Daily Papers

Quadcopters can suffer from loss of propellers in mid-flight, thus requiring a need to have a system that detects single and multiple propeller failures and an adaptive controller that stabilizes the propeller-deficient quadcopter. This paper presents reinforcement learning based controllers for quadcopters with 4, 3, and 2 (opposing) functional propellers. The paper also proposes a neural network based propeller fault detection system to detect propeller loss and switch to the appropriate controller. The simulation results demonstrate a stable quadcopter with efficient waypoint tracking for all controllers. The detection system is able to detect propeller failure in a short time and stabilize the quadcopter.

Automatic detection and prevention of open-set failures are crucial in closed-loop robotic systems. Recent studies often struggle to simultaneously identify unexpected failures reactively after they occur and prevent foreseeable ones proactively. To this end, we propose Code-as-Monitor (CaM), a novel paradigm leveraging the vision-language model (VLM) for both open-set reactive and proactive failure detection. The core of our method is to formulate both tasks as a unified set of spatio-temporal constraint satisfaction problems and use VLM-generated code to evaluate them for real-time monitoring. To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of monitoring, we further introduce constraint elements that abstract constraint-related entities or their parts into compact geometric elements. This approach offers greater generality, simplifies tracking, and facilitates constraint-aware visual programming by leveraging these elements as visual prompts. Experiments show that CaM achieves a 28.7% higher success rate and reduces execution time by 31.8% under severe disturbances compared to baselines across three simulators and a real-world setting. Moreover, CaM can be integrated with open-loop control policies to form closed-loop systems, enabling long-horizon tasks in cluttered scenes with dynamic environments.

Moments when a time series changes its behaviour are called change points. Detection of such points is a well-known problem, which can be found in many applications: quality monitoring of industrial processes, failure detection in complex systems, health monitoring, speech recognition and video analysis. Occurrence of change point implies that the state of the system is altered and its timely detection might help to prevent unwanted consequences. In this paper, we present two online change-point detection approaches based on neural networks. These algorithms demonstrate linear computational complexity and are suitable for change-point detection in large time series. We compare them with the best known algorithms on various synthetic and real world data sets. Experiments show that the proposed methods outperform known approaches.

The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is notoriously ill-defined. Earlier works focused on new-class detection, aiming to identify label-altering data distribution shifts, also known as "semantic shift." However, recent works argue for a focus on failure detection, expanding the OOD evaluation framework to account for label-preserving data distribution shifts, also known as "covariate shift." Intriguingly, under this new framework, complex OOD detectors that were previously considered state-of-the-art now perform similarly to, or even worse than the simple maximum softmax probability baseline. This raises the question: what are the latest OOD detectors actually detecting? Deciphering the behavior of OOD detection algorithms requires evaluation datasets that decouples semantic shift and covariate shift. To aid our investigations, we present ImageNet-OOD, a clean semantic shift dataset that minimizes the interference of covariate shift. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that OOD detectors are more sensitive to covariate shift than to semantic shift, and the benefits of recent OOD detection algorithms on semantic shift detection is minimal. Our dataset and analyses provide important insights for guiding the design of future OOD detectors.

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA's failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models.

Reliable application of machine learning is of primary importance to the practical deployment of deep learning methods. A fundamental challenge is that models are often unreliable due to overconfidence. In this paper, we estimate a model's reliability by measuring the agreement between its latent space, and the latent space of a foundation model. However, it is challenging to measure the agreement between two different latent spaces due to their incoherence, \eg, arbitrary rotations and different dimensionality. To overcome this incoherence issue, we design a neighborhood agreement measure between latent spaces and find that this agreement is surprisingly well-correlated with the reliability of a model's predictions. Further, we show that fusing neighborhood agreement into a model's predictive confidence in a post-hoc way significantly improves its reliability. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on failure detection across various datasets verify the effectiveness of our method on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

Although AI systems have been applied in various fields and achieved impressive performance, their safety and reliability are still a big concern. This is especially important for safety-critical tasks. One shared characteristic of these critical tasks is their risk sensitivity, where small mistakes can cause big consequences and even endanger life. There are several factors that could be guidelines for the successful deployment of AI systems in sensitive tasks: (i) failure detection and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection; (ii) overfitting identification; (iii) uncertainty quantification for predictions; (iv) robustness to data perturbations. These factors are also challenges of current AI systems, which are major blocks for building safe and reliable AI. Specifically, the current AI algorithms are unable to identify common causes for failure detection. Furthermore, additional techniques are required to quantify the quality of predictions. All these contribute to inaccurate uncertainty quantification, which lowers trust in predictions. Hence obtaining accurate model uncertainty quantification and its further improvement are challenging. To address these issues, many techniques have been proposed, such as regularization methods and learning strategies. As vision and language are the most typical data type and have many open source benchmark datasets, this thesis will focus on vision-language data processing for tasks like classification, image captioning, and vision question answering. In this thesis, we aim to build a safeguard by further developing current techniques to ensure the accurate model uncertainty for safety-critical tasks.

Uncertainty estimation is an essential and heavily-studied component for the reliable application of semantic segmentation methods. While various studies exist claiming methodological advances on the one hand, and successful application on the other hand, the field is currently hampered by a gap between theory and practice leaving fundamental questions unanswered: Can data-related and model-related uncertainty really be separated in practice? Which components of an uncertainty method are essential for real-world performance? Which uncertainty method works well for which application? In this work, we link this research gap to a lack of systematic and comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty methods. Specifically, we identify three key pitfalls in current literature and present an evaluation framework that bridges the research gap by providing 1) a controlled environment for studying data ambiguities as well as distribution shifts, 2) systematic ablations of relevant method components, and 3) test-beds for the five predominant uncertainty applications: OoD-detection, active learning, failure detection, calibration, and ambiguity modeling. Empirical results on simulated as well as real-world data demonstrate how the proposed framework is able to answer the predominant questions in the field revealing for instance that 1) separation of uncertainty types works on simulated data but does not necessarily translate to real-world data, 2) aggregation of scores is a crucial but currently neglected component of uncertainty methods, 3) While ensembles are performing most robustly across the different downstream tasks and settings, test-time augmentation often constitutes a light-weight alternative. Code is at: https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/values

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a common paradigm to use Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside private and up-to-date knowledge bases. In this work, we address the challenges of using LLM-as-a-Judge when evaluating grounded answers generated by RAG systems. To assess the calibration and discrimination capabilities of judge models, we identify 7 generator failure modes and introduce GroUSE (Grounded QA Unitary Scoring of Evaluators), a meta-evaluation benchmark of 144 unit tests. This benchmark reveals that existing automated RAG evaluation frameworks often overlook important failure modes, even when using GPT-4 as a judge. To improve on the current design of automated RAG evaluation frameworks, we propose a novel pipeline and find that while closed models perform well on GroUSE, state-of-the-art open-source judges do not generalize to our proposed criteria, despite strong correlation with GPT-4's judgement. Our findings suggest that correlation with GPT-4 is an incomplete proxy for the practical performance of judge models and should be supplemented with evaluations on unit tests for precise failure mode detection. We further show that finetuning Llama-3 on GPT-4's reasoning traces significantly boosts its evaluation capabilities, improving upon both correlation with GPT-4's evaluations and calibration on reference situations.

In the realm of fashion object detection and segmentation for online shopping images, existing state-of-the-art fashion parsing models encounter limitations, particularly when exposed to non-model-worn apparel and close-up shots. To address these failures, we introduce FashionFail; a new fashion dataset with e-commerce images for object detection and segmentation. The dataset is efficiently curated using our novel annotation tool that leverages recent foundation models. The primary objective of FashionFail is to serve as a test bed for evaluating the robustness of models. Our analysis reveals the shortcomings of leading models, such as Attribute-Mask R-CNN and Fashionformer. Additionally, we propose a baseline approach using naive data augmentation to mitigate common failure cases and improve model robustness. Through this work, we aim to inspire and support further research in fashion item detection and segmentation for industrial applications. The dataset, annotation tool, code, and models are available at https://rizavelioglu.github.io/fashionfail/.

This study explores the challenges of integrating human visual cue-based dehazing into object detection, given the selective nature of human perception. While human vision adapts dynamically to environmental conditions, computational dehazing does not always enhance detection uniformly. We propose a multi-stage framework where a lightweight detector identifies regions of interest (RoIs), which are then enhanced via spatial attention-based dehazing before final detection by a heavier model. Though effective in foggy conditions, this approach unexpectedly degrades the performance on clear images. We analyze this phenomenon, investigate possible causes, and offer insights for designing hybrid pipelines that balance enhancement and detection. Our findings highlight the need for selective preprocessing and challenge assumptions about universal benefits from cascading transformations.

Driven by advances in self-supervised learning for speech, state-of-the-art synthetic speech detectors have achieved low error rates on popular benchmarks such as ASVspoof. However, prior benchmarks do not address the wide range of real-world variability in speech. Are reported error rates realistic in real-world conditions? To assess detector failure modes and robustness under controlled distribution shifts, we introduce ShiftySpeech, a benchmark with more than 3000 hours of synthetic speech from 7 domains, 6 TTS systems, 12 vocoders, and 3 languages. We found that all distribution shifts degraded model performance, and contrary to prior findings, training on more vocoders, speakers, or with data augmentation did not guarantee better generalization. In fact, we found that training on less diverse data resulted in better generalization, and that a detector fit using samples from a single carefully selected vocoder and a single speaker achieved state-of-the-art results on the challenging In-the-Wild benchmark.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) allows transcribing the communications between air traffic controllers (ATCOs) and aircraft pilots. The transcriptions are used later to extract ATC named entities, e.g., aircraft callsigns. One common challenge is speech activity detection (SAD) and speaker diarization (SD). In the failure condition, two or more segments remain in the same recording, jeopardizing the overall performance. We propose a system that combines SAD and a BERT model to perform speaker change detection and speaker role detection (SRD) by chunking ASR transcripts, i.e., SD with a defined number of speakers together with SRD. The proposed model is evaluated on real-life public ATC databases. Our BERT SD model baseline reaches up to 10% and 20% token-based Jaccard error rate (JER) in public and private ATC databases. We also achieved relative improvements of 32% and 7.7% in JERs and SD error rate (DER), respectively, compared to VBx, a well-known SD system.

While real-world applications of reinforcement learning are becoming popular, the security and robustness of RL systems are worthy of more attention and exploration. In particular, recent works have revealed that, in a multi-agent RL environment, backdoor trigger actions can be injected into a victim agent (a.k.a. Trojan agent), which can result in a catastrophic failure as soon as it sees the backdoor trigger action. To ensure the security of RL agents against malicious backdoors, in this work, we propose the problem of Backdoor Detection in a multi-agent competitive reinforcement learning system, with the objective of detecting Trojan agents as well as the corresponding potential trigger actions, and further trying to mitigate their Trojan behavior. In order to solve this problem, we propose PolicyCleanse that is based on the property that the activated Trojan agents accumulated rewards degrade noticeably after several timesteps. Along with PolicyCleanse, we also design a machine unlearning-based approach that can effectively mitigate the detected backdoor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can accurately detect Trojan agents, and outperform existing backdoor mitigation baseline approaches by at least 3% in winning rate across various types of agents and environments.

Face detection is one of the most studied topics in the computer vision community. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face detection benchmark datasets. We show that there is a gap between current face detection performance and the real world requirements. To facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face bounding boxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performance and propose a solution to deal with large scale variation. Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to be further investigated. Dataset can be downloaded at: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/WIDERFace

The emergence of new nanoscale technologies has imposed significant challenges to designing reliable electronic systems in radiation environments. A few types of radiation like Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects often cause permanent damages on such nanoscale electronic devices, and current state-of-the-art technologies to tackle TID make use of expensive radiation-hardened devices. This paper focuses on a novel and different approach: using machine learning algorithms on consumer electronic level Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to tackle TID effects and monitor them to replace before they stop working. This condition has a research challenge to anticipate when the board results in a total failure due to TID effects. We observed internal measurements of the FPGA boards under gamma radiation and used three different anomaly detection machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect anomalies in the sensor measurements in a gamma-radiated environment. The statistical results show a highly significant relationship between the gamma radiation exposure levels and the board measurements. Moreover, our anomaly detection results have shown that a One-Class Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function Kernel has an average Recall score of 0.95. Also, all anomalies can be detected before the boards stop working.

Monocular 3D detectors achieve remarkable performance on cars and smaller objects. However, their performance drops on larger objects, leading to fatal accidents. Some attribute the failures to training data scarcity or their receptive field requirements of large objects. In this paper, we highlight this understudied problem of generalization to large objects. We find that modern frontal detectors struggle to generalize to large objects even on nearly balanced datasets. We argue that the cause of failure is the sensitivity of depth regression losses to noise of larger objects. To bridge this gap, we comprehensively investigate regression and dice losses, examining their robustness under varying error levels and object sizes. We mathematically prove that the dice loss leads to superior noise-robustness and model convergence for large objects compared to regression losses for a simplified case. Leveraging our theoretical insights, we propose SeaBird (Segmentation in Bird's View) as the first step towards generalizing to large objects. SeaBird effectively integrates BEV segmentation on foreground objects for 3D detection, with the segmentation head trained with the dice loss. SeaBird achieves SoTA results on the KITTI-360 leaderboard and improves existing detectors on the nuScenes leaderboard, particularly for large objects. Code and models at https://github.com/abhi1kumar/SeaBird

In unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) research, while state-of-the-art models have reached a saturation point with extensive studies on public benchmark datasets, they adopt large-scale tailor-made neural networks (NN) for detection performance or pursued unified models for various tasks. Towards edge computing, it is necessary to develop a computationally efficient and scalable solution that avoids large-scale complex NNs. Motivated by this, we aim to optimize the UAD performance with minimal changes to NN settings. Thus, we revisit the reconstruction-by-inpainting approach and rethink to improve it by analyzing strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the SOTA methods is a single deterministic masking approach that addresses the challenges of random multiple masking that is inference latency and output inconsistency. Nevertheless, the issue of failure to provide a mask to completely cover anomalous regions is a remaining weakness. To mitigate this issue, we propose Feature Attenuation of Defective Representation (FADeR) that only employs two MLP layers which attenuates feature information of anomaly reconstruction during decoding. By leveraging FADeR, features of unseen anomaly patterns are reconstructed into seen normal patterns, reducing false alarms. Experimental results demonstrate that FADeR achieves enhanced performance compared to similar-scale NNs. Furthermore, our approach exhibits scalability in performance enhancement when integrated with other single deterministic masking methods in a plug-and-play manner.

Heart disease, also known as cardiovascular disease, is a prevalent and critical medical condition characterized by the impairment of the heart and blood vessels, leading to various complications such as coronary artery disease, heart failure, and myocardial infarction. The timely and accurate detection of heart disease is of paramount importance in clinical practice. Early identification of individuals at risk enables proactive interventions, preventive measures, and personalized treatment strategies to mitigate the progression of the disease and reduce adverse outcomes. In recent years, the field of heart disease detection has witnessed notable advancements due to the integration of sophisticated technologies and computational approaches. These include machine learning algorithms, data mining techniques, and predictive modeling frameworks that leverage vast amounts of clinical and physiological data to improve diagnostic accuracy and risk stratification. In this work, we propose to detect heart disease from ECG images using cutting-edge technologies, namely vision transformer models. These models are Google-Vit, Microsoft-Beit, and Swin-Tiny. To the best of our knowledge, this is the initial endeavor concentrating on the detection of heart diseases through image-based ECG data by employing cuttingedge technologies namely, transformer models. To demonstrate the contribution of the proposed framework, the performance of vision transformer models are compared with state-of-the-art studies. Experiment results show that the proposed framework exhibits remarkable classification results.

In multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs),mobile nodes cooperate with each other without using any infrastructure such as access points or base stations. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms, absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Among the various attacks to which MANETs are vulnerable, malicious packet dropping attack is very common where a malicious node can partially degrade or completely disrupt communication in the network by consistently dropping packets. In this paper, a mechanism for detection of packet dropping attack is presented based on cooperative participation of the nodes in a MANET. The redundancy of routing information in an ad hoc network is utilized to make the scheme robust so that it works effectively even in presence of transient network partitioning and Byzantine failure of nodes. The proposed scheme is fully cooperative and thus more secure as the vulnerabilities of any election algorithm used for choosing a subset of nodes for cooperation are absent. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the protocol.

Machine Learning has been steadily gaining traction for its use in Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (A-NIDS). Research into this domain is frequently performed using the KDD~CUP~99 dataset as a benchmark. Several studies question its usability while constructing a contemporary NIDS, due to the skewed response distribution, non-stationarity, and failure to incorporate modern attacks. In this paper, we compare the performance for KDD-99 alternatives when trained using classification models commonly found in literature: Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naive Bayes and K-Means. Applying the SMOTE oversampling technique and random undersampling, we create a balanced version of NSL-KDD and prove that skewed target classes in KDD-99 and NSL-KDD hamper the efficacy of classifiers on minority classes (U2R and R2L), leading to possible security risks. We explore UNSW-NB15, a modern substitute to KDD-99 with greater uniformity of pattern distribution. We benchmark this dataset before and after SMOTE oversampling to observe the effect on minority performance. Our results indicate that classifiers trained on UNSW-NB15 match or better the Weighted F1-Score of those trained on NSL-KDD and KDD-99 in the binary case, thus advocating UNSW-NB15 as a modern substitute to these datasets.

