pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Should Code Models Learn Pedagogically? A Preliminary Evaluation of Curriculum Learning for Real-World Software Engineering Tasks
Authors: Kyi Shin Khant, Hong Yi Lin, Patanamon Thongtanunam
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Clone Detection, Code Summarization, Incremental Learning

Learning-based techniques, especially advanced pre-trained models for code have demonstrated capabilities in code understanding and generation, solving diverse software engineering (SE) tasks. Despite the promising results, current training approaches may not fully optimize model performance, as they typically involve learning from randomly shuffled training data. Recent work shows that Curriculum Learning (CL) can improve performance on code-related tasks through incremental learning based on the difficulty of synthetic code. Yet, the effectiveness of CL with conventional difficulty measures in SE tasks remains largely unexplored. In this study, we explore two conventional code metrics: code length and cyclomatic complexity to determine the difficulty levels. We investigate how the pre-trained code model (CodeT5) learns under CL, through the tasks of code clone detection and code summarization. Our empirical study on the CodeXGLUE benchmark showed contrasting results to prior studies, where the model exhibited signs of catastrophic forgetting and shortcut learning. Surprisingly, model performance saturates after only the first quartile of training, potentially indicating a limit in the model's representation capacity and/or the task's inherent difficulty. Future work should further explore various CL strategies with different code models across a wider range of SE tasks for a more holistic understanding.
Overcoming Vision Language Model Challenges in Diagram Understanding: A Proof-of-Concept with XML-Driven Large Language Models Solutions
Authors: Shue Shiinoki, Ryo Koshihara, Hayato Motegi, Masumi Morishige
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Diagrams play a crucial role in visually conveying complex relationships and processes within business documentation. Despite recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for various image understanding tasks, accurately identifying and extracting the structures and relationships depicted in diagrams continues to pose significant challenges. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a text-driven approach that bypasses reliance on VLMs' visual recognition capabilities. Instead, it utilizes the editable source files--such as xlsx, pptx or docx--where diagram elements (e.g., shapes, lines, annotations) are preserved as textual metadata. In our proof-of-concept, we extracted diagram information from xlsx-based system design documents and transformed the extracted shape data into textual input for Large Language Models (LLMs). This approach allowed the LLM to analyze relationships and generate responses to business-oriented questions without the bottleneck of image-based processing. Experimental comparisons with a VLM-based method demonstrated that the proposed text-driven framework yielded more accurate answers for questions requiring detailed comprehension of diagram structures.The results obtained in this study are not limited to the tested .xlsx files but can also be extended to diagrams in other documents with source files, such as Office pptx and docx formats. These findings highlight the feasibility of circumventing VLM constraints through direct textual extraction from original source files. By enabling robust diagram understanding through LLMs, our method offers a promising path toward enhanced workflow efficiency and information analysis in real-world business scenarios.
An Empirical Exploration of ChatGPT's Ability to Support Problem Formulation Tasks for Mission Engineering and a Documentation of its Performance Variability
Authors: Max Ofsa, Taylan G. Topcu
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

