pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automated Unit Test Case Generation: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Jason Wang, Basem Suleiman, Muhammad Johan Alibasa
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing, Systematic Literature Review

Software is omnipresent within all factors of society. It is thus important to ensure that software are well tested to mitigate bad user experiences as well as the potential for severe financial and human losses. Software testing is however expensive and absorbs valuable time and resources. As a result, the field of automated software testing has grown of interest to researchers in past decades. In our review of present and past research papers, we have identified an information gap in the areas of improvement for the Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimisation. A gap in knowledge in the current challenges that face automated testing has also been identified. We therefore present this systematic literature review in an effort to consolidate existing knowledge in regards to the evolutionary approaches as well as their improvements and resulting limitations. These improvements include hybrid algorithm combinations as well as interoperability with mutation testing and neural networks. We will also explore the main test criterion that are used in these algorithms alongside the challenges currently faced in the field related to readability, mocking and more.
BLADE: Benchmark suite for LLM-driven Automated Design and Evolution of iterative optimisation heuristics
Authors: Niki van Stein, Anna V. Kononova, Haoran Yin, Thomas Bäck
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Automated Algorithm Discovery (AAD), particularly for optimisation heuristics, is an emerging field of research. This emergence necessitates robust, standardised benchmarking practices to rigorously evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLM-driven AAD methods and the resulting generated algorithms, especially given the opacity of their design process and known issues with existing benchmarks. To address this need, we introduce BLADE (Benchmark suite for LLM-driven Automated Design and Evolution), a modular and extensible framework specifically designed for benchmarking LLM-driven AAD methods in a continuous black-box optimisation context. BLADE integrates collections of benchmark problems (including MA-BBOB and SBOX-COST among others) with instance generators and textual descriptions aimed at capability-focused testing, such as generalisation, specialisation and information exploitation. It offers flexible experimental setup options, standardised logging for reproducibility and fair comparison, incorporates methods for analysing the AAD process (e.g., Code Evolution Graphs and various visualisation approaches) and facilitates comparison against human-designed baselines through integration with established tools like IOHanalyser and IOHexplainer. BLADE provides an `out-of-the-box' solution to systematically evaluate LLM-driven AAD approaches. The framework is demonstrated through two distinct use cases exploring mutation prompt strategies and function specialisation.
A Comparison-Relationship-Surrogate Evolutionary Algorithm for Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Christopher M. Pierce, Young-Kee Kim, Ivan Bazarov
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms often struggle to find well converged (e.g small inverted generational distance on test problems) solutions to multi-objective optimization problems on a limited budget of function evaluations (here, a few hundred). The family of surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) offers a potential solution to this shortcoming through the use of data driven models which augment evaluations of the objective functions. A surrogate model which has shown promise in single-objective optimization is to predict the "comparison relationship" between pairs of solutions (i.e. who's objective function is smaller). In this paper, we investigate the performance of this model on multi-objective optimization problems. First, we propose a new algorithm "CRSEA" which uses the comparison-relationship model. Numerical experiments are then performed with the DTLZ and WFG test suites plus a real-world problem from the field of accelerator physics. We find that CRSEA finds better converged solutions than the tested SAEAs on many of the medium-scale, biobjective problems chosen from the WFG suite suggesting the comparison-relationship surrogate as a promising tool for improving the efficiency of multi-objective optimization algorithms.
Digital Twin-based Out-of-Distribution Detection in Autonomous Vessels
Authors: Erblin Isaku, Hassan Sartaj, Shaukat Ali
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis, Out-of-Distribution Detection

An autonomous vessel (AV) is a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) with software enabling many key functionalities, e.g., navigation software enables an AV to autonomously or semi-autonomously follow a path to its destination. Digital twins of such AVs enable advanced functionalities such as running what-if scenarios, performing predictive maintenance, and enabling fault diagnosis. Due to technological improvements, real-time analyses using continuous data from vessels' real-time operations have become increasingly possible. However, the literature has little explored developing advanced analyses in real-time data in AVs with digital twins built with machine learning techniques. To this end, we present a novel digital twin-based approach (ODDIT) to detect future out-of-distribution (OOD) states of an AV before reaching them, enabling proactive intervention. Such states may indicate anomalies requiring attention (e.g., manual correction by the ship master) and assist testers in scenario-centered testing. The digital twin consists of two machine-learning models predicting future vessel states and whether the predicted state will be OOD. We evaluated ODDIT with five vessels across waypoint and zigzag maneuvering under simulated conditions, including sensor and actuator noise and environmental disturbances i.e., ocean current. ODDIT achieved high accuracy in detecting OOD states, with AUROC and TNR@TPR95 scores reaching 99\% across multiple vessels.
Enhancing Cell Counting through MLOps: A Structured Approach for Automated Cell Analysis
Authors: Matteo Testi, Luca Clissa, Matteo Ballabio, Salvatore Ricciardi, Federico Baldo, Emanuele Frontoni, Sara Moccia, Gennario Vessio
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