Enabling models to recognize vast open-world categories has been a longstanding pursuit in object detection. By leveraging the generalization capabilities of vision-language models, current open-world detectors can recognize a broader range of vocabularies, despite being trained on limited categories. However, when the scale of the category vocabularies during training expands to a real-world level, previous classifiers aligned with coarse class names significantly reduce the recognition performance of these detectors. In this paper, we introduce Prova, a multi-modal prototype classifier for vast-vocabulary object detection. Prova extracts comprehensive multi-modal prototypes as initialization of alignment classifiers to tackle the vast-vocabulary object recognition failure problem. On V3Det, this simple method greatly enhances the performance among one-stage, two-stage, and DETR-based detectors with only additional projection layers in both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. In particular, Prova improves Faster R-CNN, FCOS, and DINO by 3.3, 6.2, and 2.9 AP respectively in the supervised setting of V3Det. For the open-vocabulary setting, Prova achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 32.8 base AP and 11.0 novel AP, which is of 2.6 and 4.3 gain over the previous methods.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is the problem of identifying inputs which are unrelated to the in-distribution task. The OOD detection performance when the in-distribution (ID) is ImageNet-1K is commonly being tested on a small range of test OOD datasets. We find that most of the currently used test OOD datasets, including datasets from the open set recognition (OSR) literature, have severe issues: In some cases more than 50% of the dataset contains objects belonging to one of the ID classes. These erroneous samples heavily distort the evaluation of OOD detectors. As a solution, we introduce with NINCO a novel test OOD dataset, each sample checked to be ID free, which with its fine-grained range of OOD classes allows for a detailed analysis of an OOD detector's strengths and failure modes, particularly when paired with a number of synthetic "OOD unit-tests". We provide detailed evaluations across a large set of architectures and OOD detection methods on NINCO and the unit-tests, revealing new insights about model weaknesses and the effects of pretraining on OOD detection performance. We provide code and data at https://github.com/j-cb/NINCO.

Photos serve as a way for humans to record what they experience in their daily lives, and they are often regarded as trustworthy sources of information. However, there is a growing concern that the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology may produce fake photos, which can create confusion and diminish trust in photographs. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate agents for distinguishing state-of-the-art AI-generated visual content. Our study benchmarks both human capability and cutting-edge fake image detection AI algorithms, using a newly collected large-scale fake image dataset Fake2M. In our human perception evaluation, titled HPBench, we discovered that humans struggle significantly to distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones, with a misclassification rate of 38.7%. Along with this, we conduct the model capability of AI-Generated images detection evaluation MPBench and the top-performing model from MPBench achieves a 13% failure rate under the same setting used in the human evaluation. We hope that our study can raise awareness of the potential risks of AI-generated images and facilitate further research to prevent the spread of false information. More information can refer to https://github.com/Inf-imagine/Sentry.

In the recent years, many software systems have adopted AI techniques, especially deep learning techniques. Due to their black-box nature, AI-based systems brought challenges to traceability, because AI system behaviors are based on models and data, whereas the requirements or policies are rules in the form of natural or programming language. To the best of our knowledge, there is a limited amount of studies on how AI and deep neural network-based systems behave against rule-based requirements/policies. This experience paper examines deep neural network behaviors against rule-based requirements described in natural language policies. In particular, we focus on a case study to check AI-based content moderation software against content moderation policies. First, using crowdsourcing, we collect natural language test cases which match each moderation policy, we name this dataset HateModerate; second, using the test cases in HateModerate, we test the failure rates of state-of-the-art hate speech detection software, and we find that these models have high failure rates for certain policies; finally, since manual labeling is costly, we further proposed an automated approach to augument HateModerate by finetuning OpenAI's large language models to automatically match new examples to policies. The dataset and code of this work can be found on our anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/content-moderation-project.

Deployed multimodal systems can fail in ways that evaluators did not anticipate. In order to find these failures before deployment, we introduce MultiMon, a system that automatically identifies systematic failures -- generalizable, natural-language descriptions of patterns of model failures. To uncover systematic failures, MultiMon scrapes a corpus for examples of erroneous agreement: inputs that produce the same output, but should not. It then prompts a language model (e.g., GPT-4) to find systematic patterns of failure and describe them in natural language. We use MultiMon to find 14 systematic failures (e.g., "ignores quantifiers") of the CLIP text-encoder, each comprising hundreds of distinct inputs (e.g., "a shelf with a few/many books"). Because CLIP is the backbone for most state-of-the-art multimodal systems, these inputs produce failures in Midjourney 5.1, DALL-E, VideoFusion, and others. MultiMon can also steer towards failures relevant to specific use cases, such as self-driving cars. We see MultiMon as a step towards evaluation that autonomously explores the long tail of potential system failures. Code for MULTIMON is available at https://github.com/tsb0601/MultiMon.

We introduce a few-shot learning framework for error detection. We show that data augmentation (a form of weak supervision) is key to training high-quality, ML-based error detection models that require minimal human involvement. Our framework consists of two parts: (1) an expressive model to learn rich representations that capture the inherent syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of errors; and (2) a data augmentation model that, given a small seed of clean records, uses dataset-specific transformations to automatically generate additional training data. Our key insight is to learn data augmentation policies from the noisy input dataset in a weakly supervised manner. We show that our framework detects errors with an average precision of ~94% and an average recall of ~93% across a diverse array of datasets that exhibit different types and amounts of errors. We compare our approach to a comprehensive collection of error detection methods, ranging from traditional rule-based methods to ensemble-based and active learning approaches. We show that data augmentation yields an average improvement of 20 F1 points while it requires access to 3x fewer labeled examples compared to other ML approaches.

With Large Language Models (LLMs) being widely used across various tasks, detecting errors in their responses is increasingly crucial. However, little research has been conducted on error detection of LLM responses. Collecting error annotations on LLM responses is challenging due to the subjective nature of many NLP tasks, and thus previous research focuses on tasks of little practical value (e.g., word sorting) or limited error types (e.g., faithfulness in summarization). This work introduces ReaLMistake, the first error detection benchmark consisting of objective, realistic, and diverse errors made by LLMs. ReaLMistake contains three challenging and meaningful tasks that introduce objectively assessable errors in four categories (reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge), eliciting naturally observed and diverse errors in responses of GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B annotated by experts. We use ReaLMistake to evaluate error detectors based on 12 LLMs. Our findings show: 1) Top LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 detect errors made by LLMs at very low recall, and all LLM-based error detectors perform much worse than humans. 2) Explanations by LLM-based error detectors lack reliability. 3) LLMs-based error detection is sensitive to small changes in prompts but remains challenging to improve. 4) Popular approaches to improving LLMs, including self-consistency and majority vote, do not improve the error detection performance. Our benchmark and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/ReaLMistake.

Being able to spot defective parts is a critical component in large-scale industrial manufacturing. A particular challenge that we address in this work is the cold-start problem: fit a model using nominal (non-defective) example images only. While handcrafted solutions per class are possible, the goal is to build systems that work well simultaneously on many different tasks automatically. The best performing approaches combine embeddings from ImageNet models with an outlier detection model. In this paper, we extend on this line of work and propose PatchCore, which uses a maximally representative memory bank of nominal patch-features. PatchCore offers competitive inference times while achieving state-of-the-art performance for both detection and localization. On the challenging, widely used MVTec AD benchmark PatchCore achieves an image-level anomaly detection AUROC score of up to 99.6%, more than halving the error compared to the next best competitor. We further report competitive results on two additional datasets and also find competitive results in the few samples regime.^* Work done during a research internship at Amazon AWS. Code: github.com/amazon-research/patchcore-inspection.

We consider the task of mapping pseudocode to long programs that are functionally correct. Given test cases as a mechanism to validate programs, we search over the space of possible translations of the pseudocode to find a program that passes the validation. However, without proper credit assignment to localize the sources of program failures, it is difficult to guide search toward more promising programs. We propose to perform credit assignment based on signals from compilation errors, which constitute 88.7% of program failures. Concretely, we treat the translation of each pseudocode line as a discrete portion of the program, and whenever a synthesized program fails to compile, an error localization method tries to identify the portion of the program responsible for the failure. We then focus search over alternative translations of the pseudocode for those portions. For evaluation, we collected the SPoC dataset (Search-based Pseudocode to Code) containing 18,356 programs with human-authored pseudocode and test cases. Under a budget of 100 program compilations, performing search improves the synthesis success rate over using the top-one translation of the pseudocode from 25.6% to 44.7%.

In this work, we study the challenge of providing human-understandable descriptions for failure modes in trained image classification models. Existing works address this problem by first identifying clusters (or directions) of incorrectly classified samples in a latent space and then aiming to provide human-understandable text descriptions for them. We observe that in some cases, describing text does not match well with identified failure modes, partially owing to the fact that shared interpretable attributes of failure modes may not be captured using clustering in the feature space. To improve on these shortcomings, we propose a novel approach that prioritizes interpretability in this problem: we start by obtaining human-understandable concepts (tags) of images in the dataset and then analyze the model's behavior based on the presence or absence of combinations of these tags. Our method also ensures that the tags describing a failure mode form a minimal set, avoiding redundant and noisy descriptions. Through several experiments on different datasets, we show that our method successfully identifies failure modes and generates high-quality text descriptions associated with them. These results highlight the importance of prioritizing interpretability in understanding model failures.

In real world software development, improper or missing exception handling can severely impact the robustness and reliability of code. Exception handling mechanisms require developers to detect, capture, and manage exceptions according to high standards, but many developers struggle with these tasks, leading to fragile code. This problem is particularly evident in open-source projects and impacts the overall quality of the software ecosystem. To address this challenge, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to improve exception handling in code. Through extensive analysis, we identify three key issues: Insensitive Detection of Fragile Code, Inaccurate Capture of Exception Block, and Distorted Handling Solution. These problems are widespread across real world repositories, suggesting that robust exception handling practices are often overlooked or mishandled. In response, we propose Seeker, a multi-agent framework inspired by expert developer strategies for exception handling. Seeker uses agents: Scanner, Detector, Predator, Ranker, and Handler to assist LLMs in detecting, capturing, and resolving exceptions more effectively. Our work is the first systematic study on leveraging LLMs to enhance exception handling practices in real development scenarios, providing valuable insights for future improvements in code reliability.

In real world software development, improper or missing exception handling can severely impact the robustness and reliability of code. Exception handling mechanisms require developers to detect, capture, and manage exceptions according to high standards, but many developers struggle with these tasks, leading to fragile code. This problem is particularly evident in open source projects and impacts the overall quality of the software ecosystem. To address this challenge, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to improve exception handling in code. Through extensive analysis, we identify three key issues: Insensitive Detection of Fragile Code, Inaccurate Capture of Exception Types, and Distorted Handling Solutions. These problems are widespread across real world repositories, suggesting that robust exception handling practices are often overlooked or mishandled. In response, we propose Seeker, a multi agent framework inspired by expert developer strategies for exception handling. Seeker uses agents: Scanner, Detector, Predator, Ranker, and Handler to assist LLMs in detecting, capturing, and resolving exceptions more effectively. Our work is the first systematic study on leveraging LLMs to enhance exception handling practices, providing valuable insights for future improvements in code reliability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want to include these models in their software stack, however, face a dreadful challenge: debugging LLMs' inconsistent behavior across minor variations of the prompt. We therefore introduce two metrics for classification tasks, namely sensitivity and consistency, which are complementary to task performance. First, sensitivity measures changes of predictions across rephrasings of the prompt, and does not require access to ground truth labels. Instead, consistency measures how predictions vary across rephrasings for elements of the same class. We perform an empirical comparison of these metrics on text classification tasks, using them as guideline for understanding failure modes of the LLM. Our hope is that sensitivity and consistency will be helpful to guide prompt engineering and obtain LLMs that balance robustness with performance.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful, they still exhibit significant but subtle weaknesses, such as mistakes in instruction-following or coding tasks. As these unexpected errors could lead to severe consequences in practical deployments, it is crucial to investigate the limitations within LLMs systematically. Traditional benchmarking approaches cannot thoroughly pinpoint specific model deficiencies, while manual inspections are costly and not scalable. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework, AutoDetect, to automatically expose weaknesses in LLMs across various tasks. Inspired by the educational assessment process that measures students' learning outcomes, AutoDetect consists of three LLM-powered agents: Examiner, Questioner, and Assessor. The collaboration among these three agents is designed to realize comprehensive and in-depth weakness identification. Our framework demonstrates significant success in uncovering flaws, with an identification success rate exceeding 30% in prominent models such as ChatGPT and Claude. More importantly, these identified weaknesses can guide specific model improvements, proving more effective than untargeted data augmentation methods like Self-Instruct. Our approach has led to substantial enhancements in popular LLMs, including the Llama series and Mistral-7b, boosting their performance by over 10% across several benchmarks. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/AutoDetect.

Kubernetes is a free, open-source container orchestration system for deploying and managing Docker containers that host microservices. Kubernetes cluster logs help in determining the reason for the failure. However, as systems become more complex, identifying failure reasons manually becomes more difficult and time-consuming. This study aims to identify effective and efficient classification algorithms to automatically determine the failure reason. We compare five classification algorithms, Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Classifier, and Multilayer Perceptron. Our results indicate that Random Forest produces good accuracy while requiring fewer computational resources than other algorithms.

Failure-inducing inputs play a crucial role in diagnosing and analyzing software bugs. Bug reports typically contain these inputs, which developers extract to facilitate debugging. Since bug reports are written in natural language, prior research has leveraged various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for automated input extraction. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), an important research question arises: how effectively can generative LLMs extract failure-inducing inputs from bug reports? In this paper, we propose LLPut, a technique to empirically evaluate the performance of three open-source generative LLMs -- LLaMA, Qwen, and Qwen-Coder -- in extracting relevant inputs from bug reports. We conduct an experimental evaluation on a dataset of 206 bug reports to assess the accuracy and effectiveness of these models. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities and limitations of generative LLMs in automated bug diagnosis.

We present TIGERScore, a Trained metric that follows Instruction Guidance to perform Explainable, and Reference-free evaluation over a wide spectrum of text generation tasks. Different from other automatic evaluation methods that only provide arcane scores, TIGERScore is guided by the natural language instruction to provide error analysis to pinpoint the mistakes in the generated text. Our metric is based on LLaMA, trained on our meticulously curated instruction-tuning dataset MetricInstruct which covers 6 text generation tasks and 23 text generation datasets. The dataset consists of 48K quadruple in the form of (instruction, input, system output rightarrow error analysis). We collected the `system outputs' through diverse channels to cover different types of errors. To quantitatively assess our metric, we evaluate its correlation with human ratings on 5 held-in datasets, 2 held-out datasets and show that TIGERScore can achieve the highest overall Spearman's correlation with human ratings across these datasets and outperforms other metrics significantly. As a reference-free metric, its correlation can even surpass the best existing reference-based metrics. To further qualitatively assess the rationale generated by our metric, we conduct human evaluation on the generated explanations and found that the explanations are 70.8\% accurate. Through these experimental results, we believe TIGERScore demonstrates the possibility of building universal explainable metrics to evaluate any text generation task.

Noise plagues many numerical datasets, where the recorded values in the data may fail to match the true underlying values due to reasons including: erroneous sensors, data entry/processing mistakes, or imperfect human estimates. We consider general regression settings with covariates and a potentially corrupted response whose observed values may contain errors. By accounting for various uncertainties, we introduced veracity scores that distinguish between genuine errors and natural data fluctuations, conditioned on the available covariate information in the dataset. We propose a simple yet efficient filtering procedure for eliminating potential errors, and establish theoretical guarantees for our method. We also contribute a new error detection benchmark involving 5 regression datasets with real-world numerical errors (for which the true values are also known). In this benchmark and additional simulation studies, our method identifies incorrect values with better precision/recall than other approaches.

Repositories of large software systems have become commonplace. This massive expansion has resulted in the emergence of various problems in these software platforms including identification of (i) bug-prone packages, (ii) critical bugs, and (iii) severity of bugs. One of the important goals would be to mine these bugs and recommend them to the developers to resolve them. The first step to this is that one has to accurately detect the extent of severity of the bugs. In this paper, we take up this task of predicting the severity of bugs in the near future. Contextualized neural models built on the text description of a bug and the user comments about the bug help to achieve reasonably good performance. Further information on how the bugs are related to each other in terms of the ways they affect packages can be summarised in the form of a graph and used along with the text to get additional benefits.

Deep learning has recently achieved initial success in program analysis tasks such as bug detection. Lacking real bugs, most existing works construct training and test data by injecting synthetic bugs into correct programs. Despite achieving high test accuracy (e.g., 90%), the resulting bug detectors are found to be surprisingly unusable in practice, i.e., <10% precision when used to scan real software repositories. In this work, we argue that this massive performance difference is caused by a distribution shift, i.e., a fundamental mismatch between the real bug distribution and the synthetic bug distribution used to train and evaluate the detectors. To address this key challenge, we propose to train a bug detector in two phases, first on a synthetic bug distribution to adapt the model to the bug detection domain, and then on a real bug distribution to drive the model towards the real distribution. During these two phases, we leverage a multi-task hierarchy, focal loss, and contrastive learning to further boost performance. We evaluate our approach extensively on three widely studied bug types, for which we construct new datasets carefully designed to capture the real bug distribution. The results demonstrate that our approach is practically effective and successfully mitigates the distribution shift: our learned detectors are highly performant on both our test set and the latest version of open source repositories. Our code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/eth-sri/learning-real-bug-detector.

Ensuring the safety of the Large Language Model (LLM) is critical, but currently used methods in most cases sacrifice the model performance to obtain increased safety or perform poorly on data outside of their adaptation distribution. We investigate existing methods for such generalization and find them insufficient. Surprisingly, while even plain LLMs recognize unsafe prompts, they may still generate unsafe responses. To avoid performance degradation and preserve safe performance, we advocate for a two-step framework, where we first identify unsafe prompts via a lightweight classifier, and apply a "safe" model only to such prompts. In particular, we explore the design of the safety detector in more detail, investigating the use of different classifier architectures and prompting techniques. Interestingly, we find that the final hidden state for the last token is enough to provide robust performance, minimizing false positives on benign data while performing well on malicious prompt detection. Additionally, we show that classifiers trained on the representations from different model layers perform comparably on the latest model layers, indicating that safety representation is present in the LLMs' hidden states at most model stages. Our work is a step towards efficient, representation-based safety mechanisms for LLMs.

The exercise of detecting similar bug reports in bug tracking systems is known as duplicate bug report detection. Having prior knowledge of a bug report's existence reduces efforts put into debugging problems and identifying the root cause. Rule and Query-based solutions recommend a long list of potential similar bug reports with no clear ranking. In addition, triage engineers are less motivated to spend time going through an extensive list. Consequently, this deters the use of duplicate bug report retrieval solutions. In this paper, we have proposed a solution using a combination of NLP techniques. Our approach considers unstructured and structured attributes of a bug report like summary, description and severity, impacted products, platforms, categories, etc. It uses a custom data transformer, a deep neural network, and a non-generalizing machine learning method to retrieve existing identical bug reports. We have performed numerous experiments with significant data sources containing thousands of bug reports and showcased that the proposed solution achieves a high retrieval accuracy of 70% for recall@5.

