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In the rapidly evolving domain of software engineering (SE), Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged to automate developer support. Open source LLMs have grown competitive with pro- prietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude-3, without the associated financial and accessibility constraints. This study investigates whether state of the art open source LLMs including Solar-10.7B, CodeLlama-7B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B, StarCoder2-7B, and LLaMA3-8B can generate responses to technical queries that align with those crafted by human experts. Leveraging retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and targeted fine tuning, we evaluate these models across critical performance dimen- sions, such as semantic alignment and contextual fluency. Our results show that Solar-10.7B, particularly when paired with RAG and fine tun- ing, most closely replicates expert level responses, o!ering a scalable and cost e!ective alternative to commercial models. This vision paper high- lights the potential of open-source LLMs to enable robust and accessible AI-powered developer assistance in software engineering.
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This content will become publicly available on May 19, 2026
Taxonomic Reasoning for Rare Arthropods: Combining Dense Image Captioning and RAG for Interpretable Classification
In the context of pressing climate change challenges and the significant biodiversity loss among arthropods, automated taxonomic classification from organismal images is a subject of intense research. However, traditional AI pipelines based on deep neural visual architectures such as CNNs or ViTs face limitations such as degraded performance on the long-tail of classes and the inability to reason about their predictions. We integrate image captioning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) to enhance biodiversity monitoring, showing particular promise for characterizing rare and unknown arthropod species. While a naive Vision-Language Model (VLM) excels in classifying images of common species, the RAG model enables classification of rarer taxa by matching explicit textual descriptions of taxonomic features to contextual biodiversity text data from external sources. The RAG model shows promise in reducing overconfidence and enhancing accuracy relative to naive LLMs, suggesting its viability in capturing the nuances of taxonomic hierarchy, particularly at the challenging family and genus levels. Our findings highlight the potential for modern vision-language AI pipelines to support biodiversity conservation initiatives, emphasizing the role of comprehensive data curation and collaboration with citizen science platforms to improve species identification, unknown species characterization and ultimately inform conservation strategies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2330423
- PAR ID:
- 10615141
- Publisher / Repository:
- Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Calgary, CA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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