Software Engineering Commons^™

Advancing Academic Advising With Knowledge Graphs: Integrating Machine Learning And Llms For Personalized Course Planning, Sara Alshamsi

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

Academic advising plays a critical role in helping students make informed decisions, improve academic performance, and successfully navigate their university journey. However, with increasing university enrollment, traditional advising methods often struggle to scale, leading to student frustration and overburdened advisors. Additionally, designing course offerings that match student demand is a complex and error-prone process involving multiple stakeholders. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes an automated, data-driven system for generating personalized academic plans for students. The primary aim of this thesis is to develop a system that reduces students' dependency on advisors while simultaneously providing accurate estimates of course demand …

Ecological Footprint Analysis Of Chatgpt (Gpt-3), Isabella Boulais

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Climate change is an escalating crisis that demands immediate action from all sectors, including the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI offers climate solutions, its own environmental impact raises concerns. Unfortunately limited research due to rapid development, system complexity, and lack of standardized methodologies hinders our understanding of AI’s environmental consequences. This project aims to conduct a comprehensive ecological footprint analysis of OpenAI’s GPT-3 model that is used to power ChatGPT, establishing guidelines for assessing AI systems’ environmental impact and proposing a framework for improvement. Going beyond tracking carbon emissions, this project will outline the broader lifecycle …

Sla Evaluation And Composition In Reconfigurable Cloud-Based Services, Michael Iannelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given the business model of offering data and computing services in a cloud setting, a major question arises: How do the services of one cloud provider compare to those of others? With the ubiquitous use of smartphones and tablets, the ability of a cloud provider to support QoS and client mobility becomes paramount. This research proposes a methodology for evaluating service-level agreements (SLAs) between cloud providers and their consumers, with a particular focus on dynamic SLA composition to adapt to changes in the application requirements and the external environment—such as traffic surges, security threats, or evolving business models.

In one …

On-Demand Scenario Generation For Testing Automated Driving Systems, Songyang Yan, Xiaodong Zhang, Kunkun Hao, Haojie Xin, Yonggang Luo, Jucheng Yang, Ming Fan, Chao Yang, Jun Sun, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The safety and reliability of Automated Driving Systems (ADS) are paramount, necessitating rigorous testing methodologies to uncover potential failures before deployment. Traditional testing approaches often prioritize either natural scenario sampling or safety-critical scenario generation, resulting in overly simplistic or unrealistic hazardous tests. In practice, the demand for natural scenarios (e.g., when evaluating the ADS's reliability in real-world conditions), critical scenarios (e.g., when evaluating safety in critical situations), or somewhere in between (e.g., when testing the ADS in regions with less civilized drivers) varies depending on the testing objectives. To address this issue, we propose the On-demand Scenario Generation (OSG) Framework, …

Irhunter: Universal Detection Of Instruction Reordering Vulnerabilities For Enhanced Concurrency In Distributed And Parallel Systems, Guohua Xin, Guangquan Xu, Yao Zhang, Cheng Wen, Cen Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Neal N. Xiong, Shaoying Liu, Pan Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Instruction reordering is an essential optimization technique used in both compilers and multi-core processors to enhance parallelism and resource utilization. Although the original intent of this technique is to benefit the program, some improper reordering can significantly impact the program correctness, which we call instruction reordering vulnerability (IRV). However, existing methods detect IRV by defining CPU instruction reordering rules to schedule execution paths while neglecting compiler reordering, and thus generate false positives that require manual filtering and resulting in inefficiency. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose the IRV detection method, , which analyzes IRV characteristics and extracts …

Contested: Consistency-Aided Tested Code Generation With Llm, Jinhao Dong, Jun Sun, Wenjie Zhang, Jinsong Dong, Dan Hao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved code generation, which generates code snippets automatically based on natural language requirements. Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance, LLMs often struggle to generate accurate and reliable code, requiring developers to spend substantial effort debugging and evaluating the generated output. Researchers have proposed leveraging Consistency to select code that passes more tests (inter-consistency) and demonstrates consistent behavior across more counterparts (intra-consistency). However, since the tests themselves are also generated by LLMs, relying on majority voting based on incorrect tests leads to unreliable results. To address this, we propose a lightweight interaction framework that …