Deep learning and language models are increasingly dominating automated program repair research. While previous generate-and-validate approaches were able to find and use fix ingredients on a file or even project level, neural language models are limited to the code that fits their input window. In this work we investigate how important identifier ingredients are in neural program repair and present ScanFix, an approach that leverages an additional scanner model to extract identifiers from a bug's file and potentially project-level context. We find that lack of knowledge of far-away identifiers is an important cause of failed repairs. Augmenting repair model input with scanner-extracted identifiers yields relative improvements of up to 31%. However, ScanFix is outperformed by a model with a large input window (> 5k tokens). When passing ingredients from the ground-truth fix, improvements are even higher. This shows that, with refined extraction techniques, ingredient scanning, similar to fix candidate ranking, could have the potential to become an important subtask of future automated repair systems. At the same time, it also demonstrates that this idea is subject to Sutton's bitter lesson and may be rendered unnecessary by new code models with ever-increasing context windows.

Automated detection of software vulnerabilities is a fundamental problem in software security. Existing program analysis techniques either suffer from high false positives or false negatives. Recent progress in Deep Learning (DL) has resulted in a surge of interest in applying DL for automated vulnerability detection. Several recent studies have demonstrated promising results achieving an accuracy of up to 95% at detecting vulnerabilities. In this paper, we ask, "how well do the state-of-the-art DL-based techniques perform in a real-world vulnerability prediction scenario?". To our surprise, we find that their performance drops by more than 50%. A systematic investigation of what causes such precipitous performance drop reveals that existing DL-based vulnerability prediction approaches suffer from challenges with the training data (e.g., data duplication, unrealistic distribution of vulnerable classes, etc.) and with the model choices (e.g., simple token-based models). As a result, these approaches often do not learn features related to the actual cause of the vulnerabilities. Instead, they learn unrelated artifacts from the dataset (e.g., specific variable/function names, etc.). Leveraging these empirical findings, we demonstrate how a more principled approach to data collection and model design, based on realistic settings of vulnerability prediction, can lead to better solutions. The resulting tools perform significantly better than the studied baseline: up to 33.57% boost in precision and 128.38% boost in recall compared to the best performing model in the literature. Overall, this paper elucidates existing DL-based vulnerability prediction systems' potential issues and draws a roadmap for future DL-based vulnerability prediction research. In that spirit, we make available all the artifacts supporting our results: https://git.io/Jf6IA.

Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial for complex reasoning and decision-making tasks, where each intermediate step plays an important role in the reasoning process. Since language models are prone to various types of errors during the reasoning process, PRMs are required to possess nuanced capabilities for detecting various implicit error types in real-world scenarios. However, current benchmarks primarily focus on step correctness, failing to evaluate PRMs' performance systematically. To address this gap, we introduce PRMBench, a process-level benchmark specifically designed to assess the fine-grained error detection capabilities of PRMs. PRMBench comprises 6,216 carefully designed problems and 83,456 step-level labels, evaluating models across multiple dimensions, including simplicity, soundness, and sensitivity. In our experiments on 15 models, spanning both open-source PRMs and closed-source large language models prompted as critic models, we uncover significant weaknesses in current PRMs. These findings underscore the challenges inherent in process-level evaluation and highlight key directions for future research. We hope PRMBench can be a robust bench for advancing research on PRM evaluation and development.

Anomaly detection plays a crucial role in the field of predictive maintenance for wind turbines, yet the comparison of different algorithms poses a difficult task because domain specific public datasets are scarce. Many comparisons of different approaches either use benchmarks composed of data from many different domains, inaccessible data or one of the few publicly available datasets which lack detailed information about the faults. Moreover, many publications highlight a couple of case studies where fault detection was successful. With this paper we publish a high quality dataset that contains data from 36 wind turbines across 3 different wind farms as well as the most detailed fault information of any public wind turbine dataset as far as we know. The new dataset contains 89 years worth of real-world operating data of wind turbines, distributed across 44 labeled time frames for anomalies that led up to faults, as well as 51 time series representing normal behavior. Additionally, the quality of training data is ensured by turbine-status-based labels for each data point. Furthermore, we propose a new scoring method, called CARE (Coverage, Accuracy, Reliability and Earliness), which takes advantage of the information depth that is present in the dataset to identify a good all-around anomaly detection model. This score considers the anomaly detection performance, the ability to recognize normal behavior properly and the capability to raise as few false alarms as possible while simultaneously detecting anomalies early.

Anomaly detection aims at detecting unexpected behaviours in the data. Because anomaly detection is usually an unsupervised task, traditional anomaly detectors learn a decision boundary by employing heuristics based on intuitions, which are hard to verify in practice. This introduces some uncertainty, especially close to the decision boundary, that may reduce the user trust in the detector's predictions. A way to combat this is by allowing the detector to reject examples with high uncertainty (Learning to Reject). This requires employing a confidence metric that captures the distance to the decision boundary and setting a rejection threshold to reject low-confidence predictions. However, selecting a proper metric and setting the rejection threshold without labels are challenging tasks. In this paper, we solve these challenges by setting a constant rejection threshold on the stability metric computed by ExCeeD. Our insight relies on a theoretical analysis of such a metric. Moreover, setting a constant threshold results in strong guarantees: we estimate the test rejection rate, and derive a theoretical upper bound for both the rejection rate and the expected prediction cost. Experimentally, we show that our method outperforms some metric-based methods.

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, a natural question is the extent to which these models can be utilized for source code optimization. This paper presents methodologically stringent case studies applied to well-known open source python libraries pillow and numpy. We find that contemporary LLM ChatGPT-4 (state September and October 2023) is surprisingly adept at optimizing energy and compute efficiency. However, this is only the case in interactive use, with a human expert in the loop. Aware of experimenter bias, we document our qualitative approach in detail, and provide transcript and source code. We start by providing a detailed description of our approach in conversing with the LLM to optimize the _getextrema function in the pillow library, and a quantitative evaluation of the performance improvement. To demonstrate qualitative replicability, we report further attempts on another locus in the pillow library, and one code locus in the numpy library, to demonstrate generalization within and beyond a library. In all attempts, the performance improvement is significant (factor up to 38). We have also not omitted reporting of failed attempts (there were none). We conclude that LLMs are a promising tool for code optimization in open source libraries, but that the human expert in the loop is essential for success. Nonetheless, we were surprised by how few iterations were required to achieve substantial performance improvements that were not obvious to the expert in the loop. We would like bring attention to the qualitative nature of this study, more robust quantitative studies would need to introduce a layer of selecting experts in a representative sample -- we invite the community to collaborate.

We discuss how VMware is solving the following challenges to harness data to operate our ML-based anomaly detection system to detect performance issues in our Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) enterprise deployments: (i) label scarcity and label bias due to heavy dependency on unscalable human annotators, and (ii) data drifts due to ever-changing workload patterns, software stack and underlying hardware. Our anomaly detection system has been deployed in production for many years and has successfully detected numerous major performance issues. We demonstrate that by addressing these data challenges, we not only improve the accuracy of our performance anomaly detection model by 30%, but also ensure that the model performance to never degrade over time.

Software specifications are essential for ensuring the reliability of software systems. Existing specification extraction approaches, however, suffer from limited generalizability and require manual efforts. The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have been successfully applied to numerous software engineering tasks, offers a promising avenue for automating this process. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs for generating software specifications from software comments or documentation. We evaluate LLMs' performance with Few Shot Learning (FSL), enabling LLMs to generalize from a small number of examples, as well as different prompt construction strategies, and compare the performance of LLMs with traditional approaches. Additionally, we conduct a comparative diagnosis of the failure cases from both LLMs and traditional methods, identifying their unique strengths and weaknesses. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments on 15 state of the art LLMs, evaluating their performance and cost effectiveness for generating software specifications. Our results show that with FSL, LLMs outperform traditional methods (by 5.6%), and more sophisticated prompt construction strategies can further enlarge this performance gap (up to 5.1 to 10.0%). Yet, LLMs suffer from their unique challenges, such as ineffective prompts and the lack of domain knowledge, which together account for 53 to 60% of LLM unique failures. The strong performance of open source models (e.g., StarCoder) makes closed source models (e.g., GPT 3 Davinci) less desirable due to size and cost. Our study offers valuable insights for future research to improve specification generation.

Data contamination, i.e., the presence of test data from downstream tasks in the training data of large language models (LLMs), is a potential major issue in measuring LLMs' real effectiveness on other tasks. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for identifying data contamination within LLMs. At its core, our approach starts by identifying potential contamination at the instance level; using this information, our approach then assesses wider contamination at the partition level. To estimate contamination of individual instances, we employ "guided instruction:" a prompt consisting of the dataset name, partition type, and the random-length initial segment of a reference instance, asking the LLM to complete it. An instance is flagged as contaminated if the LLM's output either exactly or nearly matches the latter segment of the reference. To understand if an entire partition is contaminated, we propose two ideas. The first idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if the average overlap score with the reference instances (as measured by ROUGE-L or BLEURT) is statistically significantly better with the completions from guided instruction compared to a "general instruction" that does not include the dataset and partition name. The second idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if a classifier based on GPT-4 with few-shot in-context learning prompt marks multiple generated completions as exact/near-exact matches of the corresponding reference instances. Our best method achieves an accuracy between 92% and 100% in detecting if an LLM is contaminated with seven datasets, containing train and test/validation partitions, when contrasted with manual evaluation by human experts. Further, our findings indicate that GPT-4 is contaminated with AG News, WNLI, and XSum datasets.

When deploying large language models (LLMs), it is important to ensure that these models are not only capable, but also reliable. Many benchmarks have been created to track LLMs' growing capabilities, however there has been no similar focus on measuring their reliability. To understand the potential ramifications of this gap, we investigate how well current benchmarks quantify model reliability. We find that pervasive label errors can compromise these evaluations, obscuring lingering model failures and hiding unreliable behavior. Motivated by this gap in the evaluation of reliability, we then propose the concept of so-called platinum benchmarks, i.e., benchmarks carefully curated to minimize label errors and ambiguity. As a first attempt at constructing such benchmarks, we revise examples from fifteen existing popular benchmarks. We evaluate a wide range of models on these platinum benchmarks and find that, indeed, frontier LLMs still exhibit failures on simple tasks such as elementary-level math word problems. Analyzing these failures further reveals previously unidentified patterns of problems on which frontier models consistently struggle. We provide code at https://github.com/MadryLab/platinum-benchmarks

Writing good software tests can be challenging, therefore approaches that support developers are desirable. While generating complete tests automatically is such an approach commonly proposed in research, developers may already have specific test scenarios in mind and thus just require help in selecting the most suitable test assertions for these scenarios. This can be done using deep learning models to predict assertions for given test code. Prior research on assertion generation trained these models specifically for the task, raising the question how much the use of larger models pre-trained on code that have emerged since then can improve their performance. In particular, while abstracting identifiers has been shown to improve specifically trained models, it remains unclear whether this also generalises to models pre-trained on non-abstracted code. Finally, even though prior work demonstrated high accuracy it remains unclear how this translates into the effectiveness of the assertions at their intended application -- finding faults. To shed light on these open questions, in this paper we propose AsserT5, a new model based on the pre-trained CodeT5 model, and use this to empirically study assertion generation. We find that the abstraction and the inclusion of the focal method are useful also for a fine-tuned pre-trained model, resulting in test assertions that match the ground truth assertions precisely in up to 59.5\% of cases, more than twice as precise as prior models. However, evaluation on real bugs from the Defects4J dataset shows that out of 138 bugs detectable with assertions in real-world projects, AsserT5 was only able to suggest fault-finding assertions for 33, indicating the need for further improvements.

Program errors can occur in any type of programming, and can manifest in a variety of ways, such as unexpected output, crashes, or performance issues. And program error diagnosis can often be too abstract or technical for developers to understand, especially for beginners. The goal of this paper is to present a novel machine-learning approach for Multi-task Program Error Repair and Explanatory Diagnosis (mPRED). A pre-trained language model is used to encode the source code, and a downstream model is specifically designed to identify and repair errors. Programs and test cases will be augmented and optimized from several perspectives. Additionally, our approach incorporates a "chain of thoughts" method, which enables the models to produce intermediate reasoning explanations before providing the final correction. To aid in visualizing and analyzing the program structure, we use a graph neural network for program structure visualization. Overall, our approach offers a promising approach for repairing program errors across different programming languages and providing helpful explanations to programmers.

The increasing complexity of computer systems necessitates innovative approaches to fault and error management, going beyond traditional manual log analysis. While existing solutions using large language models (LLMs) show promise, they are limited by a gap between natural and domain-specific languages, which restricts their effectiveness in real-world applications. Our approach addresses these limitations by integrating interpretable domain knowledge into open-source LLMs through continual pre-training (CPT), enhancing performance on log tasks while retaining natural language processing capabilities. We created a comprehensive dataset, NLPLog, with over 250,000 question-answer pairs to facilitate this integration. Our model, SuperLog, trained with this dataset, achieves the best performance across four log analysis tasks, surpassing the second-best model by an average of 12.01%. Our contributions include a novel CPT paradigm that significantly improves model performance, the development of SuperLog with state-of-the-art results, and the release of a large-scale dataset to support further research in this domain.

Commit messages are a valuable resource in comprehension of software evolution, since they provide a record of changes such as feature additions and bug repairs. Unfortunately, programmers often neglect to write good commit messages. Different techniques have been proposed to help programmers by automatically writing these messages. These techniques are effective at describing what changed, but are often verbose and lack context for understanding the rationale behind a change. In contrast, humans write messages that are short and summarize the high level rationale. In this paper, we adapt Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to automatically "translate" diffs into commit messages. We trained an NMT algorithm using a corpus of diffs and human-written commit messages from the top 1k Github projects. We designed a filter to help ensure that we only trained the algorithm on higher-quality commit messages. Our evaluation uncovered a pattern in which the messages we generate tend to be either very high or very low quality. Therefore, we created a quality-assurance filter to detect cases in which we are unable to produce good messages, and return a warning instead.

Diagnosing and cleaning data is a crucial step for building robust machine learning systems. However, identifying problems within large-scale datasets with real-world distributions is challenging due to the presence of complex issues such as label errors, under-representation, and outliers. In this paper, we propose a unified approach for identifying the problematic data by utilizing a largely ignored source of information: a relational structure of data in the feature-embedded space. To this end, we present scalable and effective algorithms for detecting label errors and outlier data based on the relational graph structure of data. We further introduce a visualization tool that provides contextual information of a data point in the feature-embedded space, serving as an effective tool for interactively diagnosing data. We evaluate the label error and outlier/out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performances of our approach on the large-scale image, speech, and language domain tasks, including ImageNet, ESC-50, and SST2. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on all tasks considered and demonstrates its effectiveness in debugging large-scale real-world datasets across various domains. We release codes at https://github.com/snu-mllab/Neural-Relation-Graph.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with multi-step reasoning, where inference-time scaling has emerged as a promising strategy for performance improvement. Verifier-guided search outperforms repeated sampling when sample size is limited by selecting and prioritizing valid reasoning paths. However, we identify a critical limitation: scaling flaws, prevalent across different models (Mistral 7B and DeepSeekMath 7B), benchmarks (GSM8K and MATH), and verifiers (outcome value models and process reward models). As sample size increases, verifier-guided search exhibits diminishing advantages and eventually underperforms repeated sampling. Our analysis attributes this to verifier failures, where imperfect verifiers misrank candidates and erroneously prune all valid paths. These issues are further exacerbated in challenging and out-of-distribution problems, restricting search effectiveness. To mitigate verifier failures, we explore reducing reliance on verifiers and conduct preliminary investigations using two simple methods. Our findings reveal fundamental limitations in verifier-guided search and suggest future directions.

Software engineers develop, fine-tune, and deploy deep learning (DL) models. They use and re-use models in a variety of development frameworks and deploy them on a range of runtime environments. In this diverse ecosystem, engineers use DL model converters to move models from frameworks to runtime environments. However, errors in converters can compromise model quality and disrupt deployment. The failure frequency and failure modes of DL model converters are unknown. In this paper, we conduct the first failure analysis on DL model converters. Specifically, we characterize failures in model converters associated with ONNX (Open Neural Network eXchange). We analyze past failures in the ONNX converters in two major DL frameworks, PyTorch and TensorFlow. The symptoms, causes, and locations of failures (for N=200 issues), and trends over time are also reported. We also evaluate present-day failures by converting 8,797 models, both real-world and synthetically generated instances. The consistent result from both parts of the study is that DL model converters commonly fail by producing models that exhibit incorrect behavior: 33% of past failures and 8% of converted models fell into this category. Our results motivate future research on making DL software simpler to maintain, extend, and validate.

The usage of deep neural networks in safety-critical systems is limited by our ability to guarantee their correct behavior. Runtime monitors are components aiming to identify unsafe predictions and discard them before they can lead to catastrophic consequences. Several recent works on runtime monitoring have focused on out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, i.e., identifying inputs that are different from the training data. In this work, we argue that OOD detection is not a well-suited framework to design efficient runtime monitors and that it is more relevant to evaluate monitors based on their ability to discard incorrect predictions. We call this setting out-ofmodel-scope detection and discuss the conceptual differences with OOD. We also conduct extensive experiments on popular datasets from the literature to show that studying monitors in the OOD setting can be misleading: 1. very good OOD results can give a false impression of safety, 2. comparison under the OOD setting does not allow identifying the best monitor to detect errors. Finally, we also show that removing erroneous training data samples helps to train better monitors.

Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable information, and test data for widely reported reference benchmarks. However, we currently have no way to know which data of these types is included or in what proportions. In this paper, we study the pretraining data detection problem: given a piece of text and black-box access to an LLM without knowing the pretraining data, can we determine if the model was trained on the provided text? To facilitate this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark WIKIMIA that uses data created before and after model training to support gold truth detection. We also introduce a new detection method Min-K% Prob based on a simple hypothesis: an unseen example is likely to contain a few outlier words with low probabilities under the LLM, while a seen example is less likely to have words with such low probabilities. Min-K% Prob can be applied without any knowledge about the pretraining corpus or any additional training, departing from previous detection methods that require training a reference model on data that is similar to the pretraining data. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that Min-K% Prob achieves a 7.4% improvement on WIKIMIA over these previous methods. We apply Min-K% Prob to two real-world scenarios, copyrighted book detection, and contaminated downstream example detection, and find it a consistently effective solution.

Detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs) is of great recent interest. With zero-shot methods like DetectGPT, detection capabilities have reached impressive levels. However, the reliability of existing detectors in real-world applications remains underexplored. In this study, we present a new benchmark, DetectRL, highlighting that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection techniques still underperformed in this task. We collected human-written datasets from domains where LLMs are particularly prone to misuse. Using popular LLMs, we generated data that better aligns with real-world applications. Unlike previous studies, we employed heuristic rules to create adversarial LLM-generated text, simulating advanced prompt usages, human revisions like word substitutions, and writing errors. Our development of DetectRL reveals the strengths and limitations of current SOTA detectors. More importantly, we analyzed the potential impact of writing styles, model types, attack methods, the text lengths, and real-world human writing factors on different types of detectors. We believe DetectRL could serve as an effective benchmark for assessing detectors in real-world scenarios, evolving with advanced attack methods, thus providing more stressful evaluation to drive the development of more efficient detectors. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/DetectRL.

Operationalizing large language models (LLMs) for custom, repetitive data pipelines is challenging, particularly due to their unpredictable and potentially catastrophic failures. Acknowledging the inevitability of these errors, we focus on identifying when LLMs may be generating incorrect responses when used repeatedly as part of data generation pipelines. We present SPADE, a method for automatically synthesizing assertions that identify bad LLM outputs. SPADE analyzes prompt version histories to create candidate assertion functions and then selects a minimal set that fulfills both coverage and accuracy requirements. In testing across nine different real-world LLM pipelines, SPADE efficiently reduces the number of assertions by 14% and decreases false failures by 21% when compared to simpler baselines.

Recent Language Models (LMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating texts with the knowledge internalized in parameters. Yet, LMs often generate the factually incorrect responses to the given queries, since their knowledge may be inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. To address this problem, previous works propose to augment LMs with the knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge source. However, such approaches often show suboptimal text generation performance due to two reasons: 1) the model may fail to retrieve the knowledge relevant to the given query, or 2) the model may not faithfully reflect the retrieved knowledge in the generated text. To overcome these, we propose to verify the output and the knowledge of the knowledge-augmented LMs with a separate verifier, which is a small LM that is trained to detect those two types of errors through instruction-finetuning. Then, when the verifier recognizes an error, we can rectify it by either retrieving new knowledge or generating new text. Further, we use an ensemble of the outputs from different instructions with a single verifier to enhance the reliability of the verification processes. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed verification steps on multiple question answering benchmarks, whose results show that the proposed verifier effectively identifies retrieval and generation errors, allowing LMs to provide more factually correct outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JinheonBaek/KALMV.

Software engineers are increasingly adding semantic search capabilities to applications using a strategy known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). A RAG system involves finding documents that semantically match a query and then passing the documents to a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT to extract the right answer using an LLM. RAG systems aim to: a) reduce the problem of hallucinated responses from LLMs, b) link sources/references to generated responses, and c) remove the need for annotating documents with meta-data. However, RAG systems suffer from limitations inherent to information retrieval systems and from reliance on LLMs. In this paper, we present an experience report on the failure points of RAG systems from three case studies from separate domains: research, education, and biomedical. We share the lessons learned and present 7 failure points to consider when designing a RAG system. The two key takeaways arising from our work are: 1) validation of a RAG system is only feasible during operation, and 2) the robustness of a RAG system evolves rather than designed in at the start. We conclude with a list of potential research directions on RAG systems for the software engineering community.

Machine learning-based program analyses have recently shown the promise of integrating formal and probabilistic reasoning towards aiding software development. However, in the absence of large annotated corpora, training these analyses is challenging. Towards addressing this, we present BugLab, an approach for self-supervised learning of bug detection and repair. BugLab co-trains two models: (1) a detector model that learns to detect and repair bugs in code, (2) a selector model that learns to create buggy code for the detector to use as training data. A Python implementation of BugLab improves by up to 30% upon baseline methods on a test dataset of 2374 real-life bugs and finds 19 previously unknown bugs in open-source software.

Since large language models have approached human-level performance on many tasks, it has become increasingly harder for researchers to find tasks that are still challenging to the models. Failure cases usually come from the long-tail distribution - data that an oracle language model could assign a probability on the lower end of its distribution. Current methodology such as prompt engineering or crowdsourcing are insufficient for creating long-tail examples because humans are constrained by cognitive bias. We propose a Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) framework for systematically generating long-tail knowledge statements. Grounded by a symbolic rule, we search for long-tail values for each variable of the rule by first prompting a LLM, then verifying the correctness of the values with a critic, and lastly pushing for the long-tail distribution with a reranker. With this framework we construct a dataset, Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), consisting of 200 symbolic rules and 50K knowledge statements spanning across four domains. Human annotations find that 84% of the statements in LINT are factually correct. In contrast, ChatGPT and GPT4 struggle with directly generating long-tail statements under the guidance of logic rules, each only getting 56% and 78% of their statements correct. Moreover, their "long-tail" generations in fact fall into the higher likelihood range, and thus are not really long-tail. Our findings suggest that LINK is effective for generating data in the long-tail distribution while enforcing quality. LINT can be useful for systematically evaluating LLMs' capabilities in the long-tail distribution. We challenge the models with a simple entailment classification task using samples from LINT. We find that ChatGPT and GPT4's capability in identifying incorrect knowledge drop by ~3% in the long-tail distribution compared to head distribution.

We consider the two related problems of detecting if an example is misclassified or out-of-distribution. We present a simple baseline that utilizes probabilities from softmax distributions. Correctly classified examples tend to have greater maximum softmax probabilities than erroneously classified and out-of-distribution examples, allowing for their detection. We assess performance by defining several tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition, showing the effectiveness of this baseline across all. We then show the baseline can sometimes be surpassed, demonstrating the room for future research on these underexplored detection tasks.

The widespread consumer-grade 3D printers and learning resources online enable novices to self-train in remote settings. While troubleshooting plays an essential part of 3D printing, the process remains challenging for many remote novices even with the help of well-developed online sources, such as online troubleshooting archives and online community help. We conducted a formative study with 76 active 3D printing users to learn how remote novices leverage online resources in troubleshooting and their challenges. We found that remote novices cannot fully utilize online resources. For example, the online archives statically provide general information, making it hard to search and relate their unique cases with existing descriptions. Online communities can potentially ease their struggles by providing more targeted suggestions, but a helper who can provide custom help is rather scarce, making it hard to obtain timely assistance. We propose 3DPFIX, an interactive 3D troubleshooting system powered by the pipeline to facilitate Human-AI Collaboration, designed to improve novices' 3D printing experiences and thus help them easily accumulate their domain knowledge. We built 3DPFIX that supports automated diagnosis and solution-seeking. 3DPFIX was built upon shared dialogues about failure cases from Q&A discourses accumulated in online communities. We leverage social annotations (i.e., comments) to build an annotated failure image dataset for AI classifiers and extract a solution pool. Our summative study revealed that using 3DPFIX helped participants spend significantly less effort in diagnosing failures and finding a more accurate solution than relying on their common practice. We also found that 3DPFIX users learn about 3D printing domain-specific knowledge. We discuss the implications of leveraging community-driven data in developing future Human-AI Collaboration designs.

Despite extensive diagnostics and debugging by developers, AI systems sometimes exhibit harmful unintended behaviors. Finding and fixing these is challenging because the attack surface is so large -- it is not tractable to exhaustively search for inputs that may elicit harmful behaviors. Red-teaming and adversarial training (AT) are commonly used to improve robustness, however, they empirically struggle to fix failure modes that differ from the attacks used during training. In this work, we utilize latent adversarial training (LAT) to defend against vulnerabilities without leveraging knowledge of what they are or using inputs that elicit them. LAT makes use of the compressed, abstract, and structured latent representations of concepts that the network actually uses for prediction. Here, we use it to defend against failure modes without examples that elicit them. Specifically, we use LAT to remove trojans and defend against held-out classes of adversarial attacks. We show in image classification, text classification, and text generation tasks that LAT usually improves both robustness to novel attacks and performance on clean data relative to AT. This suggests that LAT can be a promising tool for defending against failure modes that are not explicitly identified by developers.

Widely used learned metrics for machine translation evaluation, such as COMET and BLEURT, estimate the quality of a translation hypothesis by providing a single sentence-level score. As such, they offer little insight into translation errors (e.g., what are the errors and what is their severity). On the other hand, generative large language models (LLMs) are amplifying the adoption of more granular strategies to evaluation, attempting to detail and categorize translation errors. In this work, we introduce xCOMET, an open-source learned metric designed to bridge the gap between these approaches. xCOMET integrates both sentence-level evaluation and error span detection capabilities, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance across all types of evaluation (sentence-level, system-level, and error span detection). Moreover, it does so while highlighting and categorizing error spans, thus enriching the quality assessment. We also provide a robustness analysis with stress tests, and show that xCOMET is largely capable of identifying localized critical errors and hallucinations.

Preference learning enhances Code LLMs beyond supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. Existing methods construct preference pairs from candidates based on test case success, treating the higher pass rate sample as positive and the lower as negative. However, this approach does not pinpoint specific errors in the code, which prevents the model from learning more informative error correction patterns, as aligning failing code as a whole lacks the granularity needed to capture meaningful error-resolution relationships. To address these issues, we propose IterPref, a new preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. IterPref explicitly locates error regions and aligns the corresponding tokens via a tailored DPO algorithm. To generate informative pairs, we introduce the CodeFlow dataset, where samples are iteratively refined until passing tests, with modifications capturing error corrections. Extensive experiments show that a diverse suite of Code LLMs equipped with IterPref achieves significant performance gains in code generation and improves on challenging tasks like BigCodeBench. In-depth analysis reveals that IterPref yields fewer errors. Our code and data will be made publicaly available.

We present the design, implementation and engineering experience in building and deploying MegaScale, a production system for training large language models (LLMs) at the scale of more than 10,000 GPUs. Training LLMs at this scale brings unprecedented challenges to training efficiency and stability. We take a full-stack approach that co-designs the algorithmic and system components across model block and optimizer design, computation and communication overlapping, operator optimization, data pipeline, and network performance tuning. Maintaining high efficiency throughout the training process (i.e., stability) is an important consideration in production given the long extent of LLM training jobs. Many hard stability issues only emerge at large scale, and in-depth observability is the key to address them. We develop a set of diagnosis tools to monitor system components and events deep in the stack, identify root causes, and derive effective techniques to achieve fault tolerance and mitigate stragglers. MegaScale achieves 55.2% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) when training a 175B LLM model on 12,288 GPUs, improving the MFU by 1.34x compared to Megatron-LM. We share our operational experience in identifying and fixing failures and stragglers. We hope by articulating the problems and sharing our experience from a systems perspective, this work can inspire future LLM systems research.

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a variety of risks, from non-faithful output to biased and toxic generations. Due to several limiting factors surrounding LLMs (training cost, API access, data availability, etc.), it may not always be feasible to impose direct safety constraints on a deployed model. Therefore, an efficient and reliable alternative is required. To this end, we present our ongoing efforts to create and deploy a library of detectors: compact and easy-to-build classification models that provide labels for various harms. In addition to the detectors themselves, we discuss a wide range of uses for these detector models - from acting as guardrails to enabling effective AI governance. We also deep dive into inherent challenges in their development and discuss future work aimed at making the detectors more reliable and broadening their scope.

Large language models (LLMs) possess impressive linguistic capabilities but often fail to faithfully retain factual knowledge, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Understanding LLMs' knowledge deficiencies by exhaustively evaluating against full-scale knowledge bases is computationally prohibitive, especially for closed-weight models. We propose stochastic error ascent (SEA), a scalable and efficient framework for discovering knowledge deficiencies (errors) in closed-weight LLMs under a strict query budget. Rather than naively probing all knowledge candidates, SEA formulates error discovery as a stochastic optimization process: it iteratively retrieves new high-error candidates by leveraging the semantic similarity to previously observed failures. To further enhance search efficiency and coverage, SEA employs hierarchical retrieval across document and paragraph levels, and constructs a relation directed acyclic graph to model error propagation and identify systematic failure modes. Empirically, SEA uncovers 40.7x more knowledge errors than Automated Capability Discovery and 26.7% more than AutoBencher, while reducing the cost-per-error by 599x and 9x, respectively. Human evaluation confirms the high quality of generated questions, while ablation and convergence analyses validate the contribution of each component in SEA. Further analysis on the discovered errors reveals correlated failure patterns across LLM families and recurring deficits, highlighting the need for better data coverage and targeted fine-tuning in future LLM development.

Current application designers have moved to integrate large language models (LLMs) into their products. These LLM-integrated applications are vulnerable to prompt injection vulnerabilities. While attempts have been made to address this problem by building a detector that can monitor inputs to the LLM and detect attacks, we find that many detectors are not yet suitable for practical deployment. To support research in this area, we design the PromptShield benchmark for evaluating practical prompt injection detectors. We also construct a new detector, the PromptShield detector, which achieves significantly better performance at detecting prompt injection attacks than any prior scheme. Our work suggests that larger models, more training data, appropriate metrics, and careful curation of training data can contribute to strong detector performance.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to assist test generation with the source code under test provided as the context. This paper aims to answer the question: If the source code under test is incorrect, will LLMs be misguided when generating tests? The effectiveness of test cases is measured by their accuracy, coverage, and bug detection effectiveness. Our evaluation results with five open- and six closed-source LLMs on four datasets demonstrate that incorrect code can significantly mislead LLMs in generating correct, high-coverage, and bug-revealing tests. For instance, in the HumanEval dataset, LLMs achieve 80.45% test accuracy when provided with task descriptions and correct code, but only 57.12% when given task descriptions and incorrect code. For the APPS dataset, prompts with correct code yield tests that detect 39.85% of the bugs, while prompts with incorrect code detect only 19.61%. These findings have important implications for the deployment of LLM-based testing: using it on mature code may help protect against future regression, but on early-stage immature code, it may simply bake in errors. Our findings also underscore the need for further research to improve LLMs resilience against incorrect code in generating reliable and bug-revealing tests.

This paper presents insights from evaluating 16 frontier large language models (LLMs) on the WebApp1K benchmark, a test suite designed to assess the ability of LLMs to generate web application code. The results reveal that while all models possess similar underlying knowledge, their performance is differentiated by the frequency of mistakes they make. By analyzing lines of code (LOC) and failure distributions, we find that writing correct code is more complex than generating incorrect code. Furthermore, prompt engineering shows limited efficacy in reducing errors beyond specific cases. These findings suggest that further advancements in coding LLM should emphasize on model reliability and mistake minimization.

Machine learning (ML) models are only as good as the data they are trained on. But recent studies have found datasets widely used to train and evaluate ML models, e.g. ImageNet, to have pervasive labeling errors. Erroneous labels on the train set hurt ML models' ability to generalize, and they impact evaluation and model selection using the test set. Consequently, learning in the presence of labeling errors is an active area of research, yet this field lacks a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate these methods. Most of these methods are evaluated on a few computer vision datasets with significant variance in the experimental protocols. With such a large pool of methods and inconsistent evaluation, it is also unclear how ML practitioners can choose the right models to assess label quality in their data. To this end, we propose a benchmarking environment AQuA to rigorously evaluate methods that enable machine learning in the presence of label noise. We also introduce a design space to delineate concrete design choices of label error detection models. We hope that our proposed design space and benchmark enable practitioners to choose the right tools to improve their label quality and that our benchmark enables objective and rigorous evaluation of machine learning tools facing mislabeled data.

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts are devoted to the prediction of software bugs. However, most existing work in this domain treats all bugs the same, which is not the case in practice. It is important for a defect prediction method to estimate the severity of the identified bugs so that the higher-severity ones get immediate attention. In this study, we investigate source code metrics, source code representation using large language models (LLMs), and their combination in predicting bug severity labels of two prominent datasets. We leverage several source metrics at method-level granularity to train eight different machine-learning models. Our results suggest that Decision Tree and Random Forest models outperform other models regarding our several evaluation metrics. We then use the pre-trained CodeBERT LLM to study the source code representations' effectiveness in predicting bug severity. CodeBERT finetuning improves the bug severity prediction results significantly in the range of 29%-140% for several evaluation metrics, compared to the best classic prediction model on source code metric. Finally, we integrate source code metrics into CodeBERT as an additional input, using our two proposed architectures, which both enhance the CodeBERT model effectiveness.

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a critical tool for mitigating potential failures, particular during ramp-up phases of new products. However, its effectiveness is often limited by the missing reasoning capabilities of the FMEA tools, which are usually tabular structured. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) offer novel prospects for fine-tuning on custom datasets for reasoning within FMEA contexts. However, LLMs face challenges in tasks that require factual knowledge, a gap that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches aim to fill. RAG retrieves information from a non-parametric data store and uses a language model to generate responses. Building on this idea, we propose to advance the non-parametric data store with a knowledge graph (KG). By enhancing the RAG framework with a KG, our objective is to leverage analytical and semantic question-answering capabilities on FMEA data. This paper contributes by presenting a new ontology for FMEA observations, an algorithm for creating vector embeddings from the FMEA KG, and a KG enhanced RAG framework. Our approach is validated through a human study and we measure the performance of the context retrieval recall and precision.

