Foutse Khomh

Giuliano Antoniol

2024-06-13

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (publié)

Characterizing and Classifying Developer Forum Posts with their Intentions

Xingfang Wu

Eric Laufer

Heng Li

Santhosh Srinivasan

Jayden Luo

With the rapid growth of the developer community, the amount of posts on online technical forums has been growing rapidly, which poses diffi… (voir plus)culties for users to filter useful posts and find important information. Tags provide a concise feature dimension for users to locate their interested posts and for search engines to index the most relevant posts according to the queries. However, most tags are only focused on the technical perspective (e.g., program language, platform, tool). In most cases, forum posts in online developer communities reveal the author's intentions to solve a problem, ask for advice, share information, etc. The modeling of the intentions of posts can provide an extra dimension to the current tag taxonomy. By referencing previous studies and learning from industrial perspectives, we create a refined taxonomy for the intentions of technical forum posts. Through manual labeling and analysis on a sampled post dataset extracted from online forums, we understand the relevance between the constitution of posts (code, error messages) and their intentions. Furthermore, inspired by our manual study, we design a pre-trained transformer-based model to automatically predict post intentions. The best variant of our intention prediction framework, which achieves a Micro F1-score of 0.589, Top 1-3 accuracy of 62.6% to 87.8%, and an average AUC of 0.787, outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline approach. Our characterization and automated classification of forum posts regarding their intentions may help forum maintainers or third-party tool developers improve the organization and retrieval of posts on technical forums. We have released our annotated dataset and codes in our supplementary material package.

2024-06-05

Empirical Software Engineering (publié)

Introducing v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark from MLCommons

Bertie Vidgen

Adarsh Agrawal

Ahmed M. Ahmed

Victor Akinwande

Namir Al-nuaimi

Najla Alfaraj

Elie Alhajjar

Lora Aroyo

Trupti Bavalatti

Borhane Blili-Hamelin

K. Bollacker

Rishi Bomassani

Marisa Ferrara Boston

Sim'eon Campos

Kal Chakra

Canyu Chen

Cody Coleman

Zacharie Delpierre Coudert

Leon Strømberg Derczynski

Debojyoti Dutta … (voir 77 de plus)

Ian Eisenberg

James R. Ezick

Heather Frase

Brian Fuller

Ram Gandikota

Agasthya Gangavarapu

Ananya Gangavarapu

James Gealy

Rajat Ghosh

James Goel

Usman Gohar

Sujata Goswami

Scott A. Hale

Wiebke Hutiri

Joseph Marvin Imperial

Surgan Jandial

Nicholas C. Judd

Felix Juefei-Xu

Bhavya Kailkhura

Hannah Rose Kirk

Kevin Klyman

Chris Knotz

Michael Kuchnik

Shachi H. Kumar

Chris Lengerich

Bo Li

Zeyi Liao

Eileen Peters Long

Victor Lu

Yifan Mai

Priyanka Mary Mammen

Kelvin Manyeki

Sean McGregor

Virendra Mehta

Shafee Mohammed

Emanuel Moss

Lama Nachman

Dinesh Jinenhally Naganna

Amin Nikanjam

Besmira Nushi

Luis Oala

Iftach Orr

Alicia Parrish

Çigdem Patlak

William Pietri

Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh

Eleonora Presani

Fabrizio Puletti

Paul Rottger

Saurav Sahay

Tim Santos

Nino Scherrer

Alice Schoenauer Sebag

Patrick Schramowski

Abolfazl Shahbazi

Vin Sharma

Xudong Shen

Vamsi Sistla

Leonard Tang

Davide Testuggine

Vithursan Thangarasa

Elizabeth A Watkins

Rebecca Weiss

Christoper A. Welty

Tyler Wilbers

Adina Williams

Carole-Jean Wu

Poonam Yadav

Xianjun Yang

Yi Zeng

Wenhui Zhang

Fedor Zhdanov

Jiacheng Zhu

Percy Liang

Peter Mattson

Joaquin Vanschoren

2024-04-18

ArXiv (prépublication)

