CSE Colloquium: A Journey from Programming Systems Research to AI Agents

Speaker: Koushik Sen, UC Berkeley and Google DeepMind

Abstract: Coding has emerged as an important application area for large language models (LLMs), with a proliferation of code-specific models and their applications across various domains and tasks such as program repair, performance optimization, debugging, test generation, documentation, and security hardening. In this talk, I will describe how we built powerful coding agents such as R2E-Gym and DeepSWE using test-driven methodology for solving various kinds of coding tasks, such as repair, optimization, security vulnerability detection, and refactoring.  I will also discuss a novel technique, called GEPA, for domain-specific optimization of AI agent systems, which has shown a significant advantage over reinforcement learning.

Bio: Koushik Sen is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interest lies in Software Engineering, Programming Languages, and AI. He is interested in developing software tools and methodologies that improve programmer productivity and software quality. He is known for his work on “DART: Directed Automated Random Testing,” concolic testing, and LiveCodeBench. He has received a NSF CAREER Award in 2008, a Haifa Verification Conference (HVC) Award in 2009, a IFIP TC2 Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software: Theory and Practice in 2010, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a Professor R. Narasimhan Lecture Award in 2014, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2015, and an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2019. He has won several ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. He received the C.L. and Jane W-S. Liu Award in 2004, the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award in 2005, and the David J. Kuck Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2007, and a Distinguished Alumni Educator Award in 2014 from the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He holds a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in CS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.