Recently there have been many shared tasks targeting the detection of generated text from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these shared tasks tend to focus either on cases where text is limited to one particular domain or cases where text can be from many domains, some of which may not be seen during test time. In this shared task, using the newly released RAID benchmark, we aim to answer whether or not models can detect generated text from a large, yet fixed, number of domains and LLMs, all of which are seen during training. Over the course of three months, our task was attempted by 9 teams with 23 detector submissions. We find that multiple participants were able to obtain accuracies of over 99% on machine-generated text from RAID while maintaining a 5% False Positive Rate -- suggesting that detectors are able to robustly detect text from many domains and models simultaneously. We discuss potential interpretations of this result and provide directions for future research.

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa

To combat the misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent studies have presented LLM-generated-text detectors with promising performance. When users instruct LLMs to generate texts, the instruction can include different constraints depending on the user's need. However, most recent studies do not cover such diverse instruction patterns when creating datasets for LLM detection. In this paper, we reveal that even task-oriented constraints -- constraints that would naturally be included in an instruction and are not related to detection-evasion -- cause existing powerful detectors to have a large variance in detection performance. We focus on student essay writing as a realistic domain and manually create task-oriented constraints based on several factors for essay quality. Our experiments show that the standard deviation (SD) of current detector performance on texts generated by an instruction with such a constraint is significantly larger (up to an SD of 14.4 F1-score) than that by generating texts multiple times or paraphrasing the instruction. We also observe an overall trend where the constraints can make LLM detection more challenging than without them. Finally, our analysis indicates that the high instruction-following ability of LLMs fosters the large impact of such constraints on detection performance.

Training a model for grammatical error correction (GEC) requires a set of labeled ungrammatical / grammatical sentence pairs, but manually annotating such pairs can be expensive. Recently, the Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI) framework has demonstrated strong results on learning to repair a broken program without any labeled examples, but this relies on a perfect critic (e.g., a compiler) that returns whether an example is valid or not, which does not exist for the GEC task. In this work, we show how to leverage a pretrained language model (LM) in defining an LM-Critic, which judges a sentence to be grammatical if the LM assigns it a higher probability than its local perturbations. We apply this LM-Critic and BIFI along with a large set of unlabeled sentences to bootstrap realistic ungrammatical / grammatical pairs for training a corrector. We evaluate our approach on GEC datasets across multiple domains (CoNLL-2014, BEA-2019, GMEG-wiki and GMEG-yahoo) and show that it outperforms existing methods in both the unsupervised setting (+7.7 F0.5) and the supervised setting (+0.5 F0.5).

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).

We propose a new long-context financial benchmark, FailSafeQA, designed to test the robustness and context-awareness of LLMs against six variations in human-interface interactions in LLM-based query-answer systems within finance. We concentrate on two case studies: Query Failure and Context Failure. In the Query Failure scenario, we perturb the original query to vary in domain expertise, completeness, and linguistic accuracy. In the Context Failure case, we simulate the uploads of degraded, irrelevant, and empty documents. We employ the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and use fine-grained rating criteria to define and calculate Robustness, Context Grounding, and Compliance scores for 24 off-the-shelf models. The results suggest that although some models excel at mitigating input perturbations, they must balance robust answering with the ability to refrain from hallucinating. Notably, Palmyra-Fin-128k-Instruct, recognized as the most compliant model, maintained strong baseline performance but encountered challenges in sustaining robust predictions in 17% of test cases. On the other hand, the most robust model, OpenAI o3-mini, fabricated information in 41% of tested cases. The results demonstrate that even high-performing models have significant room for improvement and highlight the role of FailSafeQA as a tool for developing LLMs optimized for dependability in financial applications. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Writer/FailSafeQA

This survey paper offers a comprehensive review of methodologies utilizing machine learning (ML) classification techniques for identifying wafer defects in semiconductor manufacturing. Despite the growing body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of ML in wafer defect identification, there is a noticeable absence of comprehensive reviews on this subject. This survey attempts to fill this void by amalgamating available literature and providing an in-depth analysis of the advantages, limitations, and potential applications of various ML classification algorithms in the realm of wafer defect detection. An innovative taxonomy of methodologies that we present provides a detailed classification of algorithms into more refined categories and techniques. This taxonomy follows a three-tier structure, starting from broad methodology categories and ending with specific techniques. It aids researchers in comprehending the complex relationships between different algorithms and their techniques. We employ a rigorous empirical and experimental evaluation to rank these varying techniques. For the empirical evaluation, we assess techniques based on a set of five criteria. The experimental evaluation ranks the algorithms employing the same techniques, sub-categories, and categories. Also the paper illuminates the future prospects of ML classification techniques for wafer defect identification, underscoring potential advancements and opportunities for further research in this field

Since the proliferation of LLMs, there have been concerns about their misuse for harmful content creation and spreading. Recent studies justify such fears, providing evidence of LLM vulnerabilities and high potential of their misuse. Humans are no longer able to distinguish between high-quality machine-generated and authentic human-written texts. Therefore, it is crucial to develop automated means to accurately detect machine-generated content. It would enable to identify such content in online information space, thus providing an additional information about its credibility. This work addresses the problem by proposing a robust fine-tuning process of LLMs for the detection task, making the detectors more robust against obfuscation and more generalizable to out-of-distribution data.

Major cloud providers have employed advanced AI-based solutions like large language models to aid humans in identifying the root causes of cloud incidents. Despite the growing prevalence of AI-driven assistants in the root cause analysis process, their effectiveness in assisting on-call engineers is constrained by low accuracy due to the intrinsic difficulty of the task, a propensity for LLM-based approaches to hallucinate, and difficulties in distinguishing these well-disguised hallucinations. To address this challenge, we propose to perform confidence estimation for the predictions to help on-call engineers make decisions on whether to adopt the model prediction. Considering the black-box nature of many LLM-based root cause predictors, fine-tuning or temperature-scaling-based approaches are inapplicable. We therefore design an innovative confidence estimation framework based on prompting retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) that demand a minimal amount of information from the root cause predictor. This approach consists of two scoring phases: the LLM-based confidence estimator first evaluates its confidence in making judgments in the face of the current incident that reflects its ``grounded-ness" level in reference data, then rates the root cause prediction based on historical references. An optimization step combines these two scores for a final confidence assignment. We show that our method is able to produce calibrated confidence estimates for predicted root causes, validate the usefulness of retrieved historical data and the prompting strategy as well as the generalizability across different root cause prediction models. Our study takes an important move towards reliably and effectively embedding LLMs into cloud incident management systems.

With the growing interest on Large Language Models (LLMs) for fault localization and program repair, ensuring the integrity and generalizability of the LLM-based methods becomes paramount. The code in existing widely-adopted benchmarks for these tasks was written before the the bloom of LLMs and may be included in the training data of existing popular LLMs, thereby suffering from the threat of data leakage, leading to misleadingly optimistic performance metrics. To address this issue, we introduce "ConDefects", a novel dataset of real faults meticulously curated to eliminate such overlap. ConDefects contains 1,254 Java faulty programs and 1,625 Python faulty programs. All these programs are sourced from the online competition platform AtCoder and were produced between October 2021 and September 2023. We pair each fault with fault locations and the corresponding repaired code versions, making it tailored for in fault localization and program repair related research. We also provide interfaces for selecting subsets based on different time windows and coding task difficulties. While inspired by LLM-based tasks, ConDefects can be adopted for benchmarking ALL types of fault localization and program repair methods. The dataset is publicly available, and a demo video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22j15Hj5ONk.

The automatic detection of software vulnerabilities is an important research problem. However, existing solutions to this problem rely on human experts to define features and often miss many vulnerabilities (i.e., incurring high false negative rate). In this paper, we initiate the study of using deep learning-based vulnerability detection to relieve human experts from the tedious and subjective task of manually defining features. Since deep learning is motivated to deal with problems that are very different from the problem of vulnerability detection, we need some guiding principles for applying deep learning to vulnerability detection. In particular, we need to find representations of software programs that are suitable for deep learning. For this purpose, we propose using code gadgets to represent programs and then transform them into vectors, where a code gadget is a number of (not necessarily consecutive) lines of code that are semantically related to each other. This leads to the design and implementation of a deep learning-based vulnerability detection system, called Vulnerability Deep Pecker (VulDeePecker). In order to evaluate VulDeePecker, we present the first vulnerability dataset for deep learning approaches. Experimental results show that VulDeePecker can achieve much fewer false negatives (with reasonable false positives) than other approaches. We further apply VulDeePecker to 3 software products (namely Xen, Seamonkey, and Libav) and detect 4 vulnerabilities, which are not reported in the National Vulnerability Database but were "silently" patched by the vendors when releasing later versions of these products; in contrast, these vulnerabilities are almost entirely missed by the other vulnerability detection systems we experimented with.

In recent years, Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) have become the backbone of a large number of consumer electronic devices leading to a surge in their production. This has made it imperative to employ automatic inspection systems to identify manufacturing defects in PCB before they are installed in the respective systems. An important task in this regard is the classification of defects as either true or pseudo defects, which decides if the PCB is to be re-manufactured or not. This work proposes a novel approach to detect most common defects in the PCBs. The problem has been approached by employing highly discriminative features based on multi-scale wavelet transform, which are further boosted by using a kernalized version of the support vector machines (SVM). A real world printed circuit board dataset has been used for quantitative analysis. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed method.

Automating software vulnerability detection (SVD) remains a critical challenge in an era of increasingly complex and interdependent software systems. Despite significant advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code analysis, prevailing evaluation methodologies often lack the context-aware robustness necessary to capture real-world intricacies and cross-component interactions. To address these limitations, we present VulnSage, a comprehensive evaluation framework and a dataset curated from diverse, large-scale open-source system software projects developed in C/C++. Unlike prior datasets, it leverages a heuristic noise pre-filtering approach combined with LLM-based reasoning to ensure a representative and minimally noisy spectrum of vulnerabilities. The framework supports multi-granular analysis across function, file, and inter-function levels and employs four diverse zero-shot prompt strategies: Baseline, Chain-of-Thought, Think, and Think & Verify. Through this evaluation, we uncover that structured reasoning prompts substantially improve LLM performance, with Think & Verify reducing ambiguous responses from 20.3% to 9.1% while increasing accuracy. We further demonstrate that code-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose alternatives, with performance varying significantly across vulnerability types, revealing that no single approach universally excels across all security contexts. Link to dataset and codes: https://github.com/Erroristotle/VulnSage.git

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless, software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum-based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite (300 real-life GitHub issues) show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (19% on SWE-bench-lite), which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported SWE-agent. In addition, AutoCodeRover achieved this efficacy with significantly lower cost (on average, $0.43 USD), compared to other baselines. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

Devising indicative evaluation metrics for the image generation task remains an open problem. The most widely used metric for measuring the similarity between real and generated images has been the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score. Because it does not differentiate the fidelity and diversity aspects of the generated images, recent papers have introduced variants of precision and recall metrics to diagnose those properties separately. In this paper, we show that even the latest version of the precision and recall metrics are not reliable yet. For example, they fail to detect the match between two identical distributions, they are not robust against outliers, and the evaluation hyperparameters are selected arbitrarily. We propose density and coverage metrics that solve the above issues. We analytically and experimentally show that density and coverage provide more interpretable and reliable signals for practitioners than the existing metrics. Code: https://github.com/clovaai/generative-evaluation-prdc.

The use of modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques has shown to be beneficial for software engineering tasks, such as vulnerability detection and type inference. However, training deep NLP models requires significant computational resources. This paper explores techniques that aim at achieving the best usage of resources and available information in these models. We propose a generic approach, EarlyBIRD, to build composite representations of code from the early layers of a pre-trained transformer model. We empirically investigate the viability of this approach on the CodeBERT model by comparing the performance of 12 strategies for creating composite representations with the standard practice of only using the last encoder layer. Our evaluation on four datasets shows that several early layer combinations yield better performance on defect detection, and some combinations improve multi-class classification. More specifically, we obtain a +2 average improvement of detection accuracy on Devign with only 3 out of 12 layers of CodeBERT and a 3.3x speed-up of fine-tuning. These findings show that early layers can be used to obtain better results using the same resources, as well as to reduce resource usage during fine-tuning and inference.

The proliferation of large language models has raised growing concerns about their misuse, particularly in cases where AI-generated text is falsely attributed to human authors. Machine-generated content detectors claim to effectively identify such text under various conditions and from any language model. This paper critically evaluates these claims by assessing several popular detectors (RADAR, Wild, T5Sentinel, Fast-DetectGPT, PHD, LogRank, Binoculars) on a range of domains, datasets, and models that these detectors have not previously encountered. We employ various prompting strategies to simulate practical adversarial attacks, demonstrating that even moderate efforts can significantly evade detection. We emphasize the importance of the true positive rate at a specific false positive rate (TPR@FPR) metric and demonstrate that these detectors perform poorly in certain settings, with [email protected] as low as 0%. Our findings suggest that both trained and zero-shot detectors struggle to maintain high sensitivity while achieving a reasonable true positive rate.

Anomaly detection is the task of identifying examples that do not behave as expected. Because anomalies are rare and unexpected events, collecting real anomalous examples is often challenging in several applications. In addition, learning an anomaly detector with limited (or no) anomalies often yields poor prediction performance. One option is to employ auxiliary synthetic anomalies to improve the model training. However, synthetic anomalies may be of poor quality: anomalies that are unrealistic or indistinguishable from normal samples may deteriorate the detector's performance. Unfortunately, no existing methods quantify the quality of auxiliary anomalies. We fill in this gap and propose the expected anomaly posterior (EAP), an uncertainty-based score function that measures the quality of auxiliary anomalies by quantifying the total uncertainty of an anomaly detector. Experimentally on 40 benchmark datasets of images and tabular data, we show that EAP outperforms 12 adapted data quality estimators in the majority of cases.

Static analysis tools are widely used for vulnerability detection as they understand programs with complex behavior and millions of lines of code. Despite their popularity, static analysis tools are known to generate an excess of false positives. The recent ability of Machine Learning models to understand programming languages opens new possibilities when applied to static analysis. However, existing datasets to train models for vulnerability identification suffer from multiple limitations such as limited bug context, limited size, and synthetic and unrealistic source code. We propose D2A, a differential analysis based approach to label issues reported by static analysis tools. The D2A dataset is built by analyzing version pairs from multiple open source projects. From each project, we select bug fixing commits and we run static analysis on the versions before and after such commits. If some issues detected in a before-commit version disappear in the corresponding after-commit version, they are very likely to be real bugs that got fixed by the commit. We use D2A to generate a large labeled dataset to train models for vulnerability identification. We show that the dataset can be used to build a classifier to identify possible false alarms among the issues reported by static analysis, hence helping developers prioritize and investigate potential true positives first.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and the software engineering community has readily noticed their potential role in the software development life-cycle. Developers routinely ask LLMs to generate code snippets, increasing productivity but also potentially introducing ownership, privacy, correctness, and security issues. Previous work highlighted how code generated by mainstream commercial LLMs is often not safe, containing vulnerabilities, bugs, and code smells. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages testing and static analysis to assess the quality, and guide the self-improvement, of code generated by general-purpose, open-source LLMs. First, we ask LLMs to generate C code to solve a number of programming tasks. Then we employ ground-truth tests to assess the (in)correctness of the generated code, and a static analysis tool to detect potential safety vulnerabilities. Next, we assess the models ability to evaluate the generated code, by asking them to detect errors and vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the models ability to fix the generated code, providing the reports produced during the static analysis and incorrectness evaluation phases as feedback. Our results show that models often produce incorrect code, and that the generated code can include safety issues. Moreover, they perform very poorly at detecting either issue. On the positive side, we observe a substantial ability to fix flawed code when provided with information about failed tests or potential vulnerabilities, indicating a promising avenue for improving the safety of LLM-based code generation tools.

Concept-based explanation methods, such as Concept Activation Vectors, are potent means to quantify how abstract or high-level characteristics of input data influence the predictions of complex deep neural networks. However, applying them to industrial prediction problems is challenging as it is not immediately clear how to define and access appropriate concepts for individual use cases and specific data types. In this work, we investigate how to leverage established concept-based explanation techniques in the context of bearing fault detection with deep neural networks trained on vibration signals. Since bearings are prevalent in almost every rotating equipment, ensuring the reliability of intransparent fault detection models is crucial to prevent costly repairs and downtimes of industrial machinery. Our evaluations demonstrate that explaining opaque models in terms of vibration concepts enables human-comprehensible and intuitive insights about their inner workings, but the underlying assumptions need to be carefully validated first.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained attention due to their ability to understand and generate sophisticated human-like content. However, ensuring their safety is paramount as they might provide harmful and unsafe responses. Existing LLM testing frameworks address various safety-related concerns (e.g., drugs, terrorism, animal abuse) but often face challenges due to unbalanced and obsolete datasets. In this paper, we present ASTRAL, a tool that automates the generation and execution of test cases (i.e., prompts) for testing the safety of LLMs. First, we introduce a novel black-box coverage criterion to generate balanced and diverse unsafe test inputs across a diverse set of safety categories as well as linguistic writing characteristics (i.e., different style and persuasive writing techniques). Second, we propose an LLM-based approach that leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), few-shot prompting strategies and web browsing to generate up-to-date test inputs. Lastly, similar to current LLM test automation techniques, we leverage LLMs as test oracles to distinguish between safe and unsafe test outputs, allowing a fully automated testing approach. We conduct an extensive evaluation on well-known LLMs, revealing the following key findings: i) GPT3.5 outperforms other LLMs when acting as the test oracle, accurately detecting unsafe responses, and even surpassing more recent LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), as well as LLMs that are specifically tailored to detect unsafe LLM outputs (e.g., LlamaGuard); ii) the results confirm that our approach can uncover nearly twice as many unsafe LLM behaviors with the same number of test inputs compared to currently used static datasets; and iii) our black-box coverage criterion combined with web browsing can effectively guide the LLM on generating up-to-date unsafe test inputs, significantly increasing the number of unsafe LLM behaviors.

In multi-label classification, each example in a dataset may be annotated as belonging to one or more classes (or none of the classes). Example applications include image (or document) tagging where each possible tag either applies to a particular image (or document) or not. With many possible classes to consider, data annotators are likely to make errors when labeling such data in practice. Here we consider algorithms for finding mislabeled examples in multi-label classification datasets. We propose an extension of the Confident Learning framework to this setting, as well as a label quality score that ranks examples with label errors much higher than those which are correctly labeled. Both approaches can utilize any trained classifier. After demonstrating that our methodology empirically outperforms other algorithms for label error detection, we apply our approach to discover many label errors in the CelebA image tagging dataset.

