Researcher profile

Kevin A. Schneider

Kevin A. Schneider contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Carbon-Taxed Transformers: A Green Compression Pipeline for Overgrown Language Models

The accelerating adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering (SE) has brought with it a silent crisis: unsustainable computational cost. While these models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in different SE tasks, they are unmanageably large, slow to deploy, memory-intensive, and carbon-heavy. This reality threatens not only the scalability and accessibility of AI-powered SE, but also its long-term environmental sustainability. The research challenge is clear: we must go beyond accuracy and address efficiency and environmental cost as first-class design constraints. To meet this challenge, we introduce Carbon-Taxed Transformers (CTT), a systematic multi-architectural compression principled pipeline ordering inspired by economic carbon taxation principles. Drawing from the economic concept of carbon pricing, CTT operationalizes a computational carbon tax that penalizes architectural inefficiencies and rewards deployment-ready compression. We evaluate CTT across three core SE tasks: code clone detection, code summarization, and code generation, with models spanning encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only architecture. Our results show that CTT delivers on inference: (1) up to 49x memory reduction, (2) time reduction up to 8-10x for clone detection, up to 3x for summarization, and 4-7x for generation, (3) up to 81% reduction in CO2 emissions and (4) CTT retains around 98% accuracy on clone detection, around 89% on summarization, and up to 91% (textual metrics) and 68% (pass@1) for generation. Two ablation studies show that pipeline ordering and individual component contributions are both essential, providing empirical justification for CTT's design and effectiveness. This work establishes a viable path toward responsible AI in SE through aggressive yet performance-preserving compression.

preprint2022arXiv

Backports: Change Types, Challenges and Strategies

Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development branch to other versions. In open-source software, backports are common and often need to be adapted by hand, which motivates us to explore backports and backporting challenges and strategies. In our exploration of 68,424 backports from 10 GitHub projects, we found that bug, test, document, and feature changes are commonly backported. We identified a number of backporting challenges, including that backports were inconsistently linked to their original pull-request (49%), that backports had incompatible code (13%), that backports failed to be accepted (10%), and that there were backporting delays (16 days to create, 5 days to merge). We identified some general strategies for addressing backporting issues. We also noted that backporting strategies depend on the project type and that further investigation is needed to determine their suitability. Furthermore, we created the first-ever backports dataset that can be used by other researchers and practitioners for investigating backports and backporting.

preprint2020arXiv

Automatic Detection of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in X-ray and CT Images: A Machine Learning-Based Approach

The newly identified Coronavirus pneumonia, subsequently termed COVID-19, is highly transmittable and pathogenic with no clinically approved antiviral drug or vaccine available for treatment. The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are dry cough, sore throat, and fever. Symptoms can progress to a severe form of pneumonia with critical complications, including septic shock, pulmonary edema, acute respiratory distress syndrome and multi-organ failure. While medical imaging is not currently recommended in Canada for primary diagnosis of COVID-19, computer-aided diagnosis systems could assist in the early detection of COVID-19 abnormalities and help to monitor the progression of the disease, potentially reduce mortality rates. In this study, we compare popular deep learning-based feature extraction frameworks for automatic COVID-19 classification. To obtain the most accurate feature, which is an essential component of learning, MobileNet, DenseNet, Xception, ResNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, VGGNet, NASNet were chosen amongst a pool of deep convolutional neural networks. The extracted features were then fed into several machine learning classifiers to classify subjects as either a case of COVID-19 or a control. This approach avoided task-specific data pre-processing methods to support a better generalization ability for unseen data. The performance of the proposed method was validated on a publicly available COVID-19 dataset of chest X-ray and CT images. The DenseNet121 feature extractor with Bagging tree classifier achieved the best performance with 99% classification accuracy. The second-best learner was a hybrid of the a ResNet50 feature extractor trained by LightGBM with an accuracy of 98%.

preprint2020arXiv

Automatic Polyp Segmentation Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer-related death after lung cancer and breast cancer worldwide. The risk of developing colorectal cancer could be reduced by early diagnosis of polyps during a colonoscopy. Computer-aided diagnosis systems have the potential to be applied for polyp screening and reduce the number of missing polyps. In this paper, we compare the performance of different deep learning architectures as feature extractors, i.e. ResNet, DenseNet, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2 and SE-ResNeXt in the encoder part of a U-Net architecture. We validated the performance of presented ensemble models on the CVC-Clinic (GIANA 2018) dataset. The DenseNet169 feature extractor combined with U-Net architecture outperformed the other counterparts and achieved an accuracy of 99.15\%, Dice similarity coefficient of 90.87%, and Jaccard index of 83.82%.