Systems engineering (SE) is evolving with the availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the demand for a systems-of-systems perspective, formalized under the purview of mission engineering (ME) in the US Department of Defense. Formulating ME problems is challenging because they are open-ended exercises that involve translation of ill-defined problems into well-defined ones that are amenable for engineering development. It remains to be seen to which extent AI could assist problem formulation objectives. To that end, this paper explores the quality and consistency of multi-purpose Large Language Models (LLM) in supporting ME problem formulation tasks, specifically focusing on stakeholder identification. We identify a relevant reference problem, a NASA space mission design challenge, and document ChatGPT-3.5's ability to perform stakeholder identification tasks. We execute multiple parallel attempts and qualitatively evaluate LLM outputs, focusing on both their quality and variability. Our findings portray a nuanced picture. We find that the LLM performs well in identifying human-focused stakeholders but poorly in recognizing external systems and environmental factors, despite explicit efforts to account for these. Additionally, LLMs struggle with preserving the desired level of abstraction and exhibit a tendency to produce solution specific outputs that are inappropriate for problem formulation. More importantly, we document great variability among parallel threads, highlighting that LLM outputs should be used with caution, ideally by adopting a stochastic view of their abilities. Overall, our findings suggest that, while ChatGPT could reduce some expert workload, its lack of consistency and domain understanding may limit its reliability for problem formulation tasks.
Large Language Model Guided Self-Debugging Code Generation
Authors: Muntasir Adnan, Zhiwei Xu, Carlos C. N. Kuhn
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Computational Efficiency, HumanEval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Automated code generation is gaining significant importance in intelligent computer programming and system deployment. However, current approaches often face challenges in computational efficiency and lack robust mechanisms for code parsing and error correction. In this work, we propose a novel framework, PyCapsule, with a simple yet effective two-agent pipeline and efficient self-debugging modules for Python code generation. PyCapsule features sophisticated prompt inference, iterative error handling, and case testing, ensuring high generation stability, safety, and correctness. Empirically, PyCapsule achieves up to 5.7% improvement of success rate on HumanEval, 10.3% on HumanEval-ET, and 24.4% on BigCodeBench compared to the state-of-art methods. We also observe a decrease in normalized success rate given more self-debugging attempts, potentially affected by limited and noisy error feedback in retention. PyCapsule demonstrates broader impacts on advancing lightweight and efficient code generation for artificial intelligence systems.
DANDI: Diffusion as Normative Distribution for Deep Neural Network Input
Authors: SoMin Kim, Shin Yoo
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: DNN Testing

Surprise Adequacy (SA) has been widely studied as a test adequacy metric that can effectively guide software engineers towards inputs that are more likely to reveal unexpected behaviour of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Intuitively, SA is an out-of-distribution metric that quantifies the dissimilarity between the given input and the training data: if a new input is very different from those seen during training, the DNN is more likely to behave unexpectedly against the input. While SA has been widely adopted as a test prioritization method, its major weakness is the fact that the computation of the metric requires access to the training dataset, which is often not allowed in real-world use cases. We present DANDI, a technique that generates a surrogate input distribution using Stable Diffusion to compute SA values without requiring the original training data. An empirical evaluation of DANDI applied to image classifiers for CIFAR10 and ImageNet-1K shows that SA values computed against synthetic data are highly correlated with the values computed against the training data, with Spearman Rank correlation value of 0.852 for ImageNet-1K and 0.881 for CIFAR-10. Further, we show that SA value computed by DANDI achieves can prioritize inputs as effectively as those computed using the training data, when testing DNN models mutated by DeepMutation. We believe that DANDI can significantly improve the usability of SA for practical DNN testing.
COSMosFL: Ensemble of Small Language Models for Fault Localisation
Authors: Hyunjoon Cho, Sungmin Kang, Gabin An, Shin Yoo
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

LLMs are rapidly being adopted to build powerful tools and agents for software engineering, but most of them rely heavily on extremely large closed-source models. This, in turn, can hinder wider adoption due to security issues as well as financial cost and environmental impact. Recently, a number of open source Small Language Models (SLMs) are being released and gaining traction. While SLMs are smaller, more energy-efficient, and therefore easier to locally deploy, they tend to show worse performance when compared to larger closed LLMs. We present COSMos, a task-level LLM ensemble technique that uses voting mechanism, to provide a broader range of choice between SLMs and LLMs. We instantiate COSMos with an LLM-based Fault Localisation technique, AutoFL, and report the cost-benefit trade-off between LLM accuracy and various costs such as energy consumption, inference time, and the number of tokens used. An empirical evaluation using Defects4J shows that COSMos can build effective ensembles that can achieve Pareto-optimality in terms of FL accuracy and inference cost, when compared to individual models.
A Systematic Approach for Assessing Large Language Models' Test Case Generation Capability
Authors: Hung-Fu Chang, Mohammad Shokrolah Shirazi
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing, Test Case Creation