Machine Learning (ML) models offer significant potential for advancing cell counting applications in neuroscience, medical research, pharmaceutical development, and environmental monitoring. However, implementing these models effectively requires robust operational frameworks. This paper introduces Cell Counting Machine Learning Operations (CC-MLOps), a comprehensive framework that streamlines the integration of ML in cell counting workflows. CC-MLOps encompasses data access and preprocessing, model training, monitoring, explainability features, and sustainability considerations. Through a practical use case, we demonstrate how MLOps principles can enhance model reliability, reduce human error, and enable scalable Cell Counting solutions. This work provides actionable guidance for researchers and laboratory professionals seeking to implement machine learning (ML)- powered cell counting systems.
Clustering-Based Evolutionary Federated Multiobjective Optimization and Learning
Authors: Chengui Xiao, Songbai Liu
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diversity, Federated Learning, Multiobjective Optimization, Quantization

Federated learning enables decentralized model training while preserving data privacy, yet it faces challenges in balancing communication efficiency, model performance, and privacy protection. To address these trade-offs, we formulate FL as a federated multiobjective optimization problem and propose FedMOEAC, a clustering-based evolutionary algorithm that efficiently navigates the Pareto-optimal solution space. Our approach integrates quantization, weight sparsification, and differential privacy to reduce communication overhead while ensuring model robustness and privacy. The clustering mechanism en-hances population diversity, preventing premature convergence and improving optimization efficiency. Experimental results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that FedMOEAC achieves 98.2% accuracy, reduces communication overhead by 45%, and maintains a privacy budget below 1.0, outperforming NSGA-II in convergence speed by 33%. This work provides a scalable and efficient FL framework, ensuring an optimal balance between accuracy, communication efficiency, and privacy in resource-constrained environments.
Vessel Length Estimation from Magnetic Wake Signature: A Physics-Informed Residual Neural Network Approach
Authors: Mohammad Amir Fallah, Mehdi Monemi, Matti Latva-aho
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00

Marine remote sensing enhances maritime surveillance, environmental monitoring, and naval operations. Vessel length estimation, a key component of this technology, supports effective maritime surveillance by empowering features such as vessel classification. Departing from traditional methods relying on two-dimensional hydrodynamic wakes or computationally intensive satellite imagery, this paper introduces an innovative approach for vessel length estimation that leverages the subtle magnetic wake signatures of vessels, captured through a low-complexity one-dimensional profile from a single airborne magnetic sensor scan. The proposed method centers around our characterized nonlinear integral equations that connect the magnetic wake to the vessel length within a realistic finite-depth marine environment. To solve the derived equations, we initially leverage a deep residual neural network (DRNN). The proposed DRNN-based solution framework is shown to be unable to exactly learn the intricate relationships between parameters when constrained by a limited training-dataset. To overcome this issue, we introduce an innovative approach leveraging a physics-informed residual neural network (PIRNN). This model integrates physical formulations directly into the loss function, leading to improved performance in terms of both accuracy and convergence speed. Considering a sensor scan angle of less than $15^\circ$, which maintains a reasonable margin below Kelvin's limit angle of $19.5^\circ$, we explore the impact of various parameters on the accuracy of the vessel length estimation, including sensor scan angle, vessel speed, and sea depth. Numerical simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PIRNN method, achieving mean length estimation errors consistently below 5\% for vessels longer than 100m. For shorter vessels, the errors generally remain under 10\%.
DiCE-Extended: A Robust Approach to Counterfactual Explanations in Machine Learning
Authors: Volkan Bakir, Polat Goktas, Sureyya Akyuz
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Diversity, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has become increasingly important in decision-critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and law. Counterfactual (CF) explanations, a key approach in XAI, provide users with actionable insights by suggesting minimal modifications to input features that lead to different model outcomes. Despite significant advancements, existing CF generation methods often struggle to balance proximity, diversity, and robustness, limiting their real-world applicability. A widely adopted framework, Diverse Counterfactual Explanations (DiCE), emphasizes diversity but lacks robustness, making CF explanations sensitive to perturbations and domain constraints. To address these challenges, we introduce DiCE-Extended, an enhanced CF explanation framework that integrates multi-objective optimization techniques to improve robustness while maintaining interpretability. Our approach introduces a novel robustness metric based on the Dice-Sorensen coefficient, ensuring stability under small input variations. Additionally, we refine CF generation using weighted loss components (lambda_p, lambda_d, lambda_r) to balance proximity, diversity, and robustness. We empirically validate DiCE-Extended on benchmark datasets (COMPAS, Lending Club, German Credit, Adult Income) across multiple ML backends (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow). Results demonstrate improved CF validity, stability, and alignment with decision boundaries compared to standard DiCE-generated explanations. Our findings highlight the potential of DiCE-Extended in generating more reliable and interpretable CFs for high-stakes applications. Future work will explore adaptive optimization techniques and domain-specific constraints to further enhance CF generation in real-world scenarios.
Evaluate-and-Purify: Fortifying Code Language Models Against Adversarial Attacks Using LLM-as-a-Judge
Authors: Wenhan Mu, Ling Xu, Shuren Pei, Le Mi, Huichi Zhou
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