Machine Learning Robustness: A Primer

Houssem Ben Braiek

This chapter explores the foundational concept of robustness in Machine Learning (ML) and its integral role in establishing trustworthiness … (voir plus)in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. The discussion begins with a detailed definition of robustness, portraying it as the ability of ML models to maintain stable performance across varied and unexpected environmental conditions. ML robustness is dissected through several lenses: its complementarity with generalizability; its status as a requirement for trustworthy AI; its adversarial vs non-adversarial aspects; its quantitative metrics; and its indicators such as reproducibility and explainability. The chapter delves into the factors that impede robustness, such as data bias, model complexity, and the pitfalls of underspecified ML pipelines. It surveys key techniques for robustness assessment from a broad perspective, including adversarial attacks, encompassing both digital and physical realms. It covers non-adversarial data shifts and nuances of Deep Learning (DL) software testing methodologies. The discussion progresses to explore amelioration strategies for bolstering robustness, starting with data-centric approaches like debiasing and augmentation. Further examination includes a variety of model-centric methods such as transfer learning, adversarial training, and randomized smoothing. Lastly, post-training methods are discussed, including ensemble techniques, pruning, and model repairs, emerging as cost-effective strategies to make models more resilient against the unpredictable. This chapter underscores the ongoing challenges and limitations in estimating and achieving ML robustness by existing approaches. It offers insights and directions for future research on this crucial concept, as a prerequisite for trustworthy AI systems.

2024-04-01

ArXiv (prépublication)

Bugs in Large Language Models Generated Code: An Empirical Study

Florian Tambon

Arghavan Moradi Dakhel

Amin Nikanjam

Michel C. Desmarais

Giuliano Antoniol

2024-03-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Trained Without My Consent: Detecting Code Inclusion In Language Models Trained on Code

Vahid Majdinasab

Amin Nikanjam

Code auditing ensures that the developed code adheres to standards, regulations, and copyright protection by verifying that it does not cont… (voir plus)ain code from protected sources. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) as coding assistants in the software development process poses new challenges for code auditing. The dataset for training these models is mainly collected from publicly available sources. This raises the issue of intellectual property infringement as developers' codes are already included in the dataset. Therefore, auditing code developed using LLMs is challenging, as it is difficult to reliably assert if an LLM used during development has been trained on specific copyrighted codes, given that we do not have access to the training datasets of these models. Given the non-disclosure of the training datasets, traditional approaches such as code clone detection are insufficient for asserting copyright infringement. To address this challenge, we propose a new approach, TraWiC; a model-agnostic and interpretable method based on membership inference for detecting code inclusion in an LLM's training dataset. We extract syntactic and semantic identifiers unique to each program to train a classifier for detecting code inclusion. In our experiments, we observe that TraWiC is capable of detecting 83.87% of codes that were used to train an LLM. In comparison, the prevalent clone detection tool NiCad is only capable of detecting 47.64%. In addition to its remarkable performance, TraWiC has low resource overhead in contrast to pair-wise clone detection that is conducted during the auditing process of tools like CodeWhisperer reference tracker, across thousands of code snippets.

2024-02-14

ArXiv (prépublication)

ChatGPT vs LLaMA: Impact, Reliability, and Challenges in Stack Overflow Discussions

Leuson Da Silva

Jordan Samhi

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has shaken up Stack Overflow, the premier platform for developers' queries on programming and so… (voir plus)ftware development. Demonstrating an ability to generate instant, human-like responses to technical questions, ChatGPT has ignited debates within the developer community about the evolving role of human-driven platforms in the age of generative AI. Two months after ChatGPT's release, Meta released its answer with its own Large Language Model (LLM) called LLaMA: the race was on. We conducted an empirical study analyzing questions from Stack Overflow and using these LLMs to address them. This way, we aim to (ii) measure user engagement evolution with Stack Overflow over time; (ii) quantify the reliability of LLMs' answers and their potential to replace Stack Overflow in the long term; (iii) identify and understand why LLMs fails; and (iv) compare LLMs together. Our empirical results are unequivocal: ChatGPT and LLaMA challenge human expertise, yet do not outperform it for some domains, while a significant decline in user posting activity has been observed. Furthermore, we also discuss the impact of our findings regarding the usage and development of new LLMs.

