Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

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 …

Dissecting Global Search: A Simple Yet Effective Method To Boost Individual Discrimination Testing And Repair, Lili Quan, Tianlin Li, Xiaofei Xie, Zhenpeng Chen, Sen Chen, Lingxiao Jiang, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Learning (DL) has achieved significant success in socially critical decision-making applications but often exhibits unfair behaviors, raising social concerns. Among these unfair behaviors, individual discrimination-examining inequalities between instance pairs with identical profiles differing only in sensitive attributes such as gender, race, and age-is extremely socially impactful. Existing methods have made significant and commendable efforts in testing individual discrimination before deployment. However, their efficiency and effectiveness remain limited, particularly when evaluating relatively fairer models. It remains unclear which phase of the existing testing framework (global or local) is the primary bottleneck limiting performance. Facing the above issues, we first identify …

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, …

Scenario-Driven And Context-Aware Automated Accessibility Testing For Android Apps, Yuxin Zhang, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Zibo Liu, Lingling Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile accessibility is increasingly important nowadays as it enables people with disabilities to use mobile applications to perform daily tasks. Ensuring mobile accessibility not only benefits those with disabilities but also enhances the user experience for all users, making applications more intuitive and user-friendly. Although numerous tools are available for testing and detecting accessibility issues in Android applications, a large number of false negatives and false positives persist due to limitations in the existing approaches, i.e., low coverage of UI scenarios and lack of consideration of runtime context. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a scenario-driven exploration …

Flexfl: Flexible And Effective Fault Localization With Open-Source Large Language Models, Chuyang Xu, Zhongxin Liu, Xiaoxue Ren, Gehao Zhang, Ming Liang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fault localization (FL) targets identifying bug locations within a software system, which can enhance debugging efficiency and improve software quality. Due to the impressive code comprehension ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), a few studies have proposed to leverage LLMs to locate bugs, i.e., LLM-based FL, and demonstrated promising performance. However, first, these methods are limited in flexibility. They rely on bug-triggering test cases to perform FL and cannot make use of other available bug-related information, e.g., bug reports. Second, they are built upon proprietary LLMs, which are, although powerful, confronted with risks in data privacy. To address these limitations, …

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 …

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.

Computing In The Commonwealth: Specialized Education In Computer Science And Information Technology For High School Students In Virginia – An Environmental Scan, Amy Corning, Jonathan D. Becker, Jon Graham, James Carrigan, Keisha Tennessee

ICRE Publications

Over the past two decades, Virginia has invested substantially in STEM education, in part through specialized programs focused on computer science and information technology (CS/IT). This study represents the first effort to identify Virginia’s specialized secondary CS/IT programs and examine them collectively. Findings from the statewide environmental scan indicate that the programs are delivered through a wide variety of institutional structures, including Governor’s STEM Academies, Governor’s Schools, specialty centers, and academies, but most often through Career and Technical Education (CTE) centers. Programs tend to be concentrated in metropolitan areas, and some rural divisions may not be served. The programs provide …

Towards Smart Farming: Image-Based Crop Health Assessment And Disease Diagnosis Using Deep Learning Techniques, Kristina Botova

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Accurate crop monitoring is essential for optimizing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. This study presents a comprehensive deep learning framework for image crop type recognition, health status prediction, and disease detection using multiple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The proposed approach uses open-source datasets consisting of five crop types (apple, corn, grape, potato, tomato), varying health conditions, and common diseases. By deploying specialized CNN architecture focused on each task, the system achieves a high accuracy of 99.25% in classifying crop types, identifying health status, and detecting specific diseases. Compared to a single CNN model, the use of the proposed …

Divlog: Log Parsing With Prompt Enhanced In-Context Learning, Junjielong Xu, Ruichun Yang, Yintong Huo, Chengyu Zhang, Pinjia He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Log parsing, which involves log template extraction from semistructured logs to produce structured logs, is the first and the most critical step in automated log analysis. However, current log parsers suffer from limited effectiveness for two reasons. First, traditional data-driven log parsers solely rely on heuristics or handcrafted features designed by domain experts, which may not consistently perform well on logs from diverse systems. Second, existing supervised log parsers require model tuning, which is often limited to fixed training samples and causes sub-optimal performance across the entire log source. To address this limitation, we propose DivLog, an effective log parsing …