The widespread adoption of code language models in software engineering tasks has exposed vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, especially the identifier substitution attacks. Although existing identifier substitution attackers demonstrate high success rates, they often produce adversarial examples with unnatural code patterns. In this paper, we systematically assess the quality of adversarial examples using LLM-as-a-Judge. Our analysis reveals that over 80% of adversarial examples generated by state-of-the-art identifier substitution attackers (e.g., ALERT) are actually detectable. Based on this insight, we propose EP-Shield, a unified framework for evaluating and purifying identifier substitution attacks via naturalness-aware reasoning. Specifically, we first evaluate the naturalness of code and identify the perturbed adversarial code, then purify it so that the victim model can restore correct prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of EP-Shield over adversarial fine-tuning (up to 83.36% improvement) and its lightweight design 7B parameters) with GPT-4-level performance.
Application of the Brain Drain Optimization Algorithm to the N-Queens Problem
Authors: Sahar Ramezani Jolfaei, Sepehr Khodadadi Hossein Abadi
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decision Making

This paper introduces the application of the Brain Drain Optimization algorithm -- a swarm-based metaheuristic inspired by the emigration of intellectual elites -- to the N-Queens problem. The N-Queens problem, a classic combinatorial optimization problem, serves as a challenge for applying the BRADO. A designed cost function guides the search, and the configurations are tuned using a TOPSIS-based multicriteria decision making process. BRADO consistently outperforms alternatives in terms of solution quality, achieving fewer threats and better objective function values. To assess BRADO's efficacy, it is benchmarked against several established metaheuristic algorithms, including Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), Iterated Local Search (ILS), and basic Local Search (LS). The study highlights BRADO's potential as a general-purpose solver for combinatorial problems, opening pathways for future applications in other domains of artificial intelligence.
AutoP2C: An LLM-Based Agent Framework for Code Repository Generation from Multimodal Content in Academic Papers
Authors: Zijie Lin, Yiqing Shen, Qilin Cai, He Sun, Jinrui Zhou, Mingjun Xiao
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

Machine Learning (ML) research is spread through academic papers featuring rich multimodal content, including text, diagrams, and tabular results. However, translating these multimodal elements into executable code remains a challenging and time-consuming process that requires substantial ML expertise. We introduce ``Paper-to-Code'' (P2C), a novel task that transforms the multimodal content of scientific publications into fully executable code repositories, which extends beyond the existing formulation of code generation that merely converts textual descriptions into isolated code snippets. To automate the P2C process, we propose AutoP2C, a multi-agent framework based on large language models that processes both textual and visual content from research papers to generate complete code repositories. Specifically, AutoP2C contains four stages: (1) repository blueprint extraction from established codebases, (2) multimodal content parsing that integrates information from text, equations, and figures, (3) hierarchical task decomposition for structured code generation, and (4) iterative feedback-driven debugging to ensure functionality and performance. Evaluation on a benchmark of eight research papers demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoP2C, which can successfully generate executable code repositories for all eight papers, while OpenAI-o1 or DeepSeek-R1 can only produce runnable code for one paper. The code is available at https://github.com/shoushouyu/Automated-Paper-to-Code.
Advancing CMA-ES with Learning-Based Cooperative Coevolution for Scalable Optimization
Authors: Hongshu Guo, Wenjie Qiu, Zeyuan Ma, Xinglin Zhang, Jun Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