Enhancing Vulnerability Detection Via Inter-Procedural Semantic Completion, Bozhi Wu, Chengjie Liu, Zhiming Li, Yushi Cao, Jun Sun, Shang-Wei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inspired by advances in deep learning, numerous learning-based approaches for vulnerability detection have emerged, primarily operating at the function level for scalability. However, this design choice has a critical limitation: many vulnerabilities span multiple functions, causing function-level approaches to lose the semantics of called functions and fail to capture true vulnerability patterns. To address this issue, we propose VulnSC, a novel framework designed to enhance learning-based approaches by complementing inter-procedural semantics. VulnSC retrieves the source code of called functions for datasets and leverages large language models (LLMs) with well-designed prompts to generate summaries for these functions. The datasets, enhanced with …

Reaccept: Automated Co-Evolution Of Production And Test Code Based On Dynamic Validation And Large Language Models, Jianlei Chi, Xiaotian Wang, Yuhan Huang, Lechen Yu, Di Cui, Jianguo Sun, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Synchronizing production and test code, known as PT co-evolution, is critical for software quality. Given the significant manual effort involved, researchers have tried automating PT co-evolution using predefined heuristics and machine learning models. However, existing solutions are still incomplete. Most approaches only detect and flag obsolete test cases, leaving developers to manually update them. Meanwhile, existing solutions may suffer from low accuracy, especially when applied to real-world software projects. In this paper, we propose ReAccept, a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs), retrievalaugmented generation (RAG), and dynamic validation to fully automate PT co-evolution with high accuracy. ReAccept employs an …

De-Duplicating Silent Compiler Bugs Via Deep Semantic Representation, Junjie Chen, Xingyu Fan, Chen Yang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The compiler bug duplication problem (where many test failures are caused by the same compiler bug) can lead to huge waste of time and resource in diagnosing test failures produced by compiler testing. It is particularly challenging with regard to the silent compiler bugs that do not produce any error messages. To address this problem, multiple white-box techniques were proposed, but they are inapplicable in many practical scenarios. Black-box techniques are more practical, but the existing ones are less effective as they often rely on irrelevant syntactic information. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel black-box technique (BLADE), which …

A Comprehensive Study Of Oop-Related Bugs In C++ Compilers, Bo Wang, Chong Chen, Junjie Chen, Bowen Xu, Chen Ye, Youfang Lin, Guoliang Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern C++, a programming language characterized by its extensive use of object-oriented programming (OOP) features, is widely used for system programming. However, C++ compilers often struggle to correctly handle these sophisticated OOP features, resulting in numerous high-profile compiler bugs that can lead to crashes or miscompilation. Despite the significance of OOP-related bugs, existing studies largely overlook OOP features, hindering their ability to discover such bugs. To assist both compiler fuzzer designers and compiler developers, we conduct a comprehensive study of the compiler bugs caused by incorrectly handling C++ OOP-related features. First, we systematically extract 788 OOP-related C++ compiler bugs from …

Demystifying Memorization In Llm-Based Program Repair Via A General Hypothesis Testing Framework, Jiaolong Kong, Xiaofei Xie, Shangqing Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various applications, particularly in code-related tasks such as code generation and program repair, setting new performance benchmarks. However, the extensive use of large training corpora raises concerns about whether these achievements stem from genuine understanding or mere memorization of training data—a question often overlooked in current research. This paper aims to study the memorization issue within LLM-based program repair by investigating whether the correct patches generated by LLMs are the result of memorization. The key challenge lies in the absence of ground truth for confirming memorization, leading to various ad-hoc methods …

Cashift: Benchmarking Log-Based Cloud Attack Detection Under Normality Shift, Jiongchi Yu, Xiaofei Xie, Qiang Hu, Bowen Zhang, Ziming Zhao, Yun Lin, Lei Ma, Ruitao Feng, Frank Liau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid advancement of cloud-native computing, securing cloud environments has become an important task. Log-based Anomaly Detection (LAD) is the most representative technique used in different systems for attack detection and safety guarantee, where multiple LAD methods and relevant datasets have been proposed. However, even though some of these datasets are specifically prepared for cloud systems, they only cover limited cloud behaviors and lack information from a whole-system perspective. Another critical issue to consider is normality shift, which implies that the test distribution could differ from the training distribution and highly affect the performance of LAD. Unfortunately, existing works …

