Computer Sciences Commons^™

Democratic Training Against Universal Adversarial Perturbations, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Wei Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite their advances and success, real-world deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Universal adversarial perturbation, an inputagnostic attack, poses a serious threat for them to be deployed in security-sensitive systems. In this case, a single universal adversarial perturbation deceives the model on a range of clean inputs without requiring input-specific optimization, which makes it particularly threatening. In this work, we observe that universal adversarial perturbations usually lead to abnormal entropy spectrum in hidden layers, which suggests that the prediction is dominated by a small number of “feature” in such cases (rather than democratically by many …

Characterising Reproducibility Debt In Scientific Software: A Systematic Literature Review, Zara Hassan, Christoph Treude, Michael Norrish, Graham Williams, Alex Potanin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: In scientific software, the inability to reproduce results is often due to technical issues and challenges in recreating the full computational workflow from the original analysis. We conceptualise this problem as Reproducibility Debt (RpD). Much research has been performed to propose solutions to tackle these issues across various computational science disciplines. It is essential to identify and accumulate existing knowledge on reproducibility issues and state-of-the-art solutions so as to provide researchers and practitioners with information that enables further research activities and RpD management in practice. Objective: In the context of scientific software, we aim to characterise RpD by providing …

Prioritizing Speech Test Cases, Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Bowen Xu, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems gain widespread acceptance, there is a pressing need to rigorously test and enhance their performance. Nonetheless, the process of collecting and executing speech test cases is typically both costly and time-consuming. This presents a compelling case for the strategic prioritization of speech test cases, which consist of a piece of audio and the corresponding reference text. The central question we address is: In what sequence should speech test cases be collected and executed to identify the maximum number of errors at the earliest stage? In this study, we introduce PRiOritizing sPeecH tEsT …

Code Of Faith: Programming Spirituality In The Digital Age, Caleb Martin

Senior Honors Theses

With the increasing pervasiveness of technology in our daily lives, it is critical to consider the potential effects on an individual's religious practices and beliefs from software applications developed within a religious framework. This thesis delves into the relationship between software development and religious experiences, examining the manner in which the creation, operation, and application of religious technology can mold and impact an individual's spiritual development. This thesis aims to inform the implementation of technologies with a nonsecular application, ensuring that they are developed with a deep respect for the nuances of religious experience. The findings of this study will …

Scuzer: A Scheduling Optimization Fuzzer For Tvm, Xiangxiang Chen, Xingwei Lin, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Jiashui Wang, Wenhai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The concept of Deep Learning (DL) compiler was proposed to deploy DL models more efficiently on diverse hardware through optimization techniques. As one of the most popular DL compilers, TVM incorporates three levels (high-level, schedule, and low-level) of optimizations, which can inadvertently introduce code logic bugs and build failure bugs. Among these optimizations, scheduling optimization is the core component of DL compilers, which ensures the acceleration of models on all devices. However, the existing works only focus on the testing of high-level and low-level optimizations in TVM, fail to take the most important and challenging intermediate scheduling optimization layer into …

Gamescope, Jake Rankin, Luis Garza, Brain Lujan, Mauricio Rebaza Figueroa

Posters - 2025

Video games have grown exponentially since their debut in the late 20th century. Despite the widespread digitalization and advancements within the gaming community marked by a transition from physical discs to digital downloads and many more major improvements, the lack of an efficient, multipurpose application for reviews remains prevalent. When designing GameScope, we wanted to tackle the key problem of the absence of a multi-platform gaming review system. Gamers currently lack a popular platform to easily find game reviews and get personalized recommendations. Our aim is to create a space where gamers can share their experiences and explore new games …

Mente -Mental Health Tracking App, Vu Han

Posters - 2025

Mental health plays a crucial role in overall well-being, yet many digital tools in this space are either overly complex or lack usercentered design. Mente is a streamlined, web-based application created to support daily mental health engagement through simplicity and ease of use.

•Purpose: To provide a minimal, intuitive platform for users to reflect on their emotional well-being and develop healthier habits over time.

•Core Features:

• Mood tracking with visual trends

• Journaling for personal reflection

• Goal setting and progress tracking

• Health assessment for self-awareness

• Analytics for self-reflection •Design Focus: A clean, distraction-free interface that emphasizes …

Holdfast War Archives, Albert Mendez

Posters - 2025

Holdfast War Archives is a full-stack website designed for the competitive community of the 19th-century multiplayer roleplaying game, Holdfast Nations at War. This project caters to the North American (NA) melee competitive scene, offering tools to enhance player engagement, maintain records, track performance, and facilitate competitive matchmaking.

