Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL are charting a more "modular" path ahead for software development, breaking systems into "concepts" and "synchronizations" to make code clearer, safer, and easier for LLMs to generate.
MIT researchers are proposing a new software development approach centered around "concepts" and "synchronizations" to address issues of complexity, safety, and LLM compatibility in modern software.
Concepts are self-contained units of functionality (like "sharing" or "liking") with their own state and actions, whereas synchronizations are explicit rules defining how these concepts interact, expressed in a simple, LLM-friendly language.
The benefits include ncreased modularity, transparency, easier understanding for both humans and AI, improved safety, and potential for automated software development. Real-world application: has been demonstrated by successfully restructuring features (liking, commenting, sharing) to be more modular and legible.
Future includes concept catalogs, a shift in software architecture, and improved collaboration through shared, well-tested concepts.
A recent study shows that one large language model (LLM) demonstrates impressive linguistic analysis abilities, rivaling those of human linguistics graduate students. Researchers tested LLMs on complex linguistic tasks, including recursion and phonological rule inference, revealing that OpenAI’s o1 model performed significantly better than others, challenging conventional views on the limits of AI in understanding language.
A new study by MIT CSAIL researchers maps the challenges of AI in software development, identifying bottlenecks and highlighting research directions to move the field forward, aiming to allow humans to focus on high-level design while automating routine tasks.
An interactive tool to visualize maze generation using Depth-First Search (DFS) and maze solving using Breadth-First Search (BFS).
This paper introduces Cross-Layer Attention (CLA), an extension of Multi-Query Attention (MQA) and Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for reducing the size of the key-value cache in transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). The authors demonstrate that CLA can reduce the cache size by another 2x while maintaining nearly the same accuracy as unmodified MQA, enabling inference with longer sequence lengths and larger batch sizes.