Regtrieve: Reducing System-Level Regression Errors For Machine Learning Systems Via Retrieval-Enhanced Ensemble, Junming Cao, Xuwen Xiang, Mingfei Cheng, Bihuan Chen, Xinyan Wang, You Lu, Chaofeng Sha, Xiaofei Xie, Xin Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multiple machine learning (ML) models are often incorporated into real-world ML systems. However, updating an individual model in these ML systems frequently results in regression errors, where the new model performs worse than the old model for some inputs. While model-level regression errors have been widely studied, little is known about how regression errors propagate at system level. To address this gap, we propose RegTrieve, a novel retrieval-enhanced ensemble approach to reduce regression errors at both model and system level. Our evaluation across various model update scenarios shows that RegTrieve reduces system-level regression errors with almost no impact on system …

Hvi: A New Color Space For Low-Light Image Enhancement, Qingsen Yan, Yixu Feng, Cheng Zhang, Guansong Pang, Kangbiao Shi, Peng Wu, Wei Dong, Jinqiu Sun, Yanning Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable inten sity. The former enforces …

Why Does My Transaction Fail? A First Look At Failed Transactions On The Solana Blockchain, Xiaoye Zheng, Zhiyuan Wan, David Lo, Difan Xie, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform, recognized for its high throughput and low transaction costs, positioning it as a preferred infrastructure for Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and other Web 3.0 applications. In the Solana ecosystem, transaction initiators submit various instructions to interact with a diverse range of Solana smart contracts, among which are decentralized exchanges (DEXs) that utilize automated market makers (AMMs), allowing users to trade cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain without the need for intermediaries. Despite the high throughput and low transaction costs of Solana, the advantages have exposed Solana to bot spamming for financial exploitation, resulting …

Less Is More: On The Importance Of Data Quality For Unit Test Generation, Junwei Zhang, Xing Hu, Shan Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unit testing is crucial for software development and maintenance. Effective unit testing ensures and improves software quality, but writing unit tests is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recent studies have proposed deep learning (DL) techniques or large language models (LLMs) to automate unit test generation. These models are usually trained or fine-tuned on large-scale datasets. Despite growing awareness of the importance of data quality, there has been limited research on the quality of datasets used for test generation. To bridge this gap, we systematically examine the impact of noise on the performance of learning-based test generation models. We first apply the open …

Moditector: Module-Directed Testing For Autonomous Driving Systems, Renzhi Wang, Mingfei Cheng, Xiaofei Xie, Yuan Zhou, Lei Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Testing Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) is crucial for ensuring their safety, reliability, and performance. Despite numerous testing methods available that can generate diverse and challenging scenarios to uncover potential vulnerabilities, these methods often treat ADS as a black-box, primarily focusing on identifying system-level failures like collisions or near-misses without pinpointing the specific modules responsible for these failures. This lack of root causes understanding for the failures hinders effective debugging and subsequent system repair. Furthermore, current approaches often fall short in generating violations that adequately test the individual modules of an ADS from a system-level perspective, such as perception, prediction, planning, …

Large Language Model For Vulnerability Detection And Repair: Literature Review And The Road Ahead, Xin Zhou, Sicong Cao, Xiaobing Sun, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have resulted in their widespread adoption across various tasks within Software Engineering (SE), including vulnerability detection and repair. Numerous studies have investigated the application of LLMs to enhance vulnerability detection and repair tasks. Despite the increasing research interest, there is currently no existing survey that focuses on the utilization of LLMs for vulnerability detection and repair. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by offering a systematic literature review of approaches aimed at improving vulnerability detection and repair through the utilization of LLMs. The review encompasses research work from leading …

Ntire 2025 Challenge On Event-Based Image Deblurring: Methods And Results, Lei Sun, Et. Al.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an overview of NTIRE 2025, the First Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring, detailing the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary goal of the challenge is to design an event-based method that achieves high-quality image deblurring, with performance quantitatively assessed using Peak Signal-toNoise Ratio (PSNR). Notably, there are no restrictions on computational complexity or model size. The task focuses on leveraging both events and images as inputs for singleimage deblurring. A total of 199 participants registered, among whom 15 teams successfully submitted valid results, offering valuable insights into the current state of eventbased image deblurring. We anticipate …

A Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Model For Bug Localization, Yue Li, Bohan Liu, Ting Zhang, Zhiqi Wang, David Lo, Lanxin Yang, Jun Lyu, He Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A significant number of bug reports are generated every day as software systems continue to develop. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to correlate bug reports with source code to locate bugs automatically. The existing research has shown that LLMs are effective for bug localization and can increase software development efficiency. However, these studies still have two limitations. First, these models fail to capture context information about bug reports and source code. Second, these models are unable to understand the domain-specific expertise inherent to particular projects, such as version information in projects that are composed of alphanumeric characters without …