Elevating Automated Software Maintenance Tasks With Large Language Models, Xin Zhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Software engineering involves many tasks across different phases such as requirements, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Among them, software maintenance is a crucial phase, typically accounting for more than half of the software life cycle's duration.
To boost developer productivity, in recent years, numerous research endeavors in software engineering have sought to automate certain software maintenance tasks through the application of machine learning techniques.
Since 2020, the emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) of code has opened new avenues for enhancing automated solutions in software maintenance.
This dissertation presents a series of works aimed at advancing automated solutions for …

Wip: An Engaging Undergraduate Intro To Model Checking In Software Engineering Using Tla+, Konstantin Laufer, Gunda Mertin, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Background: In this Innovative Practice Work in Progress, we present our initial efforts to integrate formal methods, with a focus on model-checking specifications written in Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA⁺), into computer science education, targeting undergraduate juniors/seniors and graduate students. Many safety-critical systems and services crucially depend on correct and reliable behavior. Formal methods can play a key role in ensuring correct and safe system behavior, yet remain underutilized in educational and industry contexts.

Aims: We aim to (1) qualitatively assess the state of formal methods in computer science programs, (2) construct level-appropriate examples that could be included …

Interoperability In Deep Learning: A User Survey And Failure Analysis Of Onnx Model Converters, Purvish Jajal, Wenxin Jiang, Arav Tewari, Erik Kocinare, Joseph Woo, Anusha Sarraf, Yung-Hsiang Lu, George Thiruvathukal, James C. Davis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Software engineers develop, fine-tune, and deploy deep learning (DL) models using a variety of development frameworks and runtime environments. DL model converters move models between frameworks and to runtime environments. Conversion errors compromise model quality and disrupt deployment. However, the failure characteristics of DL model converters are unknown, adding risk when using DL interoperability technologies. This paper analyzes failures in DL model converters. We survey software engineers about DL interoperability tools, use cases, and pain points (N=92). Then, we characterize failures in model converters associated with the main interoperability tool, ONNX (N=200 issues in PyTorch and TensorFlow). Finally, we formulate …

How Do Preservice Teachers Learn To Teach Integrated Computational Thinking?: Evidence From Planning, Enactment, And Reflection, Rachael Dektor, Samuel Severance, Kip Téllez

Journal of Computer Science Integration

This study examines pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) beliefs and understandings about computational thinking (CT) integration and lesson implementation over time. Utilizing a design-based research approach, 3 PSTs led the co-design of integrated CT lessons with support from researchers and enacted these CT integrated lessons with K-5 students. All PSTs participated in a whole-group CT workshop and engaged in one-on-one lesson design sessions with a researcher. We utilized a grounded theory approach to qualitatively analyze pre-surveys, semi-structured interviews, and video data of three PSTs enacting their lessons. We found that PSTs’ initial beliefs about CT instruction – including the importance of it …

A Survey Of Practical Haskell: Parsing, Interpreting, And Testing, Parker Landon

Honors Projects

Strongly typed pure functional programming languages like Haskell have historically been confined to academia as vehicles for programming language research. While features of functional programming have greatly influenced mainstream programming languages, the imperative programming style remains pervasive in practical software development. This paper illustrates the practical utility of Haskell and pure functional programming by exploring “hson,” a scripting language for processing JSON developed in Haskell. After introducing the relevant features of Haskell to the unfamiliar reader, this paper reveals how hson leverages functional programming to implement parsing, interpreting, and testing. By showcasing how Haskell’s language features enable the creation of …

Program Analysis Of C For Conversion To Memory-Safe Rust, Dylan Cassidy

Honors Scholar Theses

C is a memory-unsafe language, which can cause software security issues. Rust is a more recent high-performance language that has memory-safe features, which motivates developers to move software to Rust. However, given the large existing C codebase, this is a tedious task, and current approaches result in memory-unsafe blocks of code remaining unsafe after conversion. We seek to use program analysis techniques to create software that identifies blocks of C code that could be safely converted to memory-safe Rust, despite using seemingly memory- unsafe access patterns. We performed manual translation of functions within the libGeoIP C library to Rust, ensuring …

