Digital Commons Network^™

Efficient And Green Large Language Models For Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision, And The Road Ahead, Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable capabilities in various software engineering tasks, spurring the rapid growth of the Large Language Models for Software Engineering (LLM4SE) area. However, limited attention has been paid to developing efficient LLM4SE techniques that demand minimal computational cost, time, and memory resources, as well as green LLM4SE solutions that reduce energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. This article aims to redirect the focus of the research community toward the efficiency and greenness of LLM4SE, while also sharing potential research directions to achieve this goal. It commences with a brief overview of the significance …

Deepvec: State-Vector Aware Test Case Selection For Enhancing Recurrent Neural Network, Zhonghao Jiang, Meng Yan, Li Huang, Weifeng Sun, Chao Liu, Song Sun, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have realized significant achievements across various application domains. There is no doubt that testing and enhancing a pre-trained DNN that has been deployed in an application scenario is crucial, because it can reduce the failures of the DNN. DNN-driven software testing and enhancement require large amounts of labeled data. The high cost and inefficiency caused by the large volume of data of manual labeling, and the time consumption of testing all cases in real scenarios are unacceptable. Therefore, test case selection technologies are proposed to reduce the time cost by selecting and only labeling representative test …

Do Government Benefit Programs Reduce Child Labor?: Causal Evidence From The Midday Meal Scheme In India, Vardaan Chawla, Tomoki Fujii, Arpita Khanna, Ray Rohan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study evaluates the impact of the midday meal program in India on the prevalence of child labor for upper primary school going children. The staggered implementation of the largest school feeding program in the world across states provides exogenous variation in exposure. Using the nationally representative National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, we find that exposure to the program reduced prevalence of child labor by 47 percent relative to children in never-treated states, with no significant difference in impact between boys and girls. The effects were primarily driven by a decline in household labor supply, especially performance of household …

Ai Governance And Algorithmic Auditing In Financial Institutions: Lessons From Singapore, Nydia Remolina Leon

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper examines the role of algorithmic auditing as a mechanism for responsible AI development and deployment in the financial sector, with a particular focus on Singapore’s regulatory and institutional initiatives. Against the backdrop of fragmented global artificial intelligence (AI) governance frameworks, the study analyses how Singapore has developed operational tools — such as the Veritas Toolkit, AI Verify, Project Moonshot and Project Mindforge — that go beyond abstract ethical principles to provide measurable, use-case-specific standards for auditing AI systems. These initiatives contribute to standardising audit practices, enhancing transparency and bridging trust gaps between financial institutions, regulators and stakeholders. The …

On Lexicographic Proof Rules For Probabilistic Termination, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Petr Novotný, Jiří Zárevucký, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the almost-sure (a.s.) termination problem for probabilistic programs, which are a stochastic extension of classical imperative programs. Lexicographic ranking functions provide a sound and practical approach for termination of non-probabilistic programs, and their extension to probabilistic programs is achieved via lexicographic ranking supermartingales (LexRSMs). However, LexRSMs introduced in the previous work have a limitation that impedes their automation: all of their components have to be non-negative in all reachable states. This might result in a LexRSM not existing even for simple terminating programs. Our contributions are twofold. First, we introduce a generalization of LexRSMs that allows for some …

Chatgpt’S Performance Evaluation In Spreadsheets Modeling To Inform Assessments Redesign, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: Increasingly, students are using ChatGPT to assist them in learning and even completing their assessments, raising concerns of academic integrity and loss of critical thinking skills. Many articles suggested educators to redesign assessments which are more “Generative-AI-resistant” and to focus on assessing students on higher order thinking skills. However, there is a lack of articles that attempt to quantify assessments at different cognitive levels to provide empirical study insights on ChatGPT’s performance at different levels, which will affect how educators redesign their assessments.Objectives: Educators need new information on how well ChatGPT performs to redesign future assessments to assess their …