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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

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

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

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

On The Design Of A Framework For Large-Scale Exploratory Graph Analytics, Oliver Andres Alvarado Rodriguez

Dissertations

Large-scale exploratory graph analytics merges data science with high-performance computing to extract critical insights from network-representable data. Data scientists routinely analyze data from the natural, social, and computing sciences by representing it as networks, or graphs, where objects become vertices and their relationships become edges. This representation allows data scientists to add graph analytics to their toolbox. However, designing tools for large-scale exploratory graph analytics is challenging due to the complexities of graph algorithms, such as high communication in distributed systems and large memory demands. These challenges can lead to overly complex software, which limits usability and development to a …

Hotlangbench, A Tiny Benchmark Suite For Higher-Order Statically Typed Languages, Konstantin Laufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This work in progress aims to compare various HOT (higher-order and statically typed, a term coined by Phil Wadler) through reproducible course-grained, wall-time benchmarks. Our overall goals include simplicity, agility, and reproducibility.

There is currently only one benchmark, but it brings out substantial performance differences among the various languages and platforms. It uses function composition and other higher-order constructs to build a pipeline of transformations, along with a brute-force iteration that is computationally expensive for input files specifying large ranges as function domains. We currently include versions in Modern C++, C#, Go, Haskell, Kotlin, Modern (stream-based) Java (24), OCaml, Scala …

Helmholtz Cage: Software Development And Implementation For Cubesat Testing, Gustavo A. Cotom Lopez

University Honors Theses

This paper details the successful development and deployment of a Helmholtz cage system, designed to produce precisely controlled magnetic fields for testing and calibration purposes. The core focus was on creating a robust, modular software architecture enabling independent current modulation on each axis, comprehensive serial communication between multiple microcontrollers, and real-time data acquisition from the MR3 magnetometer. All software components, including the serial communication drivers, control algorithms, command line interface, and calibration routines, were developed from the ground up. The system was fully operational upon completion: all hardware components functioned as intended, serial communication with each subsystem was reliable, and …

Programming A More Efficient Onboarding Process For New Employees, Long H. Pham

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The current onboarding process for new hires in the University of San Diego’s Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering is inefficient. There is no central location where new hires and administrators can track onboarding progress. Both parties have to manage multiple email chains and write their own reminders to keep track of everything. This leads to delays, missing deadlines, and confusion for both parties. A web-based onboarding application has been developed recently to address these issues and streamline the onboarding process for new hires. However, this application contains several accessibility issues and does not follow all of the standards for effective employee …

Evolving Enemy Behavior In Video Games, Hermie H. Adams Iii

Honors Theses

The video game I developed for my senior project lacked complex and engaging enemy artificial intelligence. The standard implementations of AI systems such as finite state machines and behavior trees felt like side-steps rather than innovative solutions. Upon seeing the 'magic' of machine learning in perfecting games such as Snake, Super Mario, and Flappy Bird, I was inspired to seek my answer in the field of evolutionary computation. However, my challenge differed in that the problem space would be defined by dynamic player strategies, making it not well-defined or static. As such, my evaluations are based on enemies exhibiting emergent …

Bridging Cattle Farming And Technology: The Development Of Moomanager, Matthew Hayes

Honors College Theses

Small-scale cattle producers face persistent challenges in adopting digital tools for herd management, often due to barriers such as limited digital literacy, software complexity, and poor alignment with practical workflows. Existing literature highlights the potential benefits of mobile applications in agricultural contexts, yet adoption rates remain low among smaller operations. This thesis investigates how a streamlined, mobile-first application can address these adoption barriers while supporting essential farm management tasks. The study details the design and development of MooManager, a mobile application built with React Native and Supabase and structured around core features such as cattle tracking, beef sales logging, and …

Reverse Engineering Of Binary Programs Using Graph Attention Networks, Sai Nikhila Kanigiri

Master's Theses

Understanding the functionality and behavior of binary code is essential for many software engineering tasks, including malware analysis, vulnerability detection, and program optimization. However, automating this process is challenging due to the complexity of machine code and the significant manual effort required from experienced software engineers. In this paper, we present BinGAT (Reverse Engineering of Binary Programs using Graph Attention Networks), a method for classifying binary programs into algorithmic categories using Graph Attention Neural Networks (GNNs) based on their Control-Flow Graphs (CFGs). Given a binary program, BinGAT extracts its CFG through static analysis and transforms the assembly instructions within each …