Software Engineering Commons^™

Towards Auto-Evaluation For Large Language Models, Jiahao Ying

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for evaluation methodologies that are timely, scalable, reliable, and informative. Conventional evaluation benchmarks, although essential for measuring model capabilities and guiding model development, are often constructed and maintained through labor-intensive human annotation. As LLMs continue to improve through increases in model scale, training data, and computational resources, static benchmarks may quickly lose discriminative power. Moreover, the growing use of large and diverse training corpora increases the risk of benchmark leakage, which can inflate evaluation results and obscure the true capabilities of models. These challenges call for a …

Securing Cloud-Native Systems: From Vulnerability Analysis To External And Insider Threat Detection, Jiongchi Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Cloud-native systems have become the backbone of modern software infrastructure. However, their dynamic resource orchestration and complex configurability introduce a large attack surface and intricate security challenges. Adversaries can externally exploit vulnerabilities in cloud components or perform insider movement within cloud environments to launch attacks. As these systems increasingly support critical services, security breaches can lead to severe operational and economic consequences.

Despite extensive efforts in vulnerability detection and attack monitoring, existing approaches struggle to remain effective in cloud-native environments characterized by rapid evolution and inherent heterogeneity. In particular, they exhibit three fundamental limitations: (1) Insufficient understanding of defect patterns …

Optimizing And Fortifying Ai Software Through The Lens Of Artifact Synthesis, Jieke Shi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the software landscape, ushering in a new era of intelligent systems that increasingly shape our daily lives. This transformation is evident in various domains, including Software Engineering (SE), where Large Language Models (LLMs) support many development tools, and control systems, where self-driving cars and autonomous drones rely on deep learning models for real-time decision-making. These AI systems are collectively referred to as AI software, with the former categorized as AI4SE software (AI for Software Engineering) and the latter as AI4Control software (AI for Control). As AI software becomes central to modern computing infrastructure, its reliability …

Symbolic Execution Engine For Dynamic Analysis Of System Software, Pansilu Madhura Bhashana Pitigala Arachchillage

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

System software, like any regular software, is prone to errors. It plays a specific role in a computer system by managing the underlying hardware and providing a platform to execute the application software. Defective or vulnerable system software can be exploited by attackers to compromise the entire system. Therefore, the system software must be studied and thoroughly analyzed to evaluate its security. However, due to the inherent complexity and its close interactions with the hardware, analyzing system software is a challenging task. As a result, there is a lack of tools and techniques capable of effectively analyzing system software.

This …

Boosting Symbolic Execution For Vulnerability Detection, Haoxin Tu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Software systems written by humans tend to be unreliable and insecure, hence, bugs or vulnerabilities in them are inevitable. Symbolic execution has shown considerable potential in detecting diverse types of software bugs and also vulnerabilities that have severe security implications. However, existing symbolic execution engines still suffer from at least three fundamental limitations in memory modeling, path exploration, and structured input generation, which significantly impede existing engines from efficiently and effectively detecting software bugs and vulnerabilities.

The objective of this dissertation is to boost existing symbolic execution engines by designing a new memory model, two new path exploration strategies, and …

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 …

Towards Testing, Detecting, And Debloating Insecure Components In Android Applications, Zicheng Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The Android ecosystem’s openness and extensibility have fueled its dominance in the mobile market, but they also broaden the attack surface of applications by introducing insecure or redundant methods. Vulnerabilities arise from various sources, including insecure API usage, code cloning, and feature bloat, especially from unneeded components introduced during development. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents a systematic, three-phase pipeline that transitions seamlessly from vulnerability discovery to clone-based detection and, ultimately, to dynamic mitigation through runtime debloating. Each phase builds upon the insights and limitations of the previous, collectively forming a practical approach to improving Android app security.