Recent research in Cooperative Coevolution~(CC) have achieved promising progress in solving large-scale global optimization problems. However, existing CC paradigms have a primary limitation in that they require deep expertise for selecting or designing effective variable decomposition strategies. Inspired by advancements in Meta-Black-Box Optimization, this paper introduces LCC, a pioneering learning-based cooperative coevolution framework that dynamically schedules decomposition strategies during optimization processes. The decomposition strategy selector is parameterized through a neural network, which processes a meticulously crafted set of optimization status features to determine the optimal strategy for each optimization step. The network is trained via the Proximal Policy Optimization method in a reinforcement learning manner across a collection of representative problems, aiming to maximize the expected optimization performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LCC not only offers certain advantages over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of optimization effectiveness and resource consumption, but it also exhibits promising transferability towards unseen problems.
Dual-Individual Genetic Algorithm: A Dual-Individual Approach for Efficient Training of Multi-Layer Neural Networks
Authors: Tran Thuy Nga Truong, Jooyong Kim
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

This paper introduces an enhanced Genetic Algorithm technique called Dual-Individual Genetic Algorithm (Dual-Individual GA), which optimizes neural networks for binary image classification tasks, such as cat vs. non-cat classification. The proposed method employs only two individuals for crossover, represented by two parameter sets: Leader and Follower. The Leader focuses on exploitation, representing the primary optimal solution at even-indexed positions (0, 2, 4, ...), while the Follower promotes exploration by preserving diversity and avoiding premature convergence, operating at odd-indexed positions (1, 3, 5, ...). Leader and Follower are modeled as two phases or roles. The key contributions of this work are threefold: (1) a self-adaptive layer dimension mechanism that eliminates the need for manual tuning of layer architectures; (2) generates two parameter sets, leader and follower parameter sets, with 10 layer architecture configurations (5 for each set), ranked by Pareto dominance and cost. post-optimization; and (3) demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional gradient-based methods. Experimental results show that the Dual-Individual GA achieves 99.04% training accuracy and 80% testing accuracy (cost = 0.034) on a three-layer network with architecture [12288, 17, 4, 1], outperforming a gradient-based approach that achieves 98% training accuracy and 80% testing accuracy (cost = 0.092) on a four-layer network with architecture [12288, 20, 7, 5, 1]. These findings highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in optimizing neural networks.
Large Language Models are Qualified Benchmark Builders: Rebuilding Pre-Training Datasets for Advancing Code Intelligence Tasks
Authors: Kang Yang, XinJun Mao, Shangwen Wang, Yanlin Wang, Tanghaoran Zhang, Bo Lin, Yihao Qin, Zhang Zhang, Yao Lu, Kamal Al-Sabahi
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Search, Code Summarization

Pre-trained code models rely heavily on high-quality pre-training data, particularly human-written reference comments that bridge code and natural language. However, these comments often become outdated as software evolves, degrading model performance. Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating high-quality code comments. We investigate whether replacing human-written comments with LLM-generated ones improves pre-training datasets. Since standard metrics cannot assess reference comment quality, we propose two novel reference-free evaluation tasks: code-comment inconsistency detection and semantic code search. Results show that LLM-generated comments are more semantically consistent with code than human-written ones, as confirmed by manual evaluation. Leveraging this finding, we rebuild the CodeSearchNet dataset with LLM-generated comments and re-pre-train CodeT5. Evaluations demonstrate that models trained on LLM-enhanced data outperform those using original human comments in code summarization, generation, and translation tasks. This work validates rebuilding pre-training datasets with LLMs to advance code intelligence, challenging the traditional reliance on human reference comments.
Optimal Distribution of Solutions for Crowding Distance on Linear Pareto Fronts of Two-Objective Optimization Problems
Authors: Hisao Ishibuchi, Lie Meng Pang
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00

Characteristics of an evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithm can be explained using its best solution set. For example, the best solution set for SMS-EMOA is the same as the optimal distribution of solutions for hypervolume maximization. For NSGA-III, if the Pareto front has intersection points with all reference lines, all of those intersection points are the best solution set. For MOEA/D, the best solution set is the set of the optimal solution of each sub-problem. Whereas these EMO algorithms can be analyzed in this manner, the best solution set for the most well-known and frequently-used EMO algorithm NSGA-II has not been discussed in the literature. This is because NSGA-II is not based on any clear criterion to be optimized (e.g., hypervolume maximization, distance minimization to the nearest reference line). As the first step toward the best solution set analysis for NSGA-II, we discuss the optimal distribution of solutions for the crowding distance under the simplest setting: the maximization of the minimum crowding distance on linear Pareto fronts of two-objective optimization problems. That is, we discuss the optimal distribution of solutions on a straight line. Our theoretical analysis shows that the uniformly distributed solutions are not the best solution set. However, it is also shown by computational experiments that the uniformly distributed solutions (except for the duplicated two extreme solutions at each edge of the Pareto front) are obtained from a modified NSGA-II with the ($\mu$ + 1) generation update scheme.