Applying Software Engineering Black-Box Methods For Testing Machine Learning Models, Timothy Elvira

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This dissertation proposes researching an approach to incorporate and align Software black-box testing methods into Machine Learning (ML) applications, specifically in the context of computer vision models. Typically, testing methods within Software Engineering (SE) encompass a range of test types that assess levels of a software system, such as Unit, Integration, Functional, and System testing [1]. The testing spectrum offers two perspectives on the system: black-box, where the system’s code is hidden, and white-box, where the system's code is exposed for testing. Software Quality pairs testing with requirements, in a many-to-one relationship, to ensure proper validation of the software system. …

Verifying Timed Properties Of Programs In Iot Nodes Using Parametric Time Petri Nets, Étienne André, Jean-Luc Béchennec, Sudipta Chattopadhyay, Sebastien Faucou, Didier Lime, Dylan Marinho, Olivier H. Roux, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The analysis of timed properties of programs is a complex task, as it is highly dependent on both the software and the hardware. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling with timed formal models the execution of programs, taking into account the micro-architecture of the machine on which it executes. We model both the program, at the instruction set architecture level, and the hardware, including the processor micro-architecture, using time Petri nets. Our implementation uses the ARM Cortex-M instruction set architecture and a hardware architecture representative of microcontrollers used in IoT nodes. The whole translation is fully automated …

Can Llms Replace Manual Annotation Of Software Engineering Artifacts?, Toufique Ahmed, Premkumar Devanbu, Christoph Treude, Michael Pradel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Experimental evaluations of software engineering innovations, e.g., tools and processes, often include human-subject studies as a component of a multi-pronged strategy to obtain greater generalizability of the findings. However, human-subject studies in our field are challenging, due to the cost and difficulty of finding and employing suitable subjects, ideally, professional programmers with varying degrees of experience. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have recently started to demonstrate human-level performance in several areas. This paper explores the possibility of substituting costly human subjects with much cheaper LLM queries in evaluations of code and code-related artifacts. We study this idea by applying six …

Dps: Design Pattern Summarisation Using Code Features, Najam Nazar, Sameer Sikka, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic summarisation has been used efficiently in recent years to condense texts, conversations, audio, code, and various other artefacts. A range of methods, from simple template-based summaries to complex machine learning techniques -- and more recently, large language models -- have been employed to generate these summaries. Summarising software design patterns is important because it helps developers quickly understand and reuse complex design concepts, thereby improving software maintainability and development efficiency. However, the generation of summaries for software design patterns has not yet been explored.Our approach utilises code features and JavaParser to parse the code and create a JSON representation. …

A Functional Software Reference Architecture For Llm-Integrated Systems, Alessio Bucaioni, Martin Weyssow, Junda He, Yunbo Lyu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The integration of large language models into software systems is transforming capabilities such as natural language understanding, decision-making, and autonomous task execution. However, the absence of a commonly accepted software reference architecture hinders systematic reasoning about their design and quality attributes. This gap makes it challenging to address critical concerns like privacy, security, modularity, and interoperability, which are increasingly important as these systems grow in complexity and societal impact. In this paper, we describe our emerging results for a preliminary functional reference architecture as a conceptual framework to address these challenges and guide the design, evaluation, and evolution of large …

Use Of Search Tools In Software Development: A Study Of Microservice-Based Team Projects, Yi Meng Lau, Christian Michael Koh, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Universities are increasingly integrating real-world projects into software engineering curricula to preparestudents for careers involving complex concepts like Microservices Architecture (MSA). Students frequentlystruggle with such concepts within limited class time and turn to various search tools and online resources for additional help. Search tools are also widely used in the software development industry. While search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, can provide quick solutions, they pose the risk of information overload. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, offer the advantage of delivering more precise answers. Studies have shown that LLMs can comprehend codes, assist in system architectural design, and …

Verification Of Bit-Flip Attacks Against Quantized Neural Networks, Yedi Zhang, Lei Huang, Pengfei Gao, Fu Song, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the rapidly evolving landscape of neural network security, the resilience of neural networks against bit-flip attacks (i.e., an attacker maliciously flips an extremely small amount of bits within its parameter storage memory system to induce harmful behavior), has emerged as a relevant area of research. Existing studies suggest that quantization may serve as a viable defense against such attacks. Recognizing the documented susceptibility of real-valued neural networks to such attacks and the comparative robustness of quantized neural networks (QNNs), in this work, we introduce BFAVerifier, the first verification framework designed to formally verify the absence of bit-flip attacks against …

Ada-Gen: Iterative And Incremental Generation Of Full-Stack Apps For Learning Agile/Devops Software Development Practices, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To learn Agile/DevOps practices effectively, students need to apply them in an actual software development project. This is challenging if students are mostly from non-computing backgrounds and they do not have time in the curriculum to learn programming and related tools. Therefore, it is important to help students who do not possess programming foundations to develop fully functional software during the process of learning Agile/DevOps concepts. We noted that existing low-code/no-code app development platforms have not been designed to teach Agile/DevOps practices. On the other hand, recent AI-based tools for code generation such as GitHub Copilot have been built mainly …