In …

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 …

Contactless And Scalable Approaches For Human Health And Performance Sensing, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Human health and performance sensing has been extensively studied, from physiology to mental health and movement analytics. However, typical approaches rely on invasive and contact sensors or require professional practitioners, limiting their scalability. For example, the gold standard for measuring heart rate is through an electrocardiogram (ECG), which requires multiple probes attached to the skin and is impractical for individuals with skin issues. Additionally, it typically needs to be performed in a hospital setting under the supervision of a trained cardiac physiologist. Depression detection often relies on the expertise of psychologists or psychiatrists. However, there is a shortage of these …

Law-Aware Autonomous Driving, Yang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) necessitate comprehensive testing prior to deployment in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). High-fidelity simulators are crucial for this testing, as they can replicate a wide range of scenarios, including those that are difficult or dangerous to recreate in real-world conditions. While previous approaches have demonstrated that test cases can be generated automatically, they often focus on weak oracles (e.g., reaching the destination without collisions) and fail to assess whether the journey was conducted safely and in compliance with some complex property specifications such as traffic laws. In this dissertation, beyond assessing basic properties like energy consumption and proximity …

Quality Assurance In Software Engineering: A Journey Towards Explainable Automated Solutions, Ratnadira Widyasari

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In today's digital era, the pervasive influence of software on daily life underscores the necessity for high-quality and reliable systems. Software failures can result in substantial harm and financial losses, highlighting the pivotal role of Software Quality Assurance (SQA). While automated SQA techniques have evolved to aid developers in ensuring software quality, the necessity for explainability in these automated solutions has become equally important. For example, in automated fault localization, only identifying suspicious locations is insufficient; it is essential to provide reasoning on why these locations are suspicious. This dissertation presents a series of interconnected studies aimed at developing explainable …

Improving The Performance Of Wi-Fi Indoor Localization In Both Dense And Unknown Environments, Quang Truong Hai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Indoor localization is important for various pervasive applications, garnering considerable research attention over recent decades. Despite numerous proposed solutions, the practical application of these methods in real-world environments with high applicability remains challenging. One compelling use case for building owners is the ability to track individuals as they navigate through the building, whether for security, customer analytics, space utilization planning, or other management purposes. However, this task becomes exceedingly difficult in environments with hundreds or thousands of people in motion. Conversely, the need to track oneself’s location is also meaningful from the perspective of individuals traversing in crowded spaces. These …

Supporting Software Engineers With Large Language Model-Based Automation, Ting Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In recent years, software engineering (SE) has witnessed significant growth, leading to the creation and sharing of an abundance of software artifacts such as source code, bug reports, and pull requests. Analyzing these artifacts is crucial for comprehending the sentiments of software developers and automating various SE tasks, ultimately leading to more human-centered automated SE and enhancing software development efficiency. However, the diverse and unstructured nature of software text poses a significant challenge to this analysis. In response, researchers have investigated a variety of approaches, including the utilization of natural language processing techniques. The advent of large language models (LLMs), …

Towards Securing Smart Contracts Systematically, Duy Tai Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Smart contracts are a groundbreaking technique that allows users to programmatically modify the state of the blockchain. They are essentially self-enforcing programs that are deployed and executed on top of the blockchain. In recent years, we have witnessed various smart contract incidents that led to substantial financial losses and even business closures. These incidents mainly arise from design flaws in Solidity, a dominant programming language for writing smart contracts, which complicates the process of detecting and repairing vulnerabilities. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in attacking smart contracts by the attackers. This thesis is dedicated to developing effective methods to …

Effective And Efficient Semantic Representations And Their Applications, Chong Cher Chia

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The proliferation of affordable and compact digital storage has also led to the creation of enormous databases of information, and much attention has been focused on the problem of processing unorganized and unstructured information into some form from which additional value can be extracted. Contemporary approaches to this problem virtually necessitate the use of complex models running on computational systems due to the sheer volume of information to be processed. While it is possible for the model to be fed the actual data as input, typically a representation of the data is used instead. These representations are therefore of interest, …

Fortifying The Seams Of Software Systems, Hong Jin Kang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

A seam in software is a place where two components within a software system meet. There are more seams in software now than ever before as modern software systems rely extensively on third-party software components, e.g., libraries. Due to the increasing complexity of software systems, understanding and improving the reliability of these components and their use is crucial. While the use of software components eases the development process, it also introduces challenges due to the interaction between the components.