Peer review is a cornerstone of quality control in scientific publishing. With the increasing workload, the unintended use of `quick' heuristics, referred to as lazy thinking, has emerged as a recurring issue compromising review quality. Automated methods to detect such heuristics can help improve the peer-reviewing process. However, there is limited NLP research on this issue, and no real-world dataset exists to support the development of detection tools. This work introduces LazyReview, a dataset of peer-review sentences annotated with fine-grained lazy thinking categories. Our analysis reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to detect these instances in a zero-shot setting. However, instruction-based fine-tuning on our dataset significantly boosts performance by 10-20 performance points, highlighting the importance of high-quality training data. Furthermore, a controlled experiment demonstrates that reviews revised with lazy thinking feedback are more comprehensive and actionable than those written without such feedback. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines that can be used to train junior reviewers in the community. (Code available here: https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2025-lazy-review)

The advent of instruction-tuned Large Language Models designed for coding tasks (Code LLMs) has transformed software engineering practices. However, their robustness against various input challenges remains a critical concern. This study introduces DegradePrompter, a novel method designed to systematically evaluate the robustness of instruction-tuned Code LLMs. We assess the impact of diverse input challenges on the functionality and correctness of generated code using rigorous metrics and established benchmarks. Our comprehensive evaluation includes five state-of-the-art open-source models and three production-grade closed-source models, revealing varying degrees of robustness. Open-source models demonstrate an increased susceptibility to input perturbations, resulting in declines in functional correctness ranging from 12% to 34%. In contrast, commercial models demonstrate relatively greater resilience, with performance degradation ranging from 3% to 24%. To enhance the robustness of the models against these vulnerabilities, we investigate a straightforward yet effective mitigation strategy. Our findings highlight the need for robust defense mechanisms and comprehensive evaluations during both the development and deployment phases to ensure the resilience and reliability of automated code generation systems.

The safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention in recent years, but there still lacks a comprehensive approach for detecting safety issues within LLMs' responses in an aligned, customizable and explainable manner. In this paper, we propose ShieldLM, an LLM-based safety detector, which aligns with general human safety standards, supports customizable detection rules, and provides explanations for its decisions. To train ShieldLM, we compile a large bilingual dataset comprising 14,387 query-response pairs, annotating the safety of responses based on various safety standards. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ShieldLM surpasses strong baselines across four test sets, showcasing remarkable customizability and explainability. Besides performing well on standard detection datasets, ShieldLM has also been shown to be effective in real-world situations as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. We release ShieldLM at https://github.com/thu-coai/ShieldLM to support accurate and explainable safety detection under various safety standards, contributing to the ongoing efforts to enhance the safety of LLMs.

We present a straightforward statistical test to detect certain violations of the assumption that the data are Independent and Identically Distributed (IID). The specific form of violation considered is common across real-world applications: whether the examples are ordered in the dataset such that almost adjacent examples tend to have more similar feature values (e.g. due to distributional drift, or attractive interactions between datapoints). Based on a k-Nearest Neighbors estimate, our approach can be used to audit any multivariate numeric data as well as other data types (image, text, audio, etc.) that can be numerically represented, perhaps with model embeddings. Compared with existing methods to detect drift or auto-correlation, our approach is both applicable to more types of data and also able to detect a wider variety of IID violations in practice. Code: https://github.com/cleanlab/cleanlab

Effective root cause analysis (RCA) is vital for swiftly restoring services, minimizing losses, and ensuring the smooth operation and management of complex systems. Previous data-driven RCA methods, particularly those employing causal discovery techniques, have primarily focused on constructing dependency or causal graphs for backtracking the root causes. However, these methods often fall short as they rely solely on data from a single modality, thereby resulting in suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose Mulan, a unified multi-modal causal structure learning method for root cause localization. We leverage a log-tailored language model to facilitate log representation learning, converting log sequences into time-series data. To explore intricate relationships across different modalities, we propose a contrastive learning-based approach to extract modality-invariant and modality-specific representations within a shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel key performance indicator-aware attention mechanism for assessing modality reliability and co-learning a final causal graph. Finally, we employ random walk with restart to simulate system fault propagation and identify potential root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

We develop tools for explicitly constructing categories enriched over generating data and that compose via ordinary scalar and matrix arithmetic arithmetic operations. We characterize meaningful size maps, weightings, and magnitude that reveal features analogous to outliers that these same notions have previously been shown to reveal in the context of metric spaces. Throughout, we provide examples of such "outlier detection" relevant to the analysis of computer programs, neural networks, cyber-physical systems, and networks of communications channels.

Recently, multiple Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to enhance the repair performance. While these techniques mainly focus on the single-line or hunk-level repair, they face significant challenges in real-world application due to the limited repair task scope and costly statement-level fault localization. However, the more practical function-level APR, which broadens the scope of APR task to fix entire buggy functions and requires only cost-efficient function-level fault localization, remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of LLM-based function-level APR including investigating the effect of the few-shot learning mechanism and the auxiliary repair-relevant information. Specifically, we adopt six widely-studied LLMs and construct a benchmark in both the Defects4J 1.2 and 2.0 datasets. Our study demonstrates that LLMs with zero-shot learning are already powerful function-level APR techniques, while applying the few-shot learning mechanism leads to disparate repair performance. Moreover, we find that directly applying the auxiliary repair-relevant information to LLMs significantly increases function-level repair performance. Inspired by our findings, we propose an LLM-based function-level APR technique, namely SRepair, which adopts a dual-LLM framework to leverage the power of the auxiliary repair-relevant information for advancing the repair performance. The evaluation results demonstrate that SRepair can correctly fix 300 single-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, largely surpassing all previous APR techniques by at least 85%, without the need for the costly statement-level fault location information. Furthermore, SRepair successfully fixes 32 multi-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, which is the first time achieved by any APR technique ever to our best knowledge.

The impact of software vulnerabilities on everyday software systems is significant. Despite deep learning models being proposed for vulnerability detection, their reliability is questionable. Prior evaluations show high recall/F1 scores of up to 99%, but these models underperform in practical scenarios, particularly when assessed on entire codebases rather than just the fixing commit. This paper introduces Real-Vul, a comprehensive dataset representing real-world scenarios for evaluating vulnerability detection models. Evaluating DeepWukong, LineVul, ReVeal, and IVDetect shows a significant drop in performance, with precision decreasing by up to 95 percentage points and F1 scores by up to 91 points. Furthermore, Model performance fluctuates based on vulnerability characteristics, with better F1 scores for information leaks or code injection than for path resolution or predictable return values. The results highlight a significant performance gap that needs addressing before deploying deep learning-based vulnerability detection in practical settings. Overfitting is identified as a key issue, and an augmentation technique is proposed, potentially improving performance by up to 30%. Contributions include a dataset creation approach for better model evaluation, Real-Vul dataset, and empirical evidence of deep learning models struggling in real-world settings.

Text-to-image diffusion models, e.g. Stable Diffusion (SD), lately have shown remarkable ability in high-quality content generation, and become one of the representatives for the recent wave of transformative AI. Nevertheless, such advance comes with an intensifying concern about the misuse of this generative technology, especially for producing copyrighted or NSFW (i.e. not safe for work) images. Although efforts have been made to filter inappropriate images/prompts or remove undesirable concepts/styles via model fine-tuning, the reliability of these safety mechanisms against diversified problematic prompts remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose Prompting4Debugging (P4D) as a debugging and red-teaming tool that automatically finds problematic prompts for diffusion models to test the reliability of a deployed safety mechanism. We demonstrate the efficacy of our P4D tool in uncovering new vulnerabilities of SD models with safety mechanisms. Particularly, our result shows that around half of prompts in existing safe prompting benchmarks which were originally considered "safe" can actually be manipulated to bypass many deployed safety mechanisms, including concept removal, negative prompt, and safety guidance. Our findings suggest that, without comprehensive testing, the evaluations on limited safe prompting benchmarks can lead to a false sense of safety for text-to-image models.

This paper presents LLM4SecHW, a novel framework for hardware debugging that leverages domain specific Large Language Model (LLM). Despite the success of LLMs in automating various software development tasks, their application in the hardware security domain has been limited due to the constraints of commercial LLMs and the scarcity of domain specific data. To address these challenges, we propose a unique approach to compile a dataset of open source hardware design defects and their remediation steps, utilizing version control data. This dataset provides a substantial foundation for training machine learning models for hardware. LLM4SecHW employs fine tuning of medium sized LLMs based on this dataset, enabling the identification and rectification of bugs in hardware designs. This pioneering approach offers a reference workflow for the application of fine tuning domain specific LLMs in other research areas. We evaluate the performance of our proposed system on various open source hardware designs, demonstrating its efficacy in accurately identifying and correcting defects. Our work brings a new perspective on automating the quality control process in hardware design.

Industry 4.0 has revolutionized manufacturing by driving digitalization and shifting the paradigm toward additive manufacturing (AM). Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), a key AM technology, enables the creation of highly customized, cost-effective products with minimal material waste through layer-by-layer extrusion, posing a significant challenge to traditional subtractive methods. However, the susceptibility of material extrusion techniques to errors often requires expert intervention to detect and mitigate defects that can severely compromise product quality. While automated error detection and machine learning models exist, their generalizability across diverse 3D printer setups, firmware, and sensors is limited, and deep learning methods require extensive labeled datasets, hindering scalability and adaptability. To address these challenges, we present a process monitoring and control framework that leverages pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside 3D printers to detect and address printing defects. The LLM evaluates print quality by analyzing images captured after each layer or print segment, identifying failure modes and querying the printer for relevant parameters. It then generates and executes a corrective action plan. We validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework in identifying defects by comparing it against a control group of engineers with diverse AM expertise. Our evaluation demonstrated that LLM-based agents not only accurately identify common 3D printing errors, such as inconsistent extrusion, stringing, warping, and layer adhesion, but also effectively determine the parameters causing these failures and autonomously correct them without any need for human intervention.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for safety-sensitive machine learning applications and has been extensively studied, yielding a plethora of methods developed in the literature. However, most studies for OOD detection did not use pre-trained models and trained a backbone from scratch. In recent years, transferring knowledge from large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by lightweight tuning has become mainstream for training in-distribution (ID) classifiers. To bridge the gap between the practice of OOD detection and current classifiers, the unique and crucial problem is that the samples whose information networks know often come as OOD input. We consider that such data may significantly affect the performance of large pre-trained networks because the discriminability of these OOD data depends on the pre-training algorithm. Here, we define such OOD data as PT-OOD (Pre-Trained OOD) data. In this paper, we aim to reveal the effect of PT-OOD on the OOD detection performance of pre-trained networks from the perspective of pre-training algorithms. To achieve this, we explore the PT-OOD detection performance of supervised and self-supervised pre-training algorithms with linear-probing tuning, the most common efficient tuning method. Through our experiments and analysis, we find that the low linear separability of PT-OOD in the feature space heavily degrades the PT-OOD detection performance, and self-supervised models are more vulnerable to PT-OOD than supervised pre-trained models, even with state-of-the-art detection methods. To solve this vulnerability, we further propose a unique solution to large-scale pre-trained models: Leveraging powerful instance-by-instance discriminative representations of pre-trained models and detecting OOD in the feature space independent of the ID decision boundaries. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/PT-OOD.

Anomaly detection methods identify examples that do not follow the expected behaviour, typically in an unsupervised fashion, by assigning real-valued anomaly scores to the examples based on various heuristics. These scores need to be transformed into actual predictions by thresholding, so that the proportion of examples marked as anomalies equals the expected proportion of anomalies, called contamination factor. Unfortunately, there are no good methods for estimating the contamination factor itself. We address this need from a Bayesian perspective, introducing a method for estimating the posterior distribution of the contamination factor of a given unlabeled dataset. We leverage on outputs of several anomaly detectors as a representation that already captures the basic notion of anomalousness and estimate the contamination using a specific mixture formulation. Empirically on 22 datasets, we show that the estimated distribution is well-calibrated and that setting the threshold using the posterior mean improves the anomaly detectors' performance over several alternative methods. All code is publicly available for full reproducibility.

Using unlabeled data to regularize the machine learning models has demonstrated promise for improving safety and reliability in detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Harnessing the power of unlabeled in-the-wild data is non-trivial due to the heterogeneity of both in-distribution (ID) and OOD data. This lack of a clean set of OOD samples poses significant challenges in learning an optimal OOD classifier. Currently, there is a lack of research on formally understanding how unlabeled data helps OOD detection. This paper bridges the gap by introducing a new learning framework SAL (Separate And Learn) that offers both strong theoretical guarantees and empirical effectiveness. The framework separates candidate outliers from the unlabeled data and then trains an OOD classifier using the candidate outliers and the labeled ID data. Theoretically, we provide rigorous error bounds from the lens of separability and learnability, formally justifying the two components in our algorithm. Our theory shows that SAL can separate the candidate outliers with small error rates, which leads to a generalization guarantee for the learned OOD classifier. Empirically, SAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on common benchmarks, reinforcing our theoretical insights. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/sal.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an umbrella of different components, design decisions, and domain-specific adaptations to enhance the capabilities of large language models and counter their limitations regarding hallucination and outdated and missing knowledge. Since it is unclear which design decisions lead to a satisfactory performance, developing RAG systems is often experimental and needs to follow a systematic and sound methodology to gain sound and reliable results. However, there is currently no generally accepted methodology for RAG evaluation despite a growing interest in this technology. In this paper, we propose a first blueprint of a methodology for a sound and reliable evaluation of RAG systems and demonstrate its applicability on a real-world software engineering research task: the validation of configuration dependencies across software technologies. In summary, we make two novel contributions: (i) A novel, reusable methodological design for evaluating RAG systems, including a demonstration that represents a guideline, and (ii) a RAG system, which has been developed following this methodology, that achieves the highest accuracy in the field of dependency validation. For the blueprint's demonstration, the key insights are the crucial role of choosing appropriate baselines and metrics, the necessity for systematic RAG refinements derived from qualitative failure analysis, as well as the reporting practices of key design decision to foster replication and evaluation.

We propose and release a new vulnerable source code dataset. We curate the dataset by crawling security issue websites, extracting vulnerability-fixing commits and source codes from the corresponding projects. Our new dataset contains 18,945 vulnerable functions spanning 150 CWEs and 330,492 non-vulnerable functions extracted from 7,514 commits. Our dataset covers 295 more projects than all previous datasets combined. Combining our new dataset with previous datasets, we present an analysis of the challenges and promising research directions of using deep learning for detecting software vulnerabilities. We study 11 model architectures belonging to 4 families. Our results show that deep learning is still not ready for vulnerability detection, due to high false positive rate, low F1 score, and difficulty of detecting hard CWEs. In particular, we demonstrate an important generalization challenge for the deployment of deep learning-based models. We show that increasing the volume of training data may not further improve the performance of deep learning models for vulnerability detection, but might be useful to improve the generalization ability to unseen projects. We also identify hopeful future research directions. We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) are a promising research direction for ML-based vulnerability detection, outperforming Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with code-structure features in our experiments. Moreover, developing source code specific pre-training objectives is a promising research direction to improve the vulnerability detection performance.

Software updates, including bug repair and feature additions, are frequent in modern applications but they often leave test suites outdated, resulting in undetected bugs and increased chances of system failures. A recent study by Meta revealed that 14%-22% of software failures stem from outdated tests that fail to reflect changes in the codebase. This highlights the need to keep tests in sync with code changes to ensure software reliability. In this paper, we present UTFix, a novel approach for repairing unit tests when their corresponding focal methods undergo changes. UTFix addresses two critical issues: assertion failure and reduced code coverage caused by changes in the focal method. Our approach leverages language models to repair unit tests by providing contextual information such as static code slices, dynamic code slices, and failure messages. We evaluate UTFix on our generated synthetic benchmarks (Tool-Bench), and real-world benchmarks. Tool- Bench includes diverse changes from popular open-source Python GitHub projects, where UTFix successfully repaired 89.2% of assertion failures and achieved 100% code coverage for 96 tests out of 369 tests. On the real-world benchmarks, UTFix repairs 60% of assertion failures while achieving 100% code coverage for 19 out of 30 unit tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study focused on unit test in evolving Python projects. Our contributions include the development of UTFix, the creation of Tool-Bench and real-world benchmarks, and the demonstration of the effectiveness of LLM-based methods in addressing unit test failures due to software evolution.

This paper describes our 3^{rd} place submission in the AVeriTeC shared task in which we attempted to address the challenge of fact-checking with evidence retrieved in the wild using a simple scheme of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) designed for the task, leveraging the predictive power of Large Language Models. We release our codebase and explain its two modules - the Retriever and the Evidence & Label generator - in detail, justifying their features such as MMR-reranking and Likert-scale confidence estimation. We evaluate our solution on AVeriTeC dev and test set and interpret the results, picking the GPT-4o as the most appropriate model for our pipeline at the time of our publication, with Llama 3.1 70B being a promising open-source alternative. We perform an empirical error analysis to see that faults in our predictions often coincide with noise in the data or ambiguous fact-checks, provoking further research and data augmentation.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of various evaluation benchmarks. These benchmarks typically rely on a single instruction template for evaluating all LLMs on a specific task. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the brittleness of results obtained via single-prompt evaluations across 6.5M instances, involving 20 different LLMs and 39 tasks from 3 benchmarks. To improve robustness of the analysis, we propose to evaluate LLMs with a set of diverse prompts instead. We discuss tailored evaluation metrics for specific use cases (e.g., LLM developers vs. developers interested in a specific downstream task), ensuring a more reliable and meaningful assessment of LLM capabilities. We then implement these criteria and conduct evaluations of multiple models, providing insights into the true strengths and limitations of current LLMs.