Government Guidance Funds And Corporate Innovation: An Empirical Examination Based On Hangzhou, Huaping Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Since the establishment of China's first market-oriented government guidance fund in 2002, these funds have actively played a supportive role in addressing market failures and promoting the innovative development of technology enterprises by reducing information asymmetry in the primary equity market, releasing positive signals, and alleviating financing constraints. With the establishment and development of China's multi-tiered government guidance fund system, related research has gradually emerged. However, current studies primarily explore whether government guidance funds have fulfilled their role in fostering innovation from a macro perspective, with limited in-depth discussion from a micro-level on how these funds should conduct their investment …

To Mitigate Or Adapt? A Construal Level Perspective On Agenda Setting For Climate Action, Shu Tian Ng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Climate change is no longer a distant threat, but a present crisis—making the question of how we act timelier than whether we act. This research investigates how people evaluate different approaches to climate action—specifically, mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (coping with impacts)—through the lens of the Construal Level Theory (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2010). Across three studies, I examined how perceptions of desirability and feasibility influence preferences for different climate action strategies. Study 1 found that, to laypeople, mitigation was perceived as more desirable while adaptation was perceived as more feasible. Study 2 attempted to manipulate individuals’ …

Evaluation Of Pre-Trained Vision Language Models In Challenging Contexts, Kankan Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid advancement and proliferation of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have heralded a new era in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), opening up unprecedented opportunities and challenges alike. This dissertation sets forth on an ambitious and comprehensive journey to critically evaluate the performance and limitations of pre-trained VLMs, particularly in complex and challenging contexts that test the bounds of their capabilities. Our focus is twofold: to rigorously assess the extent of bias embedded in these models, and to meticulously scrutinize their reasoning abilities, highlighting parallels and disparities between machine and human cognition.

We initiate our exploration with a targeted …

Hdwsa2: A Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet Supporting Stealth Address And Signature Aggregation, Xin Yin, Zhen Liu, Guomin Yang, Guoxing Chen, Haojin Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet (HDW) and Stealth Address (SA) are widely used in cryptocurrency communities due to their functionality and security. In the preliminary version of this work (ESORICS 2022), we formally define the syntax and security models of Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet supporting Stealth Address (HDWSA), capturing the functionality and security requirements imposed by the practice in cryptocurrency. We propose a concrete HDWSA construction and prove its security in the random oracle model. Note that when applied in blockchain, in practice, signature aggregation could reduce the cost of computation, storage, and communication dramatically. In this full version, we develop HDWSA definition …

Rotation-Adaptive Point Cloud Domain Generalization Via Intricate Orientation Learning, Bangzhen Liu, Chenxi Zheng, Xuemiao Xu, Cheng Xu, Huaidong Zhang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The vulnerability of 3D point cloud analysis to unpredictable rotations poses an open yet challenging problem: orientation-aware 3D domain generalization. Cross-domain robustness and adaptability of 3D representations are crucial but not easily achieved through rotation augmentation. Motivated by the inherent advantages of intricate orientations in enhancing generalizability, we propose an innovative rotation-adaptive domain generalization framework for 3D point cloud analysis. Our approach aims to alleviate orientational shifts by leveraging intricate samples in an iterative learning process. Specifically, we identify the most challenging rotation for each point cloud and construct an intricate orientation set by optimizing intricate orientations. Subsequently, we employ …

Worldcuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark For Multilingual And Multicultural Visual Question Answering On Global Cuisines, Genta Indra Winata, Et. Al

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with culture-specific knowledge, particularly in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. To evaluate their understanding of such knowledge, we introduce WorldCuisines, a massive-scale benchmark for multilingual and multicultural, visually grounded language understanding. This benchmark includes a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects, spanning 9 language families and featuring over 1 million data points, making it the largest multicultural VQA benchmark to date. It includes tasks for identifying dish names and their origins. We provide evaluation datasets in two sizes (12k and 60k instances) alongside …

On Learning Informative Trajectory Embeddings For Imitation, Classification And Regression, Zichang Ge, Changyu Chen, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In real-world sequential decision making tasks like autonomousdriving, robotics, and healthcare, learning from observed state-action trajectories is critical for tasks like imitation, classification,and clustering. For example, self-driving cars must replicate humandriving behaviors, while robots and healthcare systems benefitfrom modeling decision sequences, whether or not they come fromexpert data. Existing trajectory encoding methods often focus onspecific tasks or rely on reward signals, limiting their ability togeneralize across domains and tasks.Inspired by the success of embedding models like CLIP andBERT in static domains, we propose a novel method for embeddingstate-action trajectories into a latent space that captures the skillsand competencies in the …