This dissertation tackles problems associated with software reliability when using third-party software components. Developers write programs that interact with libraries through …

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 …

Can We Make It Better? Assessing And Improving Quality Of Github Repositories, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The code hosting platform GitHub has gained immense popularity worldwide in recent years, with over 200 million repositories hosted as of June 2021. Due to its popularity, it has great potential to facilitate widespread improvements across many software projects. Naturally, GitHub has attracted much research attention, and the source code in the various repositories it hosts also provide opportunity to apply techniques and tools developed by software engineering researchers over the years. However, much of existing body of research applicable to GitHub focuses on code quality of the software projects and ways to improve them. Fewer work focus on potential …

Learning To Interpret Knowledge From Software Q&A Sites, Bowen Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Nowadays, software question and answer (SQA) data has become a treasure for software engineering as it contains a huge volume of programming knowledge. That knowledge can be interpreted in many different ways to support various software activities, such as code recommendation, program repair, and so on. In this dissertation, we interpret SQA data by addressing three novel research problems.

The first research problem is about linkable knowledge unit prediction. In this problem, a question and its answers within a post in Stack Overflow are considered as a knowledge unit (KU). KUs often contain semantically relevant knowledge, and thus linkable for …

Machine Learning Based Approaches Towards Robust Android Malware Detection, Jiayun Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The Android platform is becoming increasingly popular and numerous applications (apps) have been developed by organizations to meet the ever increasing market demand over years. Naturally, security and privacy concerns on Android apps have grabbed considerable attention from both academic and industrial
communities. Many approaches have been proposed to detect Android malware in different ways so far, and most of them produce satisfactory performance under the given Android environment settings and labelled samples. However, existing approaches suffer the following robustness problems:

In many Android malware detection approaches, specific API calls are used to build the feature sets, and their feature …

Vision-Based Analytics For Improved Ai-Driven Iot Applications, Amit Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor systems, primarily driven by cheaper embedded hardware platforms and wide availability of light-weight software platforms, has opened up doors for large-scale data collection opportunities. The availability of massive amount of data has in-turn given way to rapidly growing machine learning models e.g. You Only Look Once (YOLO), Single-Shot-Detectors (SSD) and so on. There has been a growing trend of applying machine learning techniques, e.g., object detection, image classification, face detection etc., on data collected from camera sensors and therefore enabling plethora of vision-sensing applications namely self-driving cars, automatic crowd monitoring, traffic-flow analysis, occupancy …

How Do Monetary Incentives Influence Prosocial Fundraising? An Empirical Investigation Of Matching Subsidies On Crowdfunding, Zhiyuan Gao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Monetary incentives, such as matching subsidies, are widely used in traditional fundraising and crowdfunding platforms to boost funding activities and improve funding outcomes. However, its effectiveness on prosocial fundraising is still unclear from both theoretical (Bénabou and Tirole, 2006; Frey, 1997; Meier, 2007a) and empirical studies (Ariely et al., 2009; Karlan and List, 2007; Rondeau and List, 2008). This dissertation aims to examine the effectiveness of matching subsidies on prosocial fundraising in the crowdfunding context. Specifically, I study how the presence of matching subsidies affects overall funding outcomes and funding dynamics in the online prosocial crowdfunding environment.

The first essay …

Statistical And Deep Learning Models For Software Engineering Corpora, Van Duc Thong Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation focuses on proposing statistical and deep learning models for software engineering corpora to detect bugs in software system. The dissertation aims to solve three main software engineering problems, i.e., bug localization (locating the potential buggy source files in a software project given a bug report or failing test cases), just-in-time defect prediction (identifying the potential defective commits as they are introduced into a version control system), and bug fixing patch identification (identifying commits repairing bugs for their propagation to parallelly maintained versions) to save developers’ time and e↵ort in improving software system quality. Moreover, I also propose a …

Novel Deep Learning Methods Combined With Static Analysis For Source Code Processing, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

