Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Side Channel Detection Of Pc Rootkits Using Nonlinear Phase Space, Rebecca Clark

Poster Presentations

Cyberattacks are increasing in size and scope yearly, and the most effective and common means of attack is through malicious software executed on target devices of interest. Malware threats vary widely in terms of behavior and impact and, thus, effective methods of detection are constantly being sought from the academic research community to offset both volume and complexity. Rootkits are malware that represent a highly feared threat because they can change operating system integrity and alter otherwise normally functioning software. Although normal methods of detection that are based on signatures of known malware code are the standard line of defense, …

Providing Beginners With Interactive Exploration Of Error Messages In Clojure, John Walbran, Elena Machkasova

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024

Programmers are imperfect, and will often make mistakes when programming and create a program error, for example, attempting to divide by zero. When a computer tries to run a program with an error, the program will halt and present the details of the error to the user in the form of an error message. These error messages are often very jargon-heavy, and are not designed to be palatable to a novice programmer. This creates significant friction for new programmers trying to learn programming languages. This work is a part of an ongoing project (called Babel) led by Elena Machkasova in …

Improving Educational Delivery And Content In Juvenile Detention Centers, Yomna Elmousalami

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Students in juvenile detention centers have the greatest need to receive improvements in educational delivery and content; however, they are one of the “truly disadvantaged” populations in terms of receiving those improvements. This work presents a qualitative data analysis based on a focus group meeting with stakeholders at a local Juvenile Detention Center. The current educational system in juvenile detention centers is based on paper worksheets, single-room style teaching methods, outdated technology, and a shortage of textbooks and teachers. In addition, detained students typically have behavioral challenges that are deemed "undesired" in society. As a result, many students miss classes …

Mechanistic Investigation Of C—C Bond Activation Of Phosphaalkynes With Pt(0) Complexes, Roberto M. Escobar, Abdurrahman C. Ateşin, Christian Müller, William D. Jones, Tülay Ateşin

Research Symposium

Carbon–carbon (C–C) bond activation has gained increased attention as a direct method for the synthesis of pharmaceuticals. Due to the thermodynamic stability and kinetic inaccessibility of the C–C bonds, however, activation of C–C bonds by homogeneous transition-metal catalysts under mild homogeneous conditions is still a challenge. Most of the systems in which the activation occurs either have aromatization or relief of ring strain as the primary driving force. The activation of unstrained C–C bonds of phosphaalkynes does not have this advantage. This study employs Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations to elucidate Pt(0)-mediated C–CP bond activation mechanisms in phosphaalkynes. Investigating the …

Preprocessing Of Astronomical Images From The Neowise Survey For Near-Earth Asteroid Detection With Machine Learning, Rachel Meyer

ELAIA

Asteroid detection is a common field in astronomy for planetary defense, requiring observations from survey telescopes to detect and classify different objects. The amount of data collected each night is continually increasing as new and better-designed telescopes begin collecting information each year. This amount of data is quickly becoming unmanageable, and researchers are looking for ways to better process this data. The most feasible current solution is to implement computer algorithms to automatically detect these sources and then use machine learning to create a more efficient and accurate method of classification. Implementation of such methods has previously focused on larger …

Fixing Your Own Smells: Adding A Mistake-Based Familiarization Step When Teaching Code Refactoring, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code smells', which are specific negative characteristics (e.g. duplicate code) that can be resolved by applying refactoring patterns. Many undergraduate computing curricula train students on this software engineering practice, often doing so via exercises on unfamiliar instructor-provided code. Our observation, however, is that this makes it harder for novices to internalise refactoring as part of their own development practices. In this paper, we propose a …

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Choosing A Sophisticated, Robust, And Secure Programming Language, J. Simon Richard

The Downtown Review

This paper explores which programming languages maximize the quality and efficiency of software development projects requiring high levels of sophistication, security, and stability. Of the four languages discussed in this paper—C, C++, Java, and Rust—we conclude that Rust is the best for this application.

Μakka: Mutation Testing For Actor Concurrency In Akka Using Real-World Bugs, Mohsen Moradi Moghadam, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Raffi Takvor Khatchadourian Ph,D,, Hamid Bagheri

Publications and Research

Actor concurrency is becoming increasingly important in the real-world and mission-critical software. This requires these applications to be free from actor bugs, that occur in the real world, and have tests that are effective in finding these bugs. Mutation testing is a well-established technique that transforms an application to induce its likely bugs and evaluate the effectiveness of its tests in finding these bugs. Mutation testing is available for a broad spectrum of applications and their bugs, ranging from web to mobile to machine learning, and is used at scale in companies like Google and Facebook. However, there still is …

Random Variable Spaces: Mathematical Properties And An Extension To Programming Computable Functions, Mohammed Kurd-Misto

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

This dissertation aims to extend the boundaries of Programming Computable Functions (PCF) by introducing a novel collection of categories referred to as Random Variable Spaces. Originating as a generalization of Quasi-Borel Spaces, Random Variable Spaces are rigorously defined as categories where objects are sets paired with a collection of random variables from an underlying measurable space. These spaces offer a theoretical foundation for extending PCF to natively handle stochastic elements.

