Software Engineering Commons^™

Finding Meta Winning Ticket To Train Your Maml, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie, Zimu Zhou, Zhen Wang, Yaliang Li, Bolin. Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) states that a randomly initialized dense network contains sub-networks that can be trained in isolation to the performance of the dense network. In this paper, to achieve rapid learning with less computational cost, we explore LTH in the context of meta learning. First, we experimentally show that there are sparse sub-networks, known as meta winning tickets, which can be meta-trained to few-shot classification accuracy to the original backbone. The application of LTH in meta learning enables the adaptation of meta-trained networks on various IoT devices with fewer computation. However, the status quo to identify winning …

Digbug: Pre/Post-Processing Operator Selection For Accurate Bug Localization, Kisub Kim, Sankalp Ghatpande, Kui Liu, Anil Koyuncu, Dongsun Kim, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug localization is a recurrent maintenance task in software development. It aims at identifying relevant code locations (e.g., code files) that must be inspected to fix bugs. When such bugs are reported by users, the localization process become often overwhelming as it is mostly a manual task due to incomplete and informal information (written in natural languages) available in bug reports. The research community has then invested in automated approaches, notably using Information Retrieval techniques. Unfortunately, reported performance in the literature is still limited for practical usage. Our key observation, after empirically investigating a large dataset of bug reports as …

Npc: Neuron Path Coverage Via Characterizing Decision Logic Of Deep Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Tianlin Li, Jian Wang, Lei Ma, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning has recently been widely applied to many applications across different domains, e.g., image classification and audio recognition. However, the quality of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) still raises concerns in the practical operational environment, which calls for systematic testing, especially in safety-critical scenarios. Inspired by software testing, a number of structural coverage criteria are designed and proposed to measure the test adequacy of DNNs. However, due to the blackbox nature of DNN, the existing structural coverage criteria are difficult to interpret, making it hard to understand the underlying principles of these criteria. The relationship between the structural coverage and …

Deepcause: Verifying Neural Networks With Abstraction Refinement, Nguyen Hua Gia Phuc

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Neural networks have been becoming essential parts in many safety-critical systems (such
as self-driving cars and medical diagnosis). Due to that, it is desirable that neural networks
not only have high accuracy (which traditionally can be validated using a test set) but also
satisfy some safety properties (such as robustness, fairness, or free of backdoor). To verify
neural networks against desired safety properties, there are many approaches developed
based on classical abstract interpretation. However, like in program verification, these
approaches suffer from false alarms, which may hinder the deployment of the networks.

One natural remedy to tackle the problem adopted …

Gbgallery: A Benchmark And Framework For Game Testing, Zhuo Li, Yuechen Wu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software bug database and benchmark are the wheels of advancing automated software testing. In practice, real bugs often occur sparsely relative to the amount of software code, the extraction and curation of which are quite labor-intensive but can be essential to facilitate the innovation of testing techniques. Over the past decade, several milestones have been made to construct bug databases, pushing the progress of automated software testing research. However, up to the present, it still lacks a real bug database and benchmark for game software, making current game testing research mostly stagnant. The missing of bug database and framework greatly …

An Empirical Study On Data Distribution-Aware Test Selection For Deep Learning Enhancement, Qiang Hu, Yuejun Guo, Maxime Cordy, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar to traditional software that is constantly under evolution, deep neural networks need to evolve upon the rapid growth of test data for continuous enhancement (e.g., adapting to distribution shift in a new environment for deployment). However, it is labor intensive to manually label all of the collected test data. Test selection solves this problem by strategically choosing a small set to label. Via retraining with the selected set, deep neural networks will achieve competitive accuracy. Unfortunately, existing selection metrics involve three main limitations: (1) using different retraining processes, (2) ignoring data distribution shifts, and (3) being insufficiently evaluated. To …

Data Quality Matters: A Case Study On Data Label Correctness For Security Bug Report Prediction, Xiaoxue Wu, Wei Zheng, Xin Xia, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the research of mining software repositories, we need to label a large amount of data to construct a predictive model. The correctness of the labels will affect the performance of a model substantially. However, limited studies have been performed to investigate the impact of mislabeled instances on a predictive model. To bridge the gap, in this article, we perform a case study on the security bug report (SBR) prediction. We found five publicly available datasets for SBR prediction contains many mislabeled instances, which lead to the poor performance of SBR prediction models of recent studies (e.g., the work of …

Test Mimicry To Assess The Exploitability Of Library Vulnerabilities, Hong Jin Kang, Truong Giang Nguyen, Bach Le, Corina S. Pasareanu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software engineering projects often depend on open-source software libraries, rendering them vulnerable to potential security issues in these libraries. Developers of client projects have to stay alert of security threats in the software dependencies. While there are existing tools that allow developers to assess if a library vulnerability is reachable from a project, they face limitations. Call graphonly approaches may produce false alarms as the client project may not use the vulnerable code in a way that triggers the vulnerability, while test generation-based approaches faces difficulties in overcoming the intrinsic complexity of exploiting a vulnerability, where extensive domain knowledge …