Nature Of Smartphone Use: The Underlying Mechanisms Between Nature Exposure And Urge To Use Social Media, Jia Yi Aw

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The urge to use social media is prevalent and costly in modern society. However, little has been researched on how nature exposure can manage urge to use social media to combat its negative consequences. It was hypothesized that nature exposure through Instagram posts in Study 1 and nature park in Study 2 reduces urge to use social media. The underlying mechanisms were tested in a theory-driven serial mediation model, in which positive emotions, attention restoration and self-regulation served as serial mediators. Study 1 employed Instagram experimental manipulation in a laboratory setting by randomly assigning 206 undergraduates to view Instagram accounts …

Essays On Financial Econometrics, Yuexuan Ren

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of two papers that contribute to the theory of estimation, inference, and prediction using high-frequency financial data. In the first chapter, time-varying betas from return regressions, commonly used to measure systematic financial market risk, are studied using high-frequency data. A novel econometric framework is introduced for the nonparametric estimation of these betas. The optimal finite-sample inference, in a well-defined sense, is enabled by the local Gaussian property of a generic continuous-time benchmark model under the fixed-k framework. Furthermore, a uniform functional inference theory for spot regressions is developed. The proposed methodology is broadly applicable in empirical settings, …

Tailoring Transformer-Based Deep Learning For Code Generation And Translation, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Software is increasingly pervasive in modern society, making the effective translation of human intent into code essential. Novice programmers often struggle with domain-specific code due to limited background knowledge, while experienced developers face challenges in maintaining evolving largescale codebases. Traditional pattern-based approaches address these issues, but such approaches are task-specific and require significant adaptation for different tasks. Transformer-based models offer a more flexible alternative, as the same architecture can be tailored for diverse programming tasks.

This dissertation investigates how Transformer-based models can be customized for various code generation and translation tasks. First, it introduces Transformer-based approaches that assist end-users with …

Empirical Program Evaluation In Operations Management, Kai Tian

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation focuses on advancing and applying empirical program evaluation methodologies in Operations Management (OM), defining it not as mere prediction but as rigorously establishing causal effects of interventions. Chapter 2 lays the theoretical groundwork, defining empirical program evaluation within OM, detailing its alignment with causal inference, and outlining both classical econometric techniques and emerging Causal Machine Learning (CML) approaches for mitigating endogeneity. Building on this foundation, Chapter 3 presents an empirical application, evaluating the causal impact of a customer targeting strategy using live-streaming advertisements, employing Propensity Score Matching (PSM) in conjunction with linear regression models to derive actionable insights …

Multiobjective Linear Ensembles For Robust And Sparse Training Of Few-Bit Neural Networks, Ambrogio Maria Bernardelli, Stefano Gualandi, Simone Milanesi, Hoong Chuin Lau, Neil Yorke-Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Training neural networks (NNs) using combinatorial optimization solvers has gained attention in recent years. In low-data settings, the use of state-of-the-art mixed integer linear programming solvers, for instance, has the potential to exactly train an NN while avoiding computing-intensive training and hyperparameter tuning and simultaneously training and sparsifying the network. We study the case of few-bit discrete-valued neural networks, both binarized neural networks (BNNs) whose values are restricted to ±1 and integer-valued neural networks (INNs) whose values lie in the range {−P,…,P}. Few-bit NNs receive increasing recognition because of their lightweight architecture and ability to run on low-power devices: for …

Relation Prediction In Knowledge Graphs: A Self-Organizing Neural Network Approach, Budhitama Subagdja, Shanthoshigaa D, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graphs (KGs) in specialized domains frequently suffer from incomplete information. While current relation prediction methods for KG completion typically rely on neural network-based representation learning, we present KG2ART---a novel self-organizing neural network that employs a fundamentally different approach. Instead of learning distributed representations, KG2ART encodes relation triples of knowledge graphs explicitly and performs parallel inference over the graph structure through bidirectional interactions between bottom-up activations and top-down pattern matching. Our comprehensive evaluation across five diverse KGs (Nations, UMLS, Kinship, CoDEx-M, and a jet engine technical KG) demonstrates that KG2ART consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (TuckER, ComplEX, RESCAL, ConvE, CompGCN) in …