Machine Learning: Face Recognition, Mohammed E. Amin

Publications and Research

This project explores the cutting-edge intersection of machine learning (ML) and face recognition (FR) technology, utilizing the OpenCV library to pioneer innovative applications in real-time security and user interface enhancement. By processing live video feeds, our system encodes visual inputs and employs advanced face recognition algorithms to accurately identify individuals from a database of photos. This integration of machine learning with OpenCV not only showcases the potential for bolstering security systems but also enriches user experiences across various technological platforms. Through a meticulous examination of unique facial features and the application of sophisticated ML algorithms and neural networks, our project …

Comparative Predictive Analysis Of Stock Performance In The Tech Sector, Asaad Sendi

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study compares the performance of deep learning models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Transformer, in predicting stock prices across five companies (AAPL, CSCO, META, MSFT, and TSLA) from July 2019 to July 2023. Key findings reveal that GRU models generally exhibit the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE), indicating higher precision, particularly notable for CSCO with a remarkably low MAE. While LSTM models often show slightly higher MAE values, they outperform Transformer models in capturing broader trends and variance in stock prices, as evidenced by higher R-squared (R2) values. Transformer models generally exhibit higher MAE …

Unveiling Code Pre-Trained Models: Investigating Syntax And Semantics Capacities, Wei Ma, Shangqing Liu, Mengjie Zhao, Xiaofei Xie, Wenhang Wang, Qiang Hu, Jie Zhang, Liu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code models have made significant advancements in code intelligence by encoding knowledge about programming languages. While previous studies have explored the capabilities of these models in learning code syntax, there has been limited investigation on their ability to understand code semantics. Additionally, existing analyses assume the number of edges between nodes at the abstract syntax tree (AST) is related to syntax distance, and also often require transforming the high-dimensional space of deep learning models to a low-dimensional one, which may introduce inaccuracies. To study how code models represent code syntax and semantics, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of 7 code …

Large Language Models For Qualitative Research In Software Engineering: Exploring Opportunities And Challenges, Muneera Bano, Rashina Hoda, Didar Zowghi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent surge in the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into qualitative research in software engineering, much like in other professional domains, demands a closer inspection. This vision paper seeks to explore the opportunities of using LLMs in qualitative research to address many of its legacy challenges as well as potential new concerns and pitfalls arising from the use of LLMs. We share our vision for the evolving role of the qualitative researcher in the age of LLMs and contemplate how they may utilize LLMs at various stages of their research experience.

A Smart Resume Builder Tool Using Generative Ai, Ivan A. Velo Castaneda, Anas Hourani, Magdalene Moy

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Crafting a standout resume is crucial in today’s competitive job market. Not only does it create a strong first impression on employers but it also it opens the doors for endless job opportunities. Despite existing resume assistance for FHSU students on the Career Services page, there's a lack of tools for generating or streamlining the resume writing process. To address this issue, an efficient resume builder utilizing OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model was developed specifically for FHSU students. Its key features include intuitive template selection, dynamic AI-generated content for tailored resumes, multi-format output supporting PDF and Word formats, and a user-friendly experience …

Large Language Model For Vulnerability Detection: Emerging Results And Future Directions, Xin Zhou, Ting Zhang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Previous learning-based vulnerability detection methods relied on either medium-sized pre-trained models or smaller neural networks from scratch. Recent advancements in Large Pre-Trained Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable few-shot learning capabilities in various tasks. However, the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting software vulnerabilities is largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring how LLMs perform with various prompts, particularly focusing on two state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Our experimental results showed that GPT-3.5 achieves competitive performance with the prior state-of-the-art vulnerability detection approach and GPT-4 consistently outperformed the state-of-the-art.