Software testing ensures the quality and reliability of software products, but manual test case creation is labor-intensive. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in unit test creation with LLMs. However, effective assessment of LLM-generated test cases is limited by the lack of standardized benchmarks that comprehensively cover diverse programming scenarios. To address the assessment of LLM's test case generation ability and lacking dataset for evaluation, we propose the Generated Benchmark from Control-Flow Structure and Variable Usage Composition (GBCV) approach, which systematically generates programs used for evaluating LLMs' test generation capabilities. By leveraging basic control-flow structures and variable usage, GBCV provides a flexible framework to create a spectrum of programs ranging from simple to complex. Because GPT-4o and GPT-3-Turbo are publicly accessible models, to present real-world regular user's use case, we use GBCV to assess LLM performance on them. Our findings indicate that GPT-4o performs better on complex program structures, while all models effectively detect boundary values in simple conditions but face challenges with arithmetic computations. This study highlights the strengths and limitations of LLMs in test generation, provides a benchmark framework, and suggests directions for future improvement.
An Analysis of LLM Fine-Tuning and Few-Shot Learning for Flaky Test Detection and Classification
Authors: Riddhi More, Jeremy S. Bradbury
Date: 2025-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Flaky tests exhibit non-deterministic behavior during execution and they may pass or fail without any changes to the program under test. Detecting and classifying these flaky tests is crucial for maintaining the robustness of automated test suites and ensuring the overall reliability and confidence in the testing. However, flaky test detection and classification is challenging due to the variability in test behavior, which can depend on environmental conditions and subtle code interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising approaches to address this challenge, with fine-tuning and few-shot learning (FSL) emerging as viable techniques. With enough data fine-tuning a pre-trained LLM can achieve high accuracy, making it suitable for organizations with more resources. Alternatively, we introduce FlakyXbert, an FSL approach that employs a Siamese network architecture to train efficiently with limited data. To understand the performance and cost differences between these two methods, we compare fine-tuning on larger datasets with FSL in scenarios restricted by smaller datasets. Our evaluation involves two existing flaky test datasets, FlakyCat and IDoFT. Our results suggest that while fine-tuning can achieve high accuracy, FSL provides a cost-effective approach with competitive accuracy, which is especially beneficial for organizations or projects with limited historical data available for training. These findings underscore the viability of both fine-tuning and FSL in flaky test detection and classification with each suited to different organizational needs and resource availability.
GNNs Getting ComFy: Community and Feature Similarity Guided Rewiring
Authors: Celia Rubio-Madrigal, Adarsh Jamadandi, Rebekka Burkholz
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Maximizing the spectral gap through graph rewiring has been proposed to enhance the performance of message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs) by addressing over-squashing. However, as we show, minimizing the spectral gap can also improve generalization. To explain this, we analyze how rewiring can benefit GNNs within the context of stochastic block models. Since spectral gap optimization primarily influences community strength, it improves performance when the community structure aligns with node labels. Building on this insight, we propose three distinct rewiring strategies that explicitly target community structure, node labels, and their alignment: (a) community structure-based rewiring (ComMa), a more computationally efficient alternative to spectral gap optimization that achieves similar goals; (b) feature similarity-based rewiring (FeaSt), which focuses on maximizing global homophily; and (c) a hybrid approach (ComFy), which enhances local feature similarity while preserving community structure to optimize label-community alignment. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of these strategies and support our theoretical insights.
HOG-Diff: Higher-Order Guided Diffusion for Graph Generation
Authors: Yiming Huang, Tolga Birdal
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Image Generation

Graph generation is a critical yet challenging task as empirical analyses require a deep understanding of complex, non-Euclidean structures. Although diffusion models have recently made significant achievements in graph generation, these models typically adapt from the frameworks designed for image generation, making them ill-suited for capturing the topological properties of graphs. In this work, we propose a novel Higher-order Guided Diffusion (HOG-Diff) model that follows a coarse-to-fine generation curriculum and is guided by higher-order information, enabling the progressive generation of plausible graphs with inherent topological structures. We further prove that our model exhibits a stronger theoretical guarantee than classical diffusion frameworks. Extensive experiments on both molecular and generic graph generation tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms or remains competitive with state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yiminghh/HOG-Diff.
A Classification System Approach in Predicting Chinese Censorship
Authors: Matt Prodani, Tianchu Ze, Yushen Hu
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper is dedicated to using a classifier to predict whether a Weibo post would be censored under the Chinese internet. Through randomized sampling from \citeauthor{Fu2021} and Chinese tokenizing strategies, we constructed a cleaned Chinese phrase dataset with binary censorship markings. Utilizing various probability-based information retrieval methods on the data, we were able to derive 4 logistic regression models for classification. Furthermore, we experimented with pre-trained transformers to perform similar classification tasks. After evaluating both the macro-F1 and ROC-AUC metrics, we concluded that the Fined-Tuned BERT model exceeds other strategies in performance.
Graph machine learning for flight delay prediction due to holding manouver
Authors: Jorge L. Franco, Manoel V. Machado Neto, Filipe A. N. Verri, Diego R. Amancio
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Graph Attention