It is desirable to combine machine learning and program analysis so that one can leverage the best of both to increase the performance of software analytics. On one side, machine learning can analyze the source code of thousands of well-written software projects that can uncover patterns that partially characterize software that is reliable, easy to read, and easy to maintain. On the other side, the program analysis can be used to define rigorous and unique rules that are only available in programming languages, which enrich the representation of source code and help the machine learning to capture the patterns better. …

A Virtualization Based System Infrastructure For Dynamic Program Analysis, Jiaqi Hong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Dynamic malware analysis schemes either run the target program as is in an isolated environment assisted by additional hardware facilities or modify it with instrumentation code statically or dynamically. The hardware-assisted schemes usually trap the target during its execution to a more privileged environment based on the available hardware events. The more privileged environment is not accessible by the untrusted kernel, thus this approach is often applied for transparent and secure kernel analysis. Nevertheless, the isolated environment induces a virtual address gap between the analyzer and the target, which hinders effective and efficient memory introspection and undermines the correctness of …

Multimodal Mobile Sensing Systems For Physiological And Psychological Assessment, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Sensing systems for monitoring physiological and psychological states have been studied extensively in both academic and industry research for different applications across various domains. However, most of the studies have been done in the lab environment with controlled and complicated sensor setup, which is only suitable for serious healthcare applications in which the obtrusiveness and immobility can be compromised in a trade-off for accurate clinical screening or diagnosing. The recent substantial development of mobile devices with embedded miniaturized sensors are now allowing new opportunities to adapt and develop such sensing systems in the mobile context. The ability to sense physiological …

Enhanced Gesture Sensing Using Battery-Less Wearable Motion Trackers, Huy Vu Tran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Wearable devices are gaining in popularity, but are presently used primarily for productivity-related functions (such as calling people or discreetly receiving notifications) or for physiological sensing. However, wearable devices are still not widely used for a wider set of sensing-based applications, even though their potential is enormous. Wearable devices can enable a variety of novel applications. For example, wrist-worn and/or finger-worn devices could be viable controllers for real-time AR/VR games and applications, and can be used for real-time gestural tracking to support rehabilitative patient therapy or training of sports personnel. There are, however, a key set of impediments towards realizing …

Gesture-Based Profiling Of Commonplace Lifestyle And Physical Activity Behaviors, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The widespread availability of sensors on personal devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches) and other cheap, commoditized IoT devices in the environment has opened up the opportunity for developing applications that capture and enhance various lifestyle-driven daily activities of individuals. Moreover, there is a growing trend of leveraging ubiquitous computing technologies to improve physical health and wellbeing. Several of the lifestyle monitoring applications rely primarily on the capability of recognizing contextually relevant human movements, actions and gestures. As such, gesture recognition techniques, and gesture-based analytics have emerged as a fundamental component for realizing personalized lifestyle applications.

This thesis explores how such wealth …

Exploiting Approximation, Caching And Specialization To Accelerate Vision Sensing Applications, Nguyen Loc Huynh

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over the past few years, deep learning has emerged as state-of-the-art solutions for many challenging computer vision tasks such as face recognition, object detection, etc. Despite of its outstanding performance, deep neural networks (DNNs) are computational intensive, which prevent them to be widely adopted on billions of mobile and embedded devices with scarce resources. To address that limitation, we
focus on building systems and optimization algorithms to accelerate those models, making them more computational-efficient.
First, this thesis explores the computational capabilities of different existing processors (or co-processors) on modern mobile devices. It recognizes that by leveraging the mobile Graphics Processing …

Sensitive Behavior Analysis Of Android Applications On Unrooted Devices In The Wild, Xiaoxiao Tang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Dynamic analysis is widely used in malware detection, taint analysis, vulnerability detection, and other areas for enhancing the security of Android. Compared to static analysis, dynamic analysis is immune to common code obfuscation techniques and dynamic code loading. Existing dynamic analysis techniques rely on in-lab running environment (e.g., modified systems, rooted devices, or emulators) and require automatic input generators to execute the target app. However, these techniques could be bypassed by anti-analysis techniques that allow apps to hide sensitive behavior when an in-lab environment is detected through predefined heuristics (e.g., IMEI number of the device is invalid). Meanwhile, current input …