Ai And Prompt Engineering For Library Discovery Services, James Day

Publications

We have seen the rise of generative artificial intelligence in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide answers to users’ queries. Services such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have quickly become accepted and adopted in the research process. Now library vendors are adding artificial intelligence (AI) to their discovery services to allow for natural language queries to produce generative results. However, the AI model used for discovery services differs from normal LLMs in a significant way that has several positive benefits, but it affects how prompts are written. Library discovery services use a model called Retrieval- Augmented Generation …

Evaluating Software Development Agents: Patch Patterns, Code Quality, And Issue Complexity In Real-World Github Scenarios, Zhi Chen, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, AI-based software engineering has progressed from pre-trained models to advanced agentic workflows, with Software Development Agents representing the next major leap. These agents, capable of reasoning, planning, and interacting with external environments, offer promising solutions to complex software engineering tasks. However, while much research has evaluated code generated by large language models (LLMs), comprehensive studies on agent-generated patches, particularly in real-world settings, are lacking. This study addresses that gap by evaluating 4,892 patches from 10 top-ranked agents on 500 real-world GitHub issues from SWE-Bench Verified, focusing on their impact on code quality. Our analysis shows no single …

Adaptive Deviation Learning For Visual Anomaly Detection With Data Contamination, Aanindya Sundar Das, Guansong Pang, Monowar Bhuyan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual anomaly detection targets to detect images that notably differ from normal pattern, and it has found extensive application in identifying defective parts within the manufacturing industry. These anomaly detection paradigms predominantly focus on training detection models using only clean, unlabeled normal samples, assuming an absence of contamination; a condition often unmet in real-world scenarios. The performance of these methods significantly depends on the quality of the data and usually decreases when exposed to noise. We introduce a systematic adaptive method that employs deviation learning to compute anomaly scores end-to-end while addressing data contamination by assigning relative importance to the …

Cachealarm: Monitoring Sensitive Behaviors Of Android Apps Using Cache Side Channel, Jianwen Tian, Haoyu Ma, Debin Gao, Xiaohui Kuang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malware attack has been a serious threat to the security and privacy of both individual and corporation users of the Android platform. Business entities seek to protect themselves by means of monitoring privacy-related sensitive behaviors conducted on company-issued Android devices. However, due to Android’s own access control and privacy protection policies, this is difficult to be done with third-party apps using only normal privileges. Existing works proposed using side-channel readings from leaky APIs and system virtual files to speculate runtime app behaviors, which could be unreliable due to future system updates (that ban exploited resources), hardware jittering, etc. In this …

Adapting Knowledge Prompt Tuning For Enhanced Automated Program Repair, Xuemeng Cai, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to enhance software reliability by automatically generating bug-fixing patches. Recent work has improved the state-of-the-art of APR by fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs), such as CodeT5, for APR. However, the effectiveness of fine-tuning be-comes weakened in data scarcity scenarios, and data scarcity can be a common issue in practice, limiting fine-tuning performance. To alleviate this limitation, this paper adapts prompt tuning for enhanced APR and conducts a comprehensive study to evaluate its effectiveness in data scarcity scenarios, using three LLMs of different sizes and six diverse datasets across four programming languages. Prompt tuning rewrites …

Understanding The Oss Communities Of Deep Learning Frameworks: A Comparative Case Study Of Pytorch And Tensorflow, Yunqi Chen, Zhiyuan Wan, Yifei Zhuang, Ning Liu, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the past two decades, deep learning has received tremendous success in developing software systems across various domains. Deep learning frameworks have been proposed to facilitate the development of such software systems, among which, PyTorch and TensorFlow stand out as notable examples. Considerable attention focuses on exploring software engineering practices and addressing diverse technical aspects in developing and deploying deep learning frameworks and software systems. Despite these efforts, little is known about the open source software communities involved in the development of deep learning frameworks. In this article, we perform a comparative investigation into the open source software communities of …

Neurovig: Integrating Event Cameras For Resource-Efficient Video Grounding, Dulanga Weerakoon, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Joo Hwee Lim, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) - the task of identifying the target object in the field-of-view that the language instruction refers to - is a fundamental vision-language task. Current STVG approaches typically utilize feeds from an RGB camera that is assumed to be always-on and process the video frames using complex neural network pipelines. As a result they often impose prohibitive system overheads (energy latency) on pervasive devices. To address this we propose NeuroViG with two key innovations: (a) leveraging on event streams from a low-power neuromorphic event camera sensor to perform selective triggering of the more energy-hungry RGB camera for …