In this work, we share our experience on tele-knowledge pre-training for fault analysis, a crucial task in telecommunication applications that requires a wide range of knowledge normally found in both machine log data and product documents. To organize this knowledge from experts uniformly, we propose to create a Tele-KG (tele-knowledge graph). Using this valuable data, we further propose a tele-domain language pre-training model TeleBERT and its knowledge-enhanced version, a tele-knowledge re-training model KTeleBERT. which includes effective prompt hints, adaptive numerical data encoding, and two knowledge injection paradigms. Concretely, our proposal includes two stages: first, pre-training TeleBERT on 20 million tele-related corpora, and then re-training it on 1 million causal and machine-related corpora to obtain KTeleBERT. Our evaluation on multiple tasks related to fault analysis in tele-applications, including root-cause analysis, event association prediction, and fault chain tracing, shows that pre-training a language model with tele-domain data is beneficial for downstream tasks. Moreover, the KTeleBERT re-training further improves the performance of task models, highlighting the effectiveness of incorporating diverse tele-knowledge into the model.

Despite growing enthusiasm for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to accomplish tasks, their performance gains across popular benchmarks remain minimal compared to single-agent frameworks. This gap highlights the need to analyze the challenges hindering MAS effectiveness. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of MAS challenges. We analyze five popular MAS frameworks across over 150 tasks, involving six expert human annotators. We identify 14 unique failure modes and propose a comprehensive taxonomy applicable to various MAS frameworks. This taxonomy emerges iteratively from agreements among three expert annotators per study, achieving a Cohen's Kappa score of 0.88. These fine-grained failure modes are organized into 3 categories, (i) specification and system design failures, (ii) inter-agent misalignment, and (iii) task verification and termination. To support scalable evaluation, we integrate MASFT with LLM-as-a-Judge. We also explore if identified failures could be easily prevented by proposing two interventions: improved specification of agent roles and enhanced orchestration strategies. Our findings reveal that identified failures require more complex solutions, highlighting a clear roadmap for future research. We open-source our dataset and LLM annotator.

This paper provides a baseline system for First-shot-compliant unsupervised anomaly detection (ASD) for machine condition monitoring. First-shot ASD does not allow systems to do machine-type dependent hyperparameter tuning or tool ensembling based on the performance metric calculated with the grand truth. To show benchmark performance for First-shot ASD, this paper proposes an anomaly sound detection system that works on the domain generalization task in the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2022 Challenge Task 2: "Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection for Machine Condition Monitoring Applying Domain Generalization Technique" while complying with the First-shot requirements introduced in the DCASE 2023 Challenge Task 2 (DCASE2023T2). A simple autoencoder based implementation combined with selective Mahalanobis metric is implemented as a baseline system. The performance evaluation is conducted to set the target benchmark for the forthcoming DCASE2023T2. Source code of the baseline system will be available on GitHub: https://github.com/nttcslab/dcase2023_task2_baseline_ae .

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify test examples that do not belong to the training distribution and are thus unlikely to be predicted reliably. Despite a plethora of existing works, most of them focused only on the scenario where OOD examples come from semantic shift (e.g., unseen categories), ignoring other possible causes (e.g., covariate shift). In this paper, we present a novel, unifying framework to study OOD detection in a broader scope. Instead of detecting OOD examples from a particular cause, we propose to detect examples that a deployed machine learning model (e.g., an image classifier) is unable to predict correctly. That is, whether a test example should be detected and rejected or not is ``model-specific''. We show that this framework unifies the detection of OOD examples caused by semantic shift and covariate shift, and closely addresses the concern of applying a machine learning model to uncontrolled environments. We provide an extensive analysis that involves a variety of models (e.g., different architectures and training strategies), sources of OOD examples, and OOD detection approaches, and reveal several insights into improving and understanding OOD detection in uncontrolled environments.

Real-world classifiers can benefit from the option of abstaining from predicting on samples where they have low confidence. Such abstention is particularly useful on samples which are close to the learned decision boundary, or which are outliers with respect to the training sample. These settings have been the subject of extensive but disjoint study in the selective classification (SC) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection literature. Recent work on selective classification with OOD detection (SCOD) has argued for the unified study of these problems; however, the formal underpinnings of this problem are still nascent, and existing techniques are heuristic in nature. In this paper, we propose new plugin estimators for SCOD that are theoretically grounded, effective, and generalise existing approaches from the SC and OOD detection literature. In the course of our analysis, we formally explicate how na\"{i}ve use of existing SC and OOD detection baselines may be inadequate for SCOD. We empirically demonstrate that our approaches yields competitive SC and OOD detection performance compared to baselines from both literatures.

Uncertainty in perception, actuation, and the environment often require multiple attempts for a robotic task to be successful. We study a class of problems providing (1) low-entropy indicators of terminal success / failure, and (2) unreliable (high-entropy) data to predict the final outcome of an ongoing task. Examples include a robot trying to connect with a charging station, parallel parking, or assembling a tightly-fitting part. The ability to restart after predicting failure early, versus simply running to failure, can significantly decrease the makespan, that is, the total time to completion, with the drawback of potentially short-cutting an otherwise successful operation. Assuming task running times to be Poisson distributed, and using a Markov Jump process to capture the dynamics of the underlying Markov Decision Process, we derive a closed form solution that predicts makespan based on the confusion matrix of the failure predictor. This allows the robot to learn failure prediction in a production environment, and only adopt a preemptive policy when it actually saves time. We demonstrate this approach using a robotic peg-in-hole assembly problem using a real robotic system. Failures are predicted by a dilated convolutional network based on force-torque data, showing an average makespan reduction from 101s to 81s (N=120, p<0.05). We posit that the proposed algorithm generalizes to any robotic behavior with an unambiguous terminal reward, with wide ranging applications on how robots can learn and improve their behaviors in the wild.

With the advancement of software rendering techniques, GUI pages in mobile apps now encompass a wealth of visual information, where the visual semantics of each page contribute to the overall app logic, presenting new challenges to software testing. Despite the progress in automated Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing, the absence of testing oracles has constrained its efficacy to identify only crash bugs with evident abnormal signals. Nonetheless, there are still a considerable number of non-crash bugs, ranging from unexpected behaviors to misalignments, often evading detection by existing techniques. While these bugs can exhibit visual cues that serve as potential testing oracles, they often entail a sequence of screenshots, and detecting them necessitates an understanding of the operational logic among GUI page transitions, which is challenging traditional techniques. Considering the remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) in visual and language understanding, this paper proposes a vision-driven automated GUI testing approach VisionDroid to detect non-crash functional bugs with MLLM. It begins by extracting GUI text information and aligning it with screenshots to form a vision prompt, enabling MLLM to understand GUI context. The function-aware explorer then employs MLLM for deeper and function-oriented GUI page exploration, while the logic-aware bug detector segments the entire exploration history into logically cohesive parts and prompts the MLLM for bug detection. We evaluate VisionDroid on three datasets and compare it with 10 baselines, demonstrating its excellent performance. The ablation study further proves the contribution of each module. Moreover, VisionDroid identifies 29 new bugs on Google Play, of which 19 have been confirmed and fixed.

AI agents are systems capable of perceiving their environment, autonomously planning and executing tasks. Recent advancements in LLM have introduced a transformative paradigm for AI agents, enabling them to interact with external resources and tools through prompts. In such agents, the workflow integrates developer-written code, which manages framework construction and logic control, with LLM-generated natural language that enhances dynamic decision-making and interaction. However, discrepancies between developer-implemented logic and the dynamically generated content of LLMs in terms of behavior and expected outcomes can lead to defects, such as tool invocation failures and task execution errors. These issues introduce specific risks, leading to various defects in LLM-based AI Agents, such as service interruptions. Despite the importance of these issues, there is a lack of systematic work that focuses on analyzing LLM-based AI Agents to uncover defects in their code. In this paper, we present the first study focused on identifying and detecting defects in LLM Agents. We collected and analyzed 6,854 relevant posts from StackOverflow to define 8 types of agent defects. For each type, we provided detailed descriptions with an example. Then, we designed a static analysis tool, named Agentable, to detect the defects. Agentable leverages Code Property Graphs and LLMs to analyze Agent workflows by efficiently identifying specific code patterns and analyzing natural language descriptions. To evaluate Agentable, we constructed two datasets: AgentSet, consists of 84 real-world Agents, and AgentTest, which contains 78 Agents specifically designed to include various types of defects. Our results show that Agentable achieved an overall accuracy of 88.79% and a recall rate of 91.03%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the 889 defects of the AgentSet, highlighting the prevalence of these defects.

Log analysis is crucial for ensuring the orderly and stable operation of information systems, particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in natural language processing tasks. In the AIOps domain, they excel in tasks such as anomaly detection, root cause analysis of faults, operations and maintenance script generation, and alert information summarization. However, the performance of current LLMs in log analysis tasks remains inadequately validated. To address this gap, we introduce LogEval, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in various log analysis tasks for the first time. This benchmark covers tasks such as log parsing, log anomaly detection, log fault diagnosis, and log summarization. LogEval evaluates each task using 4,000 publicly available log data entries and employs 15 different prompts for each task to ensure a thorough and fair assessment. By rigorously evaluating leading LLMs, we demonstrate the impact of various LLM technologies on log analysis performance, focusing on aspects such as self-consistency and few-shot contextual learning. We also discuss findings related to model quantification, Chinese-English question-answering evaluation, and prompt engineering. These findings provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in multilingual environments and the effectiveness of different prompt strategies. Various evaluation methods are employed for different tasks to accurately measure the performance of LLMs in log analysis, ensuring a comprehensive assessment. The insights gained from LogEvals evaluation reveal the strengths and limitations of LLMs in log analysis tasks, providing valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a breakthrough technology in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, with the ability to handle large-scale datasets and exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. Meanwhile, software testing is a crucial undertaking that serves as a cornerstone for ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. As the scope and complexity of software systems continue to grow, the need for more effective software testing techniques becomes increasingly urgent, and making it an area ripe for innovative approaches such as the use of LLMs. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the utilization of LLMs in software testing. It analyzes 52 relevant studies that have used LLMs for software testing, from both the software testing and LLMs perspectives. The paper presents a detailed discussion of the software testing tasks for which LLMs are commonly used, among which test case preparation and program repair are the most representative ones. It also analyzes the commonly used LLMs, the types of prompt engineering that are employed, as well as the accompanied techniques with these LLMs. It also summarizes the key challenges and potential opportunities in this direction. This work can serve as a roadmap for future research in this area, highlighting potential avenues for exploration, and identifying gaps in our current understanding of the use of LLMs in software testing.

Bug reports are vital for software maintenance that allow users to inform developers of the problems encountered while using the software. As such, researchers have committed considerable resources toward automating bug replay to expedite the process of software maintenance. Nonetheless, the success of current automated approaches is largely dictated by the characteristics and quality of bug reports, as they are constrained by the limitations of manually-crafted patterns and pre-defined vocabulary lists. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language understanding, we propose AdbGPT, a new lightweight approach to automatically reproduce the bugs from bug reports through prompt engineering, without any training and hard-coding effort. AdbGPT leverages few-shot learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to elicit human knowledge and logical reasoning from LLMs to accomplish the bug replay in a manner similar to a developer. Our evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our AdbGPT to reproduce 81.3% of bug reports in 253.6 seconds, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines and ablation studies. We also conduct a small-scale user study to confirm the usefulness of AdbGPT in enhancing developers' bug replay capabilities.

Software testing is a crucial phase in the software life cycle, helping identify potential risks and reduce maintenance costs. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have proposed an increasing number of LLM-based software testing techniques, particularly in the area of test case generation. Despite the growing interest, limited efforts have been made to thoroughly evaluate the actual capabilities of LLMs in this task. In this paper, we introduce TestBench, a benchmark for class-level LLM-based test case generation. We construct a dataset of 108 Java programs from 9 real-world, large-scale projects on GitHub, each representing a different thematic domain. We then design three distinct types of prompts based on context descriptions, including self-contained context, full context, and simple context. Besides, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that considers five aspects of test cases: syntactic correctness, compilation correctness, test correctness, code coverage rate, and defect detection rate. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic algorithm to repair erroneous test cases generated by LLMs. We evaluate CodeLlama-13b, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 on the TestBench, and our experimental results indicate that larger models demonstrate a greater ability to effectively utilize contextual information, thus generating higher-quality test cases. Smaller models may struggle with the noise introduced by the extensive information contained within the full context. However, when using the simplified version, namely the simple context, which is derived from the full context via abstract syntax tree analysis, the performance of these models improves significantly. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further enhance the effectiveness of models by handling contextual information for test case generation.

The fluency and factual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) heightens the need for corresponding systems to detect whether a piece of text is machine-written. For example, students may use LLMs to complete written assignments, leaving instructors unable to accurately assess student learning. In this paper, we first demonstrate that text sampled from an LLM tends to occupy negative curvature regions of the model's log probability function. Leveraging this observation, we then define a new curvature-based criterion for judging if a passage is generated from a given LLM. This approach, which we call DetectGPT, does not require training a separate classifier, collecting a dataset of real or generated passages, or explicitly watermarking generated text. It uses only log probabilities computed by the model of interest and random perturbations of the passage from another generic pre-trained language model (e.g, T5). We find DetectGPT is more discriminative than existing zero-shot methods for model sample detection, notably improving detection of fake news articles generated by 20B parameter GPT-NeoX from 0.81 AUROC for the strongest zero-shot baseline to 0.95 AUROC for DetectGPT. See https://ericmitchell.ai/detectgpt for code, data, and other project information.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. Code is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/neco

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing out the potential benefits of its application. Natural language processing has shown the potential to process text data regarding a variety of tasks. We argue, that such models can also show similar benefits for software code processing. In this paper, we investigate how models used for natural language processing can be trained upon software code. We introduce a data retrieval pipeline for software code and train a model upon Java software code. The resulting model, JavaBERT, shows a high accuracy on the masked language modeling task showing its potential for software engineering tools.

Code contains security and functional bugs. The process of identifying and localizing them is difficult and relies on human labor. In this work, we present a novel approach (FLAG) to assist human debuggers. FLAG is based on the lexical capabilities of generative AI, specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs). Here, we input a code file then extract and regenerate each line within that file for self-comparison. By comparing the original code with an LLM-generated alternative, we can flag notable differences as anomalies for further inspection, with features such as distance from comments and LLM confidence also aiding this classification. This reduces the inspection search space for the designer. Unlike other automated approaches in this area, FLAG is language-agnostic, can work on incomplete (and even non-compiling) code and requires no creation of security properties, functional tests or definition of rules. In this work, we explore the features that help LLMs in this classification and evaluate the performance of FLAG on known bugs. We use 121 benchmarks across C, Python and Verilog; with each benchmark containing a known security or functional weakness. We conduct the experiments using two state of the art LLMs in OpenAI's code-davinci-002 and gpt-3.5-turbo, but our approach may be used by other models. FLAG can identify 101 of the defects and helps reduce the search space to 12-17% of source code.

As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks are getting larger and more complex as well. We present LMentry, a benchmark that avoids this "arms race" by focusing on a compact set of tasks that are trivial to humans, e.g. writing a sentence containing a specific word, identifying which words in a list belong to a specific category, or choosing which of two words is longer. LMentry is specifically designed to provide quick and interpretable insights into the capabilities and robustness of large language models. Our experiments reveal a wide variety of failure cases that, while immediately obvious to humans, pose a considerable challenge for large language models, including OpenAI's latest 175B-parameter instruction-tuned model, TextDavinci002. LMentry complements contemporary evaluation approaches of large language models, providing a quick, automatic, and easy-to-run "unit test", without resorting to large benchmark suites of complex tasks.

In today's digital landscape, the importance of timely and accurate vulnerability detection has significantly increased. This paper presents a novel approach that leverages transformer-based models and machine learning techniques to automate the identification of software vulnerabilities by analyzing GitHub issues. We introduce a new dataset specifically designed for classifying GitHub issues relevant to vulnerability detection. We then examine various classification techniques to determine their effectiveness. The results demonstrate the potential of this approach for real-world application in early vulnerability detection, which could substantially reduce the window of exploitation for software vulnerabilities. This research makes a key contribution to the field by providing a scalable and computationally efficient framework for automated detection, enabling the prevention of compromised software usage before official notifications. This work has the potential to enhance the security of open-source software ecosystems.

Manufacturing wafers is an intricate task involving thousands of steps. Defect Pattern Recognition (DPR) of wafer maps is crucial for determining the root cause of production defects, which may further provide insight for yield improvement in wafer foundry. During manufacturing, various defects may appear standalone in the wafer or may appear as different combinations. Identifying multiple defects in a wafer is generally harder compared to identifying a single defect. Recently, deep learning methods have gained significant traction in mixed-type DPR. However, the complexity of defects requires complex and large models making them very difficult to operate on low-memory embedded devices typically used in fabrication labs. Another common issue is the unavailability of labeled data to train complex networks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised training routine to distill the knowledge of complex pre-trained models to lightweight deployment-ready models. We empirically show that this type of training compresses the model without sacrificing accuracy despite being up to 10 times smaller than the teacher model. The compressed model also manages to outperform contemporary state-of-the-art models.

In software development, bug report reproduction is a challenging task. This paper introduces ReBL, a novel feedback-driven approach that leverages GPT-4, a large-scale language model, to automatically reproduce Android bug reports. Unlike traditional methods, ReBL bypasses the use of Step to Reproduce (S2R) entities. Instead, it leverages the entire textual bug report and employs innovative prompts to enhance GPT's contextual reasoning. This approach is more flexible and context-aware than the traditional step-by-step entity matching approach, resulting in improved accuracy and effectiveness. In addition to handling crash reports, ReBL has the capability of handling non-crash bug reports. Our evaluation of 96 Android bug reports (73 crash and 23 non-crash) demonstrates that ReBL successfully reproduced 90.63% of these reports, averaging only 74.98 seconds per bug report. Additionally, ReBL outperformed three existing tools in both success rate and speed.