The dissertation is structured into seven chapters that provide a multi-disciplinary background, from PCF and Measure Theory to Category Theory with special attention to Monads and the Giry Monad. The …

Ensuring Non-Repudiation In Long-Distance Constrained Devices, Ethan Blum

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Satellite communication is essential for the exploration and study of space. Satellites allow communications with many devices and systems residing in space and on the surface of celestial bodies from ground stations on Earth. However, with the rise of Ground Station as a Service (GsaaS), the ability to efficiently send action commands to distant satellites must ensure non-repudiation such that an attacker is unable to send malicious commands to distant satellites. Distant satellites are also constrained devices and rely on limited power, meaning security on these devices is minimal. Therefore, this study attempted to propose a novel algorithm to allow …

Llm-Adapters: An Adapter Family For Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Of Large Language Models, Zhiqiang Hu, Lei Wang, Yihuai Lan, Wanyu Xu, Ee-Peng Lim, Lidong Bing, Xing Xu, Soujanya Poria, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by finetuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLMAdapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and …

Examining The Inter-Consistency Of Large Language Models: An In-Depth Analysis Via Debate, Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, but they still face various inconsistency issues. Existing works primarily focus on the inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we complementarily explore the inter-consistency among multiple LLMs for collaboration. To examine whether LLMs can collaborate effectively to achieve a consensus for a shared goal, we focus on commonsense reasoning, and introduce a formal debate framework (FORD) to conduct a three-stage debate among LLMs with real-world scenarios alignment: fair debate, mismatched debate, and roundtable debate. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, LLMs can effectively collaborate to reach a consensus …

A Comprehensive Evaluation Of Large Language Models On Legal Judgment Prediction, Ruihao Shui, Yixin Cao, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for domain-specific applications, such as the law domain. However, recent disputes over GPT-4’s law evaluation raise questions concerning their performance in real-world legal tasks. To systematically investigate their competency in the law, we design practical baseline solutions based on LLMs and test on the task of legal judgment prediction. In our solutions, LLMs can work alone to answer open questions or coordinate with an information retrieval (IR) system to learn from similar cases or solve simplified multi-choice questions. We show that similar cases and multi-choice options, namely label candidates, included in prompts …

Large Language Model Is Not A Good Few-Shot Information Extractor, But A Good Reranker For Hard Samples!, Yubo Ma, Yixin Cao, Yongchin Hong, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks. However, whether they are competitive few-shot solvers for information extraction (IE) tasks and surpass fine-tuned small Pre-trained Language Models (SLMs) remains an open problem. This paper aims to provide a thorough answer to this problem, and moreover, to explore an approach towards effective and economical IE systems that combine the strengths of LLMs and SLMs. Through extensive experiments on nine datasets across four IE tasks, we show that LLMs are not effective few-shot information extractors in general, given their unsatisfactory performance in most settings and the high latency and …

Benchmarking Foundation Models With Language-Model-As-An-Examiner, Yushi Bai, Jiahao Ying, Yixin Cao, Xin Lv, Yuze He, Xiaozhi Wang, Jifan Yu, Kaisheng Zeng, Yijia Xiao, Haozhe Lyu, Jiayin Zhang, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model’s ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans. Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets, however, we see two main issues within previous benchmarking pipelines, namely testing leakage and evaluation automation. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmarking framework, Language-Model-as-an-Examiner, where the LM serves as a knowledgeable examiner that formulates questions based on its knowledge and evaluates responses in a reference-free manner. Our framework allows for effortless extensibility …

Molca: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling With Cross-Modal Projector And Uni-Modal Adapter, Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Yanchen Luo, Hao Fei, Yixin Cao, Kenji Kawaguchi, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on various 1D text-related tasks. However, they inherently lack 2D graph perception — a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules’ topological structures. To bridge this gap, we propose MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter. MolCA enables an LM (i.e., Galactica) to understand both text- and graph-based molecular contents via the cross-modal projector. Specifically, the cross-modal projector is implemented as a QFormer to connect a graph encoder’s representation space and an LM’s text space. Further, MolCA employs a uni-modal adapter (i.e., LoRA) for the LM’s efficient …

Disentangling Transformer Language Models As Superposed Topic Models, Jia Peng Lim, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic Modelling is an established research area where the quality of a given topic is measured using coherence metrics. Often, we infer topics from Neural Topic Models (NTM) by interpreting their decoder weights, consisting of top-activated words projected from individual neurons. Transformer-based Language Models (TLM) similarly consist of decoder weights. However, due to its hypothesised superposition properties, the final logits originating from the residual path are considered uninterpretable. Therefore, we posit that we can interpret TLM as superposed NTM by proposing a novel weight-based, model-agnostic and corpus-agnostic approach to search and disentangle decoder-only TLM, potentially mapping individual neurons to multiple …

Wsdms: Debunk Fake News Via Weakly Supervised Detection Of Misinforming Sentences With Contextualized Social Wisdom, Ruichao Yang, Wei Gao, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Zhiwei Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, we witness the explosion of false and unconfirmed information (i.e., rumors) that went viral on social media and shocked the public. Rumors can trigger versatile, mostly controversial stance expressions among social media users. Rumor verification and stance detection are different yet relevant tasks. Fake news debunking primarily focuses on determining the truthfulness of news articles, which oversimplifies the issue as fake news often combines elements of both truth and falsehood. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify specific instances of misinformation within the articles. In this research, we investigate a novel task in the field of fake news …

A Black-Box Attack On Code Models Via Representation Nearest Neighbor Search, Jie Zhang, Wei Ma, Qiang Hu, Shangqing Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing methods for generating adversarial code examples face several challenges: limted availability of substitute variables, high verification costs for these substitutes, and the creation of adversarial samples with noticeable perturbations. To address these concerns, our proposed approach, RNNS, uses a search seed based on historical attacks to find potential adversarial substitutes. Rather than directly using the discrete substitutes, they are mapped to a continuous vector space using a pre-trained variable name encoder. Based on the vector representation, RNNS predicts and selects better substitutes for attacks. We evaluated the performance of RNNS across six coding tasks encompassing three programming languages: Java, …