary White, Christian Cabrera, Andrei Palade et al.

Smart Bins have become popular in smart cities and campuses around the world. These bins have a compaction mechanism that increases the bins' capacity as well as automated real-time collection notifications. In this paper, we propose WasteNet, a waste classification model based on convolutional neural networks that can be deployed on a low power device at the edge of the network, such as a Jetson Nano. The problem of segregating waste is a big challenge for many countries around the world. Automated waste classification at the edge allows for fast intelligent decisions in smart bins without needing access to the cloud. Waste is classified into six categories: paper, cardboard, glass, metal, plastic and other. Our model achieves a 97\% prediction accuracy on the test dataset. This level of classification accuracy will help to alleviate some common smart bin problems, such as recycling contamination, where different types of waste become mixed with recycling waste causing the bin to be contaminated. It also makes the bins more user friendly as citizens do not have to worry about disposing their rubbish in the correct bin as the smart bin will be able to make the decision for them.