Revisiting Sentiment Analysis For Software Engineering In The Era Of Large Language Models, Ting Zhang, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Thung Ferdian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development involves collaborative interactions where stakeholders express opinions across various platforms. Recognizing the sentiments conveyed in these interactions is crucial for the effective development and ongoing maintenance of software systems. For software products, analyzing the sentiment of user feedback, e.g., reviews, comments, and forum posts can provide valuable insights into user satisfaction and areas for improvement. This can guide the development of future updates and features. However, accurately identifying sentiments in software engineering datasets remains challenging.This study investigates bigger large language models (bLLMs) in addressing the labeled data shortage that hampers fine-tuned smaller large language models (sLLMs) in software …

Tla+ For All: Model Checking In A Python Notebook, Konstantin Laufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

TLA+ is widely recognized for its effectiveness in specifying and verifying concurrent and distributed systems. However, for educators and practitioners, barriers to adoption include installation complexity and tooling setup. In the proposed presentation, we demonstrate a lightweight, easily shareable, and fully reproducible approach to running TLA+ in a Python notebook hosted on Google Colab without requiring new tools or custom Jupyter kernel development. By creating an environment where users can experiment with TLA+ models instantly, we lower these barriers and demonstrate the suitability for education and outreach.

Towards Resource-Efficient Reactive And Proactive Auto-Scaling For Microservice Architectures, Hussain Ahmad, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner, Claudia Szabo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservice architectures have become increasingly popular in both academia and industry, providing enhanced agility, elasticity, and maintainability in software development and deployment. To simplify scaling operations in microservice architectures, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes feature Horizontal Pod Auto-scalers (HPAs) designed to adjust the resources of microservices to accommodate fluctuating workloads. However, existing HPAs are not suitable for resource-constrained environments, as they make scaling decisions based on the individual resource capacities of microservices, leading to service unavailability, resource mismanagement, and financial losses. Furthermore, the inherent delay in initializing and terminating microservice pods hinders HPAs from timely responding to workload fluctuations, …

Ptm4tag+: Tag Recommendation Of Stack Overflow Posts With Pre-Trained Models, Junda He, Bowen Xu, Zhou Yang, Donggyun Han, Chengran Yang, Jiakun Liu, Zhipeng Zhao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow is one of the most influential Software Question & Answer (SQA) websites, hosting millions of programming-related questions and answers. Tags play a critical role in efficiently organizing the contents on Stack Overflow and are vital to support various site operations, such as querying relevant content. Poorly chosen tags often lead to issues such as tag ambiguity and tag explosion. Therefore, a precise and accurate automated tag recommendation technique is needed. Inspired by the recent success of pre-trained models (PTMs) in natural language processing (NLP), we present PTM4Tag+, a tag recommendation framework for Stack Overflow posts that utilize PTMs …

Bridging Expert Knowledge With Deep Learning Techniques For Just-In-Time Defect Prediction, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction aims to automatically predict whether a commit is defective or not, and has been widely studied in recent years. In general, most studies can be classified into two categories: 1) simple models using traditional machine learning classifiers with hand-crafted features, and 2) complex models using deep learning techniques to automatically extract features from commit contents. Hand-crafted features used by simple models are based on expert knowledge but may not fully represent the semantic meaning of the commits. On the other hand, deep learning-based features used by complex models represent the semantic meaning of commits but may …

Wf-Ppg: A Wrist-Finger Dual-Channel Dataset For Studying The Impact Of Contact Pressure On Ppg Morphology, Matthew Yiwen Ho, Hung Manh Pham, Aaqib Saeed, Dong Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a simple optical technique widely used in wearable devices for continuous cardiac health monitoring. However, the quality of PPG signals, particularly their morphology, is influenced by the contact pressure between the skin and the sensor. This variability in signal quality complicates complex tasks that rely on high-quality signals, such as blood pressure and heart rate variability estimation, making them less reliable or even impossible. To address this issue, we present a novel dataset (termed WF-PPG) comprising PPG signals from the wrist measured under varying contact pressures, along with high-quality PPG signals from the fingertip captured simultaneously. Data …

The Role Of Surprisal In Issue Trackers, James Caddy, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner, Earl T. Barr

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Software development creates and relies on a large volume of information, yet the volume of this information can make it challenging for developers to maintain an overview of all goings-on that a team and external actors contribute to a project. We posit that unexpected or “surprising” events could serve as important signposts amidst this information overload. These unexpected events may indicate underlying anomalies or emergent situations that require immediate attention. To explore this premise, our study leverages the concept of ‘surprisal’ from information theory to identify and quantify these unusual occurrences from the issues and pull requests of popular …