Flight delays due to holding maneuvers are a critical and costly phenomenon in aviation, driven by the need to manage air traffic congestion and ensure safety. Holding maneuvers occur when aircraft are instructed to circle in designated airspace, often due to factors such as airport congestion, adverse weather, or air traffic control restrictions. This study models the prediction of flight delays due to holding maneuvers as a graph problem, leveraging advanced Graph Machine Learning (Graph ML) techniques to capture complex interdependencies in air traffic networks. Holding maneuvers, while crucial for safety, cause increased fuel usage, emissions, and passenger dissatisfaction, making accurate prediction essential for operational efficiency. Traditional machine learning models, typically using tabular data, often overlook spatial-temporal relations within air traffic data. To address this, we model the problem of predicting holding as edge feature prediction in a directed (multi)graph where we apply both CatBoost, enriched with graph features capturing network centrality and connectivity, and Graph Attention Networks (GATs), which excel in relational data contexts. Our results indicate that CatBoost outperforms GAT in this imbalanced dataset, effectively predicting holding events and offering interpretability through graph-based feature importance. Additionally, we discuss the model's potential operational impact through a web-based tool that allows users to simulate real-time delay predictions. This research underscores the viability of graph-based approaches for predictive analysis in aviation, with implications for enhancing fuel efficiency, reducing delays, and improving passenger experience.
A Pseudo Markov-Chain Model and Time-Elapsed Measures of Mobility from Collective Data
Authors: Alisha Foster, David A. Meyer, Asif Shakeel
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

In this paper we develop a pseudo Markov-chain model to understand time-elapsed flows, over multiple intervals, from time and space aggregated collective inter-location trip data, given as a time-series. Building on the model, we develop measures of mobility that parallel those known for individual mobility data, such as the radius of gyration. We apply these measures to the NetMob 2024 Data Challenge data, and obtain interesting results that are consistent with published statistics and commuting patterns in cities. Besides building a new framework, we foresee applications of this approach to an improved understanding of human mobility in the context of environmental changes and sustainable development.
Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study
Authors: Lanqin Yuan, Philipp J. Schneider, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.
Comparative Analysis of Community Detection Algorithms on the SNAP Social Circles Dataset
Authors: Yash Malode, Amit Aylani, Arvind Bhardwaj, Deepak Hajoary
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection

In network research, Community Detection has always been a topic of significant interest in network science, with numerous papers and algorithms proposing to uncover the underlying structures within networks. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of several prominent community detection algorithms applied to the SNAP Social Circles Dataset, derived from the Facebook Social Media network. The algorithms implemented include Louvain, Girvan-Newman, Spectral Clustering, K-Means Clustering, etc. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms based on various metrics such as modularity, normalized cut-ratio, silhouette score, compactness, and separability. Our findings reveal insights into the effectiveness of each algorithm in detecting various meaningful communities within the social network, shedding light on their strength and limitations. This research contributes to the understanding of community detection methods and provides valuable guidance for their application in analyzing real-world social networks.
Output-Feedback Full-State Targeting Model Predictive Control for Station-Keeping on Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbits
Authors: Yuri Shimane, Stefano Di Cairano, Koki Ho, Avishai Weiss
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

We develop a model predictive control (MPC) policy for station-keeping (SK) on a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO). The proposed policy achieves full-state tracking of a reference NRHO via a two-maneuver control horizon placed one revolution apart. Our method abides by the typical mission requirement that at most one maneuver is used for SK during each NRHO revolution. Simultaneously, the policy has sufficient controllability for full-state tracking, making it immune to phase deviation issues in the along-track direction of the reference NRHO, a common drawback of existing SK methods with a single maneuver per revolution. We report numerical simulations with a navigation filter to demonstrate the MPC's performance with output feedback. Our approach successfully maintains the spacecraft's motion in the vicinity of the reference in both space and phase, with tighter tracking than state-of-the-art SK methods and comparable delta-V performance.