Neural Network Based Scene Text Recognition [Us Patent Us 2022/0237403 A1], Pan Zhou, Peng Tang, Ran Xu, Steven Chu Hong Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A system uses a neural network based model to perform scene text recognition. The system achieves high accuracy of prediction of text from scenes based on a neural network architecture that uses double attention mechanism. The neural network based model includes a convolutional neural network component that outputs a set of visual features and an attention extractor neural network component that determines attention scores based on the visual features. The visual features and the attention scores are combined to generate mixed features that are provided as input to a character recognizer component that determines a second attention score and recognizes …

Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning For Statistical Type Inference, Zhiming Li, Xiaofei Xie, Haoliang Li, Zhengzi Xu, Yi Li, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hitherto statistical type inference systems rely thoroughly on supervised learning approaches, which require laborious manual effort to collect and label large amounts of data. Most Turing-complete imperative languages share similar control- and data-flow structures, which make it possible to transfer knowledge learned from one language to another. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual transfer learning framework, Plato, for statistical type inference, which allows us to leverage prior knowledge learned from the labeled dataset of one language and transfer it to the others, e.g., Python to JavaScript, Java to JavaScript, etc. Plato is powered by a novel kernelized attention mechanism …

Proceedings Of The 13th International Workshop On Graph Computation Models (Gcm 2022), Reiko Heckel, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of the Thirteenth International Workshop on Graph Computation Models (GCM 2022) , which was held in Nantes, France on 6th July 2022 as part of the STAF federation of conferences. Graphs are common mathematical structures that are visual and intuitive. They constitute a natural and seamless way for system modelling in science, engineering, and beyond, including computer science, biology, and business process modelling. Graph computation models constitute a class of very high-level models where graphs are first-class citizens. The aim of the International GCM Workshop series is to bring together researchers interested in all aspects …

Xss For The Masses: Integrating Security In A Web Programming Course Using A Security Scanner, Lwin Khin Shar, Christopher M. Poskitt, Kyong Jin Shim, Li Ying Leonard Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cybersecurity education is considered an important part of undergraduate computing curricula, but many institutions teach it only in dedicated courses or tracks. This optionality risks students graduating with limited exposure to secure coding practices that are expected in industry. An alternative approach is to integrate cybersecurity concepts across non-security courses, so as to expose students to the interplay between security and other sub-areas of computing. In this paper, we report on our experience of applying the security integration approach to an undergraduate web programming course. In particular, we added a practical introduction to secure coding, which highlighted the OWASP Top …

Challenges For Inclusion In Software Engineering: The Case Of The Emerging Papua New Guinean Society, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata, Sebastian Baltes, Igor Steinmacher, Marco Gerosa, Winifred Kula Amini

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software plays a central role in modern societies, with its high economic value and potential for advancing societal change. In this paper, we characterise challenges and opportunities for a country progressing towards entering the global software industry, focusing on Papua New Guinea (PNG). By hosting a Software Engineering workshop, we conducted a qualitative study by recording talks (n=3), employing a questionnaire (n=52), and administering an in-depth focus group session with local actors (n=5). Based on a thematic analysis, we identified challenges as barriers and opportunities for the PNG software engineering community. We also discuss the state of practices and how …

Learning To Solve Routing Problems Via Distributionally Robust Optimization, Jiang Yuan, Yaoxin Wu, Zhiguang Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent deep models for solving routing problems always assume a single distribution of nodes for training, which severely impairs their cross-distribution generalization ability. In this paper, we exploit group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) to tackle this issue, where we jointly optimize the weights for different groups of distributions and the parameters for the deep model in an interleaved manner during training. We also design a module based on convolutional neural network, which allows the deep model to learn more informative latent pattern among the nodes. We evaluate the proposed approach on two types of wellknown deep models including GCN …

Hu-Fu: Efficient And Secure Spatial Queries Over Data Federation, Yongxin Tong, Xuchen Pan, Yuxiang Zeng, Yexuan Shi, Chunbo Xue, Zimu Zhou, Xiaofei Zhang, Lei Chen, Yi Xu, Ke Xu, Weifeng Lv

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data isolation has become an obstacle to scale up query processing over big data, since sharing raw data among data owners is often prohibitive due to security concerns. A promising solution is to perform secure queries over a federation of multiple data owners leveraging secure multi-party computation (SMC) techniques, as evidenced by recent federation work over relational data. However, existing solutions are highly inefficient on spatial queries due to excessive secure distance operations for query processing and their usage of general-purpose SMC libraries for secure operation implementation. In this paper, we propose Hu-Fu, the first system for efficient and secure …

