Götz-Henrik Wiegand

Götz-Henrik Wiegand, Filip Stepniak, Patrick Baier

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is a key framework for developing customer-oriented software, focusing on the precise modeling of an application's domain. Traditionally, metamodels that describe these domains are created manually by system designers, forming the basis for iterative software development. This paper explores the partial automation of metamodel generation using generative AI, particularly for producing domain-specific JSON objects. By training a model on real-world DDD project data, we demonstrate that generative AI can produce syntactically correct JSON objects based on simple prompts, offering significant potential for streamlining the design process. To address resource constraints, the AI model was fine-tuned on a consumer-grade GPU using a 4-bit quantized version of Code Llama and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Despite limited hardware, the model achieved high performance, generating accurate JSON objects with minimal post-processing. This research illustrates the viability of incorporating generative AI into the DDD process, improving efficiency and reducing resource requirements, while also laying the groundwork for further advancements in AI-driven software development.

Tomas Hrycej, Bernhard Bermeitinger, Massimo Pavone et al.

The key task of machine learning is to minimize the loss function that measures the model fit to the training data. The numerical methods to do this efficiently depend on the properties of the loss function. The most decisive among these properties is the convexity or non-convexity of the loss function. The fact that the loss function can have, and frequently has, non-convex regions has led to a widespread commitment to non-convex methods such as Adam. However, a local minimum implies that, in some environment around it, the function is convex. In this environment, second-order minimizing methods such as the Conjugate Gradient (CG) give a guaranteed superlinear convergence. We propose a novel framework grounded in the hypothesis that loss functions in real-world tasks swap from initial non-convexity to convexity towards the optimum. This is a property we leverage to design an innovative two-phase optimization algorithm. The presented algorithm detects the swap point by observing the gradient norm dependence on the loss. In these regions, non-convex (Adam) and convex (CG) algorithms are used, respectively. Computing experiments confirm the hypothesis that this simple convexity structure is frequent enough to be practically exploited to substantially improve convergence and accuracy.