Disambiguart: A Neural-Based Inference Model For Knowledge Graph Disambiguation, Budhitama Subagdja, D. Shanthoshigaa, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One main challenge in constructing a knowledge graph (KG) is to deal with ambiguity. Specifically, an entity in the graph can be assigned with multiple meanings while two or more entities considered to have different meanings may actually be the same. Assigning an entity with the correct meaning may involve re-evaluation of its relevant contexts. This costly operation typically involves searching for other similar entities within the KG such that the context can be determined. In this paper, a new model called DisambiguART is proposed leveraging multi-channel matching and inference in a self-organizing neural network for sense disambiguation in knowledge …

Enhancing Deliberativeness: Evaluating The Impact Of Multimodal Reflection Nudges, Shun Yi Yeo, Zhuoqun Jiang, Anthony Tang, Simon Tangi Perrault

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nudging participants with text-based reflective nudges enhances deliberation quality on online deliberation platforms. The effectiveness of multimodal reflective nudges, however, remains largely unexplored. Given the multi-sensory nature of human perception, incorporating diverse modalities into self-reflection mechanisms has the potential to better support various reflective styles. This paper explores how presenting reflective nudges of different types (direct: persona and indirect: storytelling) in different modalities (text, image, video and audio) affects deliberation quality. We conducted two user studies with 20 and 200 participants respectively. The first study identifies the preferred modality for each type of reflective nudges, revealing that text is most …

Creating Talking Points For Client Advisers At Banks To Promote Sustainable Investing, Wewe Zi Yi, Pradeep Varakantham, Alan Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors have become key nonfinancial factors for investors to evaluate companies with respect to understanding material risks and growth opportunities. While not mandatory, companies are providing ESG reports that outline progress in different ESG metrics (six broad metrics and 15 specific ones). Client advisers (CAs) read these reports to identify key metrics of interest to investors. Given the number of companies and investment products, however, it is not feasible for CAs to read all the reports, which can sometimes run into tens or hundreds of pages). The authors have developed multiple frameworks building on leading …

Prompting An Embodied Ai Agent: How Embodiment And Multimodal Signaling Affects Prompting Behaviour, Tianyi Zhang, Colin Au Yeung, Emily Aurelia, Yuki Onishi, Neil Chulpongsatorn, Jiannan Li, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current voice agents wait for a user to complete their verbal instruction before responding; yet, this is misaligned with how humans engage in everyday conversational interaction, where interlocutors use multimodal signaling (e.g. nodding, grunting, or looking at referred to objects) to ensure conversational grounding. We designed an embodied VR agent that exhibits multimodal signaling behaviors in response to situated prompts, by turning its head, or by visually highlighting objects being discussed or referred to. We explore how people prompt this agent to design and manipulate the objects in a VR scene. Through a Wizard of Oz study, we found that …

Quantitative Runtime Monitoring Of Ethereum Transaction Attacks, Xinyao Xu, Ziyu Mao, Jianzhong Su, Xingwei Lin, David Basin, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid growth of decentralized applications, while revolutionizing financial transactions, has created an attractive target for malicious attacks. Existing approaches to detecting attacks often rely on predefined rules or simplistic and overly-specialized models, which lack the flexibility to handle the wide spectrum of diverse and dynamically changing attack types. To address this challenge, we present a general and extensible framework, MoE (Monitoring Ethereum), that leverages runtime verification to detect a wide range of attacks on Ethereum. MoE features an expressive attack modeling language, based on Metric First-order Temporal Logic (MFOTL), that can formalize a wide range of attacks. We integrate …