Identifying procedural errors online from egocentric videos is a critical yet challenging task across various domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, and skill-based training. The nature of such mistakes is inherently open-set, as unforeseen or novel errors may occur, necessitating robust detection systems that do not rely on prior examples of failure. Currently, however, no technique effectively detects open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose a dual branch architecture to address this problem in an online fashion: one branch continuously performs step recognition from the input egocentric video, while the other anticipates future steps based on the recognition module's output. Mistakes are detected as mismatches between the currently recognized action and the action predicted by the anticipation module. The recognition branch takes input frames, predicts the current action, and aggregates frame-level results into action tokens. The anticipation branch, specifically, leverages the solid pattern-matching capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict action tokens based on previously predicted ones. Given the online nature of the task, we also thoroughly benchmark the difficulties associated with per-frame evaluations, particularly the need for accurate and timely predictions in dynamic online scenarios. Extensive experiments on two procedural datasets demonstrate the challenges and opportunities of leveraging a dual-branch architecture for mistake detection, showcasing the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In a thorough evaluation including recognition and anticipation variants and state-of-the-art models, our method reveals its robustness and effectiveness in online applications.

Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of results. This assumption comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To address this issue, we posit that the current focus on reproducibility should go hand in hand with the emphasis on software quality. We present a case study in which we identify and fix three bugs in widely used implementations of the state-of-the-art Conformer architecture. Through experiments on speech recognition and translation in various languages, we demonstrate that the presence of bugs does not prevent the achievement of good and reproducible results, which however can lead to incorrect conclusions that potentially misguide future research. As a countermeasure, we propose a Code-quality Checklist and release pangoliNN, a library dedicated to testing neural models, with the goal of promoting coding best practices and improving research software quality within the NLP community.

Bug localization, which is used to help programmers identify the location of bugs in source code, is an essential task in software development. Researchers have already made efforts to harness the powerful deep learning (DL) techniques to automate it. However, training bug localization model is usually challenging because it requires a large quantity of data labeled with the bug's exact location, which is difficult and time-consuming to collect. By contrast, obtaining bug detection data with binary labels of whether there is a bug in the source code is much simpler. This paper proposes a WEakly supervised bug LocaLization (WELL) method, which only uses the bug detection data with binary labels to train a bug localization model. With CodeBERT finetuned on the buggy-or-not binary labeled data, WELL can address bug localization in a weakly supervised manner. The evaluations on three method-level synthetic datasets and one file-level real-world dataset show that WELL is significantly better than the existing SOTA model in typical bug localization tasks such as variable misuse and other programming bugs.

Recent research has repeatedly shown that machine learning techniques can be applied to either whole files or file fragments to classify them for analysis. We build upon these techniques to show that for samples of un-labeled compiled computer object code, one can apply the same type of analysis to classify important aspects of the code, such as its target architecture and endianess. We show that using simple byte-value histograms we retain enough information about the opcodes within a sample to classify the target architecture with high accuracy, and then discuss heuristic-based features that exploit information within the operands to determine endianess. We introduce a dataset with over 16000 code samples from 20 architectures and experimentally show that by using our features, classifiers can achieve very high accuracy with relatively small sample sizes.

Efficient network management is one of the key challenges of the constantly growing and increasingly complex wide area networks (WAN). The paradigm shift towards virtualized (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) in the next generation of mobile networks (5G), as well as the latest scientific insights in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable the transition from manually managed networks nowadays to fully autonomic and dynamic self-organized networks (SON). This helps to meet the KPIs and reduce at the same time operational costs (OPEX). In this paper, an AI driven concept is presented for the malfunction detection in NFV applications with the help of semi-supervised learning. For this purpose, a profile of the application under test is created. This profile then is used as a reference to detect abnormal behaviour. For example, if there is a bug in the updated version of the app, it is now possible to react autonomously and roll-back the NFV app to a previous version in order to avoid network outages.

Automated detection of defects in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing using Solder Paste Inspection (SPI) and Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) machines can help improve operational efficiency and significantly reduce the need for manual intervention. In this paper, using SPI-extracted features of 6 million pins, we demonstrate a data-centric approach to train Machine Learning (ML) models to detect PCB defects at three stages of PCB manufacturing. The 6 million PCB pins correspond to 2 million components that belong to 15,387 PCBs. Using a base extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) ML model, we iterate on the data pre-processing step to improve detection performance. Combining pin-level SPI features using component and PCB IDs, we developed training instances also at the component and PCB level. This allows the ML model to capture any inter-pin, inter-component, or spatial effects that may not be apparent at the pin level. Models are trained at the pin, component, and PCB levels, and the detection results from the different models are combined to identify defective components.

Event log analysis is an important task that security professionals undertake. Event logs record key information on activities that occur on computing devices, and due to the substantial number of events generated, they consume a large amount of time and resources to analyse. This demanding and repetitive task is also prone to errors. To address these concerns, researchers have developed automated techniques to improve the event log analysis process. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the ability to successfully perform a wide range of tasks that individuals would usually partake in, to high standards, and at a pace and degree of complexity that outperform humans. Due to this, researchers are rapidly investigating the use of LLMs for event log analysis. This includes fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and in-context learning, which affect performance. These works demonstrate good progress, yet there is a need to understand the developing body of knowledge, identify commonalities between works, and identify key challenges and potential solutions to further developments in this domain. This paper aims to survey LLM-based event log analysis techniques, providing readers with an in-depth overview of the domain, gaps identified in previous research, and concluding with potential avenues to explore in future.

In the field of industrial inspection, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have a high potential to renew the paradigms in practical applications due to their robust language capabilities and generalization abilities. However, despite their impressive problem-solving skills in many domains, MLLMs' ability in industrial anomaly detection has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present MMAD, the first-ever full-spectrum MLLMs benchmark in industrial Anomaly Detection. We defined seven key subtasks of MLLMs in industrial inspection and designed a novel pipeline to generate the MMAD dataset with 39,672 questions for 8,366 industrial images. With MMAD, we have conducted a comprehensive, quantitative evaluation of various state-of-the-art MLLMs. The commercial models performed the best, with the average accuracy of GPT-4o models reaching 74.9%. However, this result falls far short of industrial requirements. Our analysis reveals that current MLLMs still have significant room for improvement in answering questions related to industrial anomalies and defects. We further explore two training-free performance enhancement strategies to help models improve in industrial scenarios, highlighting their promising potential for future research.

Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks - such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating implementing the tools, manually setting up the environment for each test scenario, and finding risky cases. As tools and agents become more complex, the high cost of testing these agents will make it increasingly difficult to find high-stakes, long-tailed risks. To address these challenges, we introduce ToolEmu: a framework that uses an LM to emulate tool execution and enables the testing of LM agents against a diverse range of tools and scenarios, without manual instantiation. Alongside the emulator, we develop an LM-based automatic safety evaluator that examines agent failures and quantifies associated risks. We test both the tool emulator and evaluator through human evaluation and find that 68.8% of failures identified with ToolEmu would be valid real-world agent failures. Using our curated initial benchmark consisting of 36 high-stakes tools and 144 test cases, we provide a quantitative risk analysis of current LM agents and identify numerous failures with potentially severe outcomes. Notably, even the safest LM agent exhibits such failures 23.9% of the time according to our evaluator, underscoring the need to develop safer LM agents for real-world deployment.

Counterexample-guided repair aims at creating neural networks with mathematical safety guarantees, facilitating the application of neural networks in safety-critical domains. However, whether counterexample-guided repair is guaranteed to terminate remains an open question. We approach this question by showing that counterexample-guided repair can be viewed as a robust optimisation algorithm. While termination guarantees for neural network repair itself remain beyond our reach, we prove termination for more restrained machine learning models and disprove termination in a general setting. We empirically study the practical implications of our theoretical results, demonstrating the suitability of common verifiers and falsifiers for repair despite a disadvantageous theoretical result. Additionally, we use our theoretical insights to devise a novel algorithm for repairing linear regression models based on quadratic programming, surpassing existing approaches.

The rapid development of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved the quality of generated texts, necessitating reliable machine-generated text detectors. A huge number of detectors and collections with AI fragments have emerged, and several detection methods even showed recognition quality up to 99.9% according to the target metrics in such collections. However, the quality of such detectors tends to drop dramatically in the wild, posing a question: Are detectors actually highly trustworthy or do their high benchmark scores come from the poor quality of evaluation datasets? In this paper, we emphasise the need for robust and qualitative methods for evaluating generated data to be secure against bias and low generalising ability of future model. We present a systematic review of datasets from competitions dedicated to AI-generated content detection and propose methods for evaluating the quality of datasets containing AI-generated fragments. In addition, we discuss the possibility of using high-quality generated data to achieve two goals: improving the training of detection models and improving the training datasets themselves. Our contribution aims to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics between human and machine text, which will ultimately support the integrity of information in an increasingly automated world.

Reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is fundamental to implementing safer modern machine learning (ML) systems. In this paper, we introduce Igeood, an effective method for detecting OOD samples. Igeood applies to any pre-trained neural network, works under various degrees of access to the ML model, does not require OOD samples or assumptions on the OOD data but can also benefit (if available) from OOD samples. By building on the geodesic (Fisher-Rao) distance between the underlying data distributions, our discriminator can combine confidence scores from the logits outputs and the learned features of a deep neural network. Empirically, we show that Igeood outperforms competing state-of-the-art methods on a variety of network architectures and datasets.

The task of root cause analysis (RCA) is to identify the root causes of system faults/failures by analyzing system monitoring data. Efficient RCA can greatly accelerate system failure recovery and mitigate system damages or financial losses. However, previous research has mostly focused on developing offline RCA algorithms, which often require manually initiating the RCA process, a significant amount of time and data to train a robust model, and then being retrained from scratch for a new system fault. In this paper, we propose CORAL, a novel online RCA framework that can automatically trigger the RCA process and incrementally update the RCA model. CORAL consists of Trigger Point Detection, Incremental Disentangled Causal Graph Learning, and Network Propagation-based Root Cause Localization. The Trigger Point Detection component aims to detect system state transitions automatically and in near-real-time. To achieve this, we develop an online trigger point detection approach based on multivariate singular spectrum analysis and cumulative sum statistics. To efficiently update the RCA model, we propose an incremental disentangled causal graph learning approach to decouple the state-invariant and state-dependent information. After that, CORAL applies a random walk with restarts to the updated causal graph to accurately identify root causes. The online RCA process terminates when the causal graph and the generated root cause list converge. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

Evaluating the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the most critical aspects of building a performant compound AI system. Since the output from LLMs propagate to downstream steps, identifying LLM errors is crucial to system performance. A common task for LLMs in AI systems is tool use. While there are several benchmark environments for evaluating LLMs on this task, they typically only give a success rate without any explanation of the failure cases. To solve this problem, we introduce SpecTool, a new benchmark to identify error patterns in LLM output on tool-use tasks. Our benchmark data set comprises of queries from diverse environments that can be used to test for the presence of seven newly characterized error patterns. Using SPECTOOL , we show that even the most prominent LLMs exhibit these error patterns in their outputs. Researchers can use the analysis and insights from SPECTOOL to guide their error mitigation strategies.

Automated issue solving aims to resolve real-world issues in software repositories. The most popular benchmarks for automated issue solving are SWE-bench and its human-filtered subset SWE-bench Verified. These benchmarks leverage testing to validate generated patches. However, because testing is rarely exhaustive, a patch may pass the tests but nevertheless fail to match the developers' expectations. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent evaluations performed with SWE-bench suffer from such plausible but incorrect patches. This paper presents an in-depth empirical study of the correctness of plausible patches generated by three state-of-the-art issue-solving tools evaluated on SWE-bench Verified. We extensively test and inspect generated patches, and compare them against human-written ground truth patches. The core of our methodology is a novel technique PatchDiff for differential patch testing, which automatically exposes behavioral discrepancies between two patches. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in SWE-bench's patch validation mechanism, which causes 7.8% of all patches to count as correct while failing the developer-written test suite. Moreover, our novel automated technique reveals that even more (29.6%) plausible patches induce different behavior than the ground truth patches. These behavioral differences are often due to similar, but divergent implementations (46.8%) and due to generated patches that adapt more behavior than the ground truth patches (27.3%). Our manual inspection shows that 28.6% of behaviorally divergent patches are certainly incorrect. Combined, the different weaknesses lead to an inflation of reported resolution rates by 6.2 absolute percent points. Our findings are a call to arms for more robust and reliable evaluation of issue-solving tools. We envision our automated differential patch testing technique to be useful for this purpose.

Recently, large language models (LLMs), especially those that are pretrained on code, have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating programs from natural language inputs in a few-shot or even zero-shot manner. Despite promising results, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive evaluation of these models language-to-code generation capabilities. Existing studies often focus on specific tasks, model architectures, or learning paradigms, leading to a fragmented understanding of the overall landscape. In this work, we present L2CEval, a systematic evaluation of the language-to-code generation capabilities of LLMs on 7 tasks across the domain spectrum of semantic parsing, math reasoning and Python programming, analyzing the factors that potentially affect their performance, such as model size, pretraining data, instruction tuning, and different prompting methods. In addition to assessing model performance, we measure confidence calibration for the models and conduct human evaluations of the output programs. This enables us to identify and analyze the typical failure modes across various tasks and models. L2CEval offers a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in language-to-code generation. We also release the evaluation framework and all model outputs, hoping to lay the groundwork for further future research in this domain.

The ability to detect unfamiliar or unexpected images is essential for safe deployment of computer vision systems. In the context of classification, the task of detecting images outside of a model's training domain is known as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While there has been a growing research interest in developing post-hoc OOD detection methods, there has been comparably little discussion around how these methods perform when the underlying classifier is not trained on a clean, carefully curated dataset. In this work, we take a closer look at 20 state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in the (more realistic) scenario where the labels used to train the underlying classifier are unreliable (e.g. crowd-sourced or web-scraped labels). Extensive experiments across different datasets, noise types & levels, architectures and checkpointing strategies provide insights into the effect of class label noise on OOD detection, and show that poor separation between incorrectly classified ID samples vs. OOD samples is an overlooked yet important limitation of existing methods. Code: https://github.com/glhr/ood-labelnoise

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) is increasing the demand for methods that detect machine-generated text to prevent misuse. The goal of our study is to stress test the detectors' robustness to malicious attacks under realistic scenarios. We comprehensively study the robustness of popular machine-generated text detectors under attacks from diverse categories: editing, paraphrasing, prompting, and co-generating. Our attacks assume limited access to the generator LLMs, and we compare the performance of detectors on different attacks under different budget levels. Our experiments reveal that almost none of the existing detectors remain robust under all the attacks, and all detectors exhibit different loopholes. Averaging all detectors, the performance drops by 35% across all attacks. Further, we investigate the reasons behind these defects and propose initial out-of-the-box patches to improve robustness.

Software vulnerabilities bear enterprises significant costs. Despite extensive efforts in research and development of software vulnerability detection methods, uncaught vulnerabilities continue to put software owners and users at risk. Many current vulnerability detection methods require that code snippets can compile and build before attempting detection. This, unfortunately, introduces a long latency between the time a vulnerability is injected to the time it is removed, which can substantially increases the cost of fixing a vulnerability. We recognize that the current advances in machine learning can be used to detect vulnerable code patterns on syntactically incomplete code snippets as the developer is writing the code at EditTime. In this paper we present a practical system that leverages deep learning on a large-scale data set of vulnerable code patterns to learn complex manifestations of more than 250 vulnerability types and detect vulnerable code patterns at EditTime. We discuss zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning approaches on state of the art pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs). We show that in comparison with state of the art vulnerability detection models our approach improves the state of the art by 10%. We also evaluate our approach to detect vulnerability in auto-generated code by code LLMs. Evaluation on a benchmark of high-risk code scenarios shows a reduction of up to 90% vulnerability reduction.

Program repair techniques offer cost-saving benefits for debugging within software development and programming education scenarios. With the proven effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code-related tasks, researchers have explored their potential for program repair. However, it is crucial to recognize that existing repair benchmarks may have influenced LLM training data, potentially causing data leakage. To evaluate LLMs' realistic repair capabilities, (1) we introduce an extensive, non-crawled benchmark, referred to as TutorCode, comprising 1,239 C++ defect codes and associated information such as tutor guidance, solution description, failing test cases, and the corrected code. Our work assesses the repair performance of 12 LLMs on TutorCode, measuring repair correctness (TOP-5 and AVG-5) and patch precision (RPSR). (2) We then provide a comprehensive investigation into which types of extra information can help LLMs improve their performance in repairing defects. Among these types, tutor guidance was found to be the most effective information in enhancing LLM repair capabilities. To fully harness LLMs' conversational capabilities and the benefits of augmented information, (3) we introduce a novel conversational semi-automatic repair framework CREF assisting human tutor. It demonstrates a remarkable AVG-5 improvement of 17.2%-24.6% compared to the baseline, achieving an impressive AVG-5 of 76.6% when utilizing GPT-4. These results highlight the potential for enhancing LLMs' repair capabilities through interactions with tutors and historical conversations involving incorrect responses. The successful application of CREF in a real-world educational setting demonstrates its effectiveness in reducing tutors' workload and improving students' learning experience, while also showcasing its promise for facilitating other software engineering tasks, such as code review.

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves state of the art performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs.

We revisit the likelihood ratio between a pretrained large language model (LLM) and its finetuned variant as a criterion for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. The intuition behind such a criterion is that, the pretrained LLM has the prior knowledge about OOD data due to its large amount of training data, and once finetuned with the in-distribution data, the LLM has sufficient knowledge to distinguish their difference. Leveraging the power of LLMs, we show that, the likelihood ratio can serve as an effective OOD detection criterion. Moreover, we apply the proposed LLM-based likelihood ratio to detect OOD questions in question-answering (QA) systems, which can be used to improve the performance of specialized LLMs for general questions. Given that likelihood can be easily obtained by the loss functions within contemporary neural network frameworks, it is straightforward to implement this approach in practice. Since both the pretrained LLMs and its various finetuned models are widely available from online platforms such as Hugging Face, our proposed criterion can be effortlessly incorporated for OOD detection without the need for further training. We conduct comprehensive evaluation across on multiple settings, including far OOD, near OOD, spam detection, and QA scenarios, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. Code can be found at https://github.com/andiac/LLMOODratio

Auditing large language models for unexpected behaviors is critical to preempt catastrophic deployments, yet remains challenging. In this work, we cast auditing as an optimization problem, where we automatically search for input-