2024-02-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

Deep Learning Model Reuse in the HuggingFace Community: Challenges, Benefit and Trends

Mina Taraghi

Gianolli Dorcelus

Armstrong Foundjem

Florian Tambon

The ubiquity of large-scale Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) is on the rise, sparking interest in model hubs, and dedicated platforms for hosting P… (voir plus)TMs. Despite this trend, a comprehensive exploration of the challenges that users encounter and how the community leverages PTMs remains lacking. To address this gap, we conducted an extensive mixed-methods empirical study by focusing on discussion forums and the model hub of HuggingFace, the largest public model hub. Based on our qualitative analysis, we present a taxonomy of the challenges and benefits associated with PTM reuse within this community. We then conduct a quantitative study to track model-type trends and model documentation evolution over time. Our findings highlight prevalent challenges such as limited guidance for beginner users, struggles with model output comprehensibility in training or inference, and a lack of model understanding. We also identified interesting trends among models where some models maintain high upload rates despite a decline in topics related to them. Additionally, we found that despite the introduction of model documentation tools, its quantity has not increased over time, leading to difficulties in model comprehension and selection among users. Our study sheds light on new challenges in reusing PTMs that were not reported before and we provide recommendations for various stakeholders involved in PTM reuse.

2024-01-24

ArXiv (prépublication)

Towards Enhancing the Reproducibility of Deep Learning Bugs: An Empirical Study

Mehil B. Shah

Mohammad Masudur Rahman

2024-01-05

ArXiv (prépublication)

AITA: AI trustworthiness assessment

Bertrand Braunschweig

Stefan Buijsman

Faicel Chamroukhi

Fredrik Heintz

Juliette Mattioli

Maximilian Poretschkin

2024-01-03

AI and Ethics (publié)

Common Challenges of Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications Development: An Empirical Study

Mohammad Mehdi Morovati

Florian Tambon

Mina Taraghi

Amin Nikanjam

2024-01-01

Empir. Softw. Eng. (publié)

Harnessing Pre-trained Generalist Agents for Software Engineering Tasks

Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom

Amin Nikanjam

Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop techniques aimed at improving the reliability,… (voir plus) effectiveness, and overall quality of software systems. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently been successfully used for automation in complex tasks such as game testing and solving the job-shop scheduling problem. However, these specialized DRL agents, trained from scratch on specific tasks, suffer from a lack of generalizability to other tasks and they need substantial time to be developed and re-trained effectively. Recently, DRL researchers have begun to develop generalist agents, able to learn a policy from various environments and capable of achieving performances similar to or better than specialist agents in new tasks. In the Natural Language Processing or Computer Vision domain, these generalist agents are showing promising adaptation capabilities to never-before-seen tasks after a light fine-tuning phase and achieving high performance. This paper investigates the potential of generalist agents for solving SE tasks. Specifically, we conduct an empirical study aimed at assessing the performance of two generalist agents on two important SE tasks: the detection of bugs in games (for two games) and the minimization of makespan in a scheduling task, to solve the job-shop scheduling problem (for two instances). Our results show that the generalist agents outperform the specialist agents with very little effort for fine-tuning, achieving a 20% reduction of the makespan over specialized agent performance on task-based scheduling. In the context of game testing, some generalist agent configurations detect 85% more bugs than the specialist agents. Building on our analysis, we provide recommendations for researchers and practitioners looking to select generalist agents for SE tasks, to ensure that they perform effectively.

2023-12-24

ArXiv (prépublication)