Tensorjsfuzz: Effective Testing Of Web-Based Deep Learning Frameworks Via Input-Constraint Extraction, Lili Quan, Xiaofei Xie, Qianyu Guo, Lingxiao Jiang, Sen Chen, Junjie Wang, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW '25) took place from April 28 to May 2, 2025, in the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Australia. Its logo, featuring the Sydney Harbour Bridge, symbolizes the core "connecting" function of the Web. Formerly known as the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), this event originated at CERN in 1994 and has long served as the premier venue for presenting and discussing research, development, standards, and applications related to the Web.The 2025 ACM Web Conference (WWW'25) took place from April 28 to May 2, 2025, in the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Australia. Its …

Decictor: Towards Evaluating The Robustness Of Decision-Making In Autonomous Driving Systems, Mingfei Cheng, Xiaofei Xie, Yuan Zhou, Junjie Wang, Guozhu Meng, Kairui Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous Driving System (ADS) testing is crucial in ADS development, with the current primary focus being on safety. However, the evaluation of non-safety-critical performance, particularly the ADS's ability to make optimal decisions and produce optimal paths for autonomous vehicles (AVs), is also vital to ensure the intelligence and reduce risks of AVs. Currently, there is little work dedicated to assessing the robustness of ADSs' path-planning decisions (PPDs), i.e., whether an ADS can maintain the optimal PPD after an insignificant change in the environment. The key challenges include the lack of clear oracles for assessing PPD optimality and the difficulty in …

Specgen: Automated Generation Of Formal Program Specifications Via Large Language Models, Lezhi Ma, Shangqing Liu, Yi Li, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the software development process, formal program specifications play a crucial role in various stages, including requirement analysis, software testing, and verification. However, manually crafting formal program specifications is rather difficult, making the job time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, it is even more challenging to write specifications that correctly and comprehensively describe the semantics of complex programs. To reduce the burden on software developers, automated specification generation methods have emerged. However, existing methods usually rely on predefined templates or grammar, making them struggle to accurately describe the behavior and functionality of complex real-world programs. To tackle this challenge, we introduce SpecGen, …

Hello Again! Llm-Powered Personalized Agent For Long-Term Dialogue, Hao Li, Chenghao Yang, An Zhang, Yang Deng, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open-domain dialogue systems have seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, most existing dialogue systems predominantly focus on brief single-session interactions, neglecting the real-world demands for long-term companionship and personalized interactions with chatbots. Crucial to addressing this real-world need are event summary and persona management, which enable reasoning for appropriate long-term dialogue responses. Recent progress in the human-like cognitive and reasoning capabilities of LLMs suggests that LLM-based agents could significantly enhance automated perception, decision-making, and problem-solving. In response to this potential, we introduce a model-agnostic framework, the Long-term Dialogue Agent (LD-Agent), which incorporates three independently …

Gamba: Marry Gaussian Splatting With Mamba For Single-View 3d Reconstruction, Qiuhong Shen, Zike Wu, Xuanyu Yi, Pan Zhou, Hanwang Zhang, Shuicheng Yan, Xinchao Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We tackle the challenge of efficiently reconstructing a 3D asset from a single image at millisecond speed. Existing methods for single-image 3D reconstruction are primarily based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) with Neural 3D representations. Despite promising results, these approaches encounter practical limitations due to lengthy optimizations and significant memory consumption. In this work, we introduce Gamba, an end-to-end 3D reconstruction model from a single-view image, emphasizing two main insights: (1) Efficient Backbone Design: introducing a Mamba-based GambaFormer network to model 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstruction as sequential prediction with linear scalability of token length, thereby accommodating a substantial number …

Building Bridges Across Papua New Guinea’S Digital Divide In Growing The Ict Industry, Marc Cheong, Sankwi Abuzo, Hideaki Hata, Priscilla Kevin, Winifred Kula, Benson Mirou, Christoph Treude, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an emerging tech society with an opportunity to overcome geographic and social boundaries, in order to engage with the global market. However, the current tech landscape, dominated by Big Tech in Silicon Valley and other multinational companies in the Global North, tends to overlook the requirements of emerging economies such as PNG. This is becoming more obvious as issues such as algorithmic bias (in tech product deployments) and the digital divide (as in the case of non-affordable commercial software) are affecting PNG users. The Open Source Software (OSS) movement, based on extant research, is seen …