Code Search Is All You Need? Improving Code Suggestions With Code Search, Junkai Chen, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Cuiyun Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) provide various automated code suggestion techniques (e.g., code completion and code generation) to help developers improve their efficiency. Such techniques may retrieve similar code snippets from the code base or leverage deep learning models to provide code suggestions. However, how to effectively enhance the code suggestions using code retrieval has not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we study and explore a retrieval-augmented framework for code suggestions. Specifically, our framework leverages different retrieval approaches and search strategies to search similar code snippets. Then the retrieved code is used to further enhance the performance of language …

Unveiling Memorization In Code Models, Zhou Yang, Zhipeng Zhao, Chenyu Wang, Jieke Shi, Dongsun Kim, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The availability of large-scale datasets, advanced architectures, and powerful computational resources have led to effective code models that automate diverse software engineering activities. The datasets usually consist of billions of lines of code from both open-source and private repositories. A code model memorizes and produces source code verbatim, which potentially contains vulnerabilities, sensitive information, or code with strict licenses, leading to potential security and privacy issues.This paper investigates an important problem: to what extent do code models memorize their training data? We conduct an empirical study to explore memorization in large pre-trained code models. Our study highlights that simply extracting …

Greening Large Language Models Of Code, Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, Hong Jin Kang, Bowen Xu, Junda He, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models of code have shown remarkable effectiveness across various software engineering tasks. Despite the availability of many cloud services built upon these powerful models, there remain several scenarios where developers cannot take full advantage of them, stemming from factors such as restricted or unreliable internet access, institutional privacy policies that prohibit external transmission of code to third-party vendors, and more. Therefore, developing a compact, efficient, and yet energy-saving model for deployment on developers' devices becomes essential.To this aim, we propose Avatar, a novel approach that crafts a deployable model from a large language model of code by optimizing …

Streamlining Java Programming: Uncovering Well-Formed Idioms With Idiomine, Yanming Yang, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, David Lo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code idioms are commonly used patterns, techniques, or practices that aid in solving particular problems or specific tasks across multiple software projects. They can improve code quality, performance, and maintainability, and also promote program standardization and reuse across projects. However, identifying code idioms is significantly challenging, as existing studies have still suffered from three main limitations. First, it is difficult to recognize idioms that span non-contiguous code lines. Second, identifying idioms with intricate data flow and code structures can be challenging. Moreover, they only extract dataset-specific idioms, so common idioms or well-established code/design patterns that are rarely found in datasets …

Encoding Version History Context For Better Code Representation, Huy Nguyen, Christoph Treude, Patanamon Thongtanunam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the exponential growth of AI tools that generate source code, understanding software has become crucial. When developers comprehend a program, they may refer to additional contexts to look for information, e.g. program documentation or historical code versions. Therefore, we argue that encoding this additional contextual information could also benefit code representation for deep learning. Recent papers incorporate contextual data (e.g. call hierarchy) into vector representation to address program comprehension problems. This motivates further studies to explore additional contexts, such as version history, to enhance models' understanding of programs. That is, insights from version history enable recognition of patterns in …

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 …

Broadening Participation Of Teachers In Computing: Examining Postsecondary Educational Experiences And Prospective Educators’ Cs Teaching Interests, Robert Schwarzhaupt, Alexsandra Galanis, Joanna Goode, Kate Blanchard, Jill Bowdon, Joseph P. Wilson

Journal of Computer Science Integration

Teacher shortages in K–12 computer science (CS) education negatively impact students’ access to CS courses, exposure to CS concepts, and interest in CS-related careers. To address CS teacher shortages, this study seeks to understand factors related to expressing a preference to teach CS among prospective teachers. The study team analyzed data from 27,700 prospective teacher applications accepted into the 2016–2020 Teach For America (TFA) corps (cohorts). The TFA corps is an alternative teacher development program that recruits and prepares participants to obtain their teaching certification while they work for at least two years in underserved communities on a temporary teaching …

Adaptive Neh With Constrained Nearest Neighbor Subtours For The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows, Andrew Struthers

All Master's Theses

The development of electric vehicles is currently considered one of the most innovative areas in manufacturing. Largely driven by the desire to reduce greenhouse emissions, electric vehicles are seen as a viable alternative to internal combustion engine cars. Starting from consumer cars, a dedicated effort is being made to translate this into commercial vehicles for freight and delivery. This research introduces a novel adaptive Nawaz, Enscore, Ham (NEH) algorithm with constrained nearest neighbor subtour (NEH-NN). This algorithm is tested on the standard benchmark problems in literature and used as a seed solution for the Genetic Algorithm (GA). The performance and …