A Practical Comparison Of Quantum And Classical Leaderless Consensus, Paul Robert Griffin, Dimple Mevada

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Quantum computing is coming of age and being explored in many business areas for either solving difficult problems or improving business processes. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is now embedded in many businesses and continues to mature. Consensus, at the heart of DLTs, has practical scaling issues and, as we move into needing bigger datasets, bigger networks and more security, the problem is ever increasing. Consensus agreement is a non-deterministic problem which is a good match to quantum computers due to the probabilistic nature of quantum phenomena. In this paper, we show that quantum nodes entangled in a variety of network …

You Have Earned A Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements And Their Completions, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players’ interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers’ forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers’ and players’ perspectives.

Reinforcement Learning Approach To Solve Dynamic Bi-Objective Police Patrol Dispatching And Rescheduling Problem, Waldy Joe, Hoong Chuin Lau, Jonathan Pan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Police patrol aims to fulfill two main objectives namely to project presence and to respond to incidents in a timely manner. Incidents happen dynamically and can disrupt the initially-planned patrol schedules. The key decisions to be made will be which patrol agent to be dispatched to respond to an incident and subsequently how to adapt the patrol schedules in response to such dynamically-occurring incidents whilst still fulfilling both objectives; which sometimes can be conflicting. In this paper, we define this real-world problem as a Dynamic Bi-Objective Police Patrol Dispatching and Rescheduling Problem and propose a solution approach that combines Deep …

Adaptive Task Planning For Large-Scale Robotized Warehouses, Dingyuan Shi, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Ke Xu, Wenzhe Tan, Hongbo Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Robotized warehouses are deployed to automatically distribute millions of items brought by the massive logistic orders from e-commerce. A key to automated item distribution is to plan paths for robots, also known as task planning, where each task is to deliver racks with items to pickers for processing and then return the rack back. Prior solutions are unfit for large-scale robotized warehouses due to the inflexibility to time-varying item arrivals and the low efficiency for high throughput. In this paper, we propose a new task planning problem called TPRW, which aims to minimize the end-to-end makespan that incorporates the entire …

Does This Apply To Me? An Empirical Study Of Technical Context In Stack Overflow, Akalanka Galappaththi, Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow has become an essential technical resource for developers. However, given the vast amount of knowledge available on Stack Overflow, finding the right information that is relevant for a given task is still challenging, especially when a developer is looking for a solution that applies to their specific requirements or technology stack. Clearly marking answers with their technical context, i.e., the information that characterizes the technologies and assumptions needed for this answer, is potentially one way to improve navigation. However, there is no information about how often such context is mentioned, and what kind of information it might offer. …

Probabilistic Path Prioritization For Hybrid Fuzzing, Lei Zhao, Pengcheng Cao, Yue Duan, Heng Yin, Jifeng Xuan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid fuzzing that combines fuzzing and concolic execution has become an advanced technique for software vulnerability detection. Based on the observation that fuzzing and concolic execution are complementary in nature, state-of-the-art hybrid fuzzing systems deploy “optimal concolic testing” and “demand launch” strategies. Although these ideas sound intriguing, we point out several fundamental limitations in them, due to unrealistic or oversimplified assumptions. Further, we propose a novel “discriminative dispatch” strategy and design a probabilistic hybrid fuzzing system to better utilize the capability of concolic execution. Specifically, we design a Monte Carlo-based probabilistic path prioritization model to quantify each path’s difficulty, and …

Graphcode2vec: Generic Code Embedding Via Lexical And Program Dependence Analyses, Wei Ma, Mengjie Zhao, Ezekiel Soremekun, Qiang Hu, Jie M. Zhang, Mike Papadakis, Maxime Cordy, Xiaofei Xie, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code embedding is a keystone in the application of machine learning on several Software Engineering (SE) tasks. To effectively support a plethora of SE tasks, the embedding needs to capture program syntax and semantics in a way that is generic. To this end, we propose the first self-supervised pre-training approach (called Graphcode2vec) which produces task-agnostic embedding of lexical and program dependence features. Graphcode2vec achieves this via a synergistic combination of code analysis and Graph Neural Networks. Graphcode2vec is generic, it allows pre-training, and it is applicable to several SE downstream tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of Graphcode2vec on four (4) …

Causality-Based Neural Network Repair, Bing Sun, Jun Sun, Long H. Pham, Jie Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural networks have had discernible achievements in a wide range of applications. The wide-spread adoption also raises the concern of their dependability and reliability. Similar to traditional decision-making programs, neural networks can have defects that need to be repaired. The defects may cause unsafe behaviors, raise security concerns or unjust societal impacts. In this work, we address the problem of repairing a neural network for desirable properties such as fairness and the absence of backdoor. The goal is to construct a neural network that satisfies the property by (minimally) adjusting the given neural network's parameters (i.e., weights). Specifically, we propose …

Unified Route Planning For Shared Mobility: An Insertion-Based Framework, Yongxin Tong, Yuxiang Zeng, Zimu Zhou, Lei Chen, Ke. Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been a dramatic growth of shared mobility applications such as ride-sharing, food delivery, and crowdsourced parcel delivery. Shared mobility refers to transportation services that are shared among users, where a central issue is route planning. Given a set of workers and requests, route planning finds for each worker a route, i.e., a sequence of locations to pick up and drop off passengers/parcels that arrive from time to time, with different optimization objectives. Previous studies lack practicability due to their conflicted objectives and inefficiency in inserting a new request into a route, a basic operation called insertion. In addition, …

Uipdroid: Unrooted Dynamic Monitor Of Android App Uis For Fine-Grained Permission Control, Mulin Duan, Lingxiao Jiang, Lwin Khin Shar, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper permission controls in Android systems are important for protecting users' private data when running applications installed on the devices. Currently Android systems require apps to obtain authorization from users at the first time when they try to access users' sensitive data, but every permission is only managed at the application level, allowing apps to (mis)use permissions granted by users at the beginning for different purposes subsequently without informing users. Based on privacy-by-design principles, this paper develops a new permission manager, named UIPDroid, that (1) enforces the users' basic right-to-know through user interfaces whenever an app uses permissions, and (2) …

Understanding Crowdsourcing Requesters’ Wage Setting Behaviors, Kotaro Hara, Yudai Tanaka

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Requesters on crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) compensate workers inadequately. One potential reason for the underpayment is that the AMT’s requester interface provides limited information about estimated wages, preventing requesters from knowing if they are offering a fair piece-rate reward. To assess if presenting wage information affects requesters’ reward setting behaviors, we conducted a controlled study with 63 participants. We had three levels for a between-subjects factor in a mixed design study, where we provided participants with: no wage information, wage point estimate, and wage distribution. Each participant had three stages of adjusting the reward and controlling the …

Feasibility Studies In Indoor Localization Through Intelligent Conversation, Sheshadri Smitha, Linus Cheng, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a model to achieve human localization in indoor environments through intelligent conversation between users and an agent. We investigated the feasibility of conversational localization by conducting two studies. First, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study with N = 7 participants and studied the feasibility of localizing users through conversation. We identified challenges posed by users’ language and behavior. Second, we collected N = 800 user descriptions of virtual indoor locations from N = 80 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants to analyze user language. We explored the effects of conversational agent behavior and observed that people describe indoor locations differently based …

Benchmarking Library Recognition In Tweets, Ting Zhang, Divya Prabha Chandrasekaran, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers often use social media (such as Twitter) to shareprogramming knowledge such as new tools, sample code snippets,and tips on programming. One of the topics they talk about is thesoftware library. The tweets may contain useful information abouta library. A good understanding of this information, e.g., on thedeveloper’s views regarding a library can be beneficial to weigh thepros and cons of using the library as well as the general sentimentstowards the library. However, it is not trivial to recognize whethera word actually refers to a library or other meanings. For example,a tweet mentioning the word “pandas" may refer to …

Xai4fl: Enhancing Spectrum-Based Fault Localization With Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Ratnadira Widyasari, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Stefanus Agus Haryono, Yuan Tian, Hafil Noer Zachiary, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Manually finding the program unit (e.g., class, method, or statement) responsible for a fault is tedious and time-consuming. To mitigate this problem, many fault localization techniques have been proposed. A popular family of such techniques is spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL), which takes program execution traces (spectra) of failed and passed test cases as input and applies a ranking formula to compute a suspiciousness score for each program unit. However, most existing SBFL techniques fail to consider two facts: 1) not all failed test cases contribute equally to a considered fault(s), and 2) program units collaboratively contribute to the failure/pass of …

On The Effectiveness Of Pretrained Models For Api Learning, Mohammad Abdul Hadi, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Thung Ferdian, Gia Kien Luong, Lingxiao Jiang, Fatemeh H. Fard, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers frequently use APIs to implement certain functionalities, such as parsing Excel Files, reading and writing text files line by line, etc. Developers can greatly benefit from automatic API usage sequence generation based on natural language queries for building applications in a faster and cleaner manner. Existing approaches utilize information retrieval models to search for matching API sequences given a query or use RNN-based encoder-decoder to generate API sequences. As it stands, the first approach treats queries and API names as bags of words. It lacks deep comprehension of the semantics of the queries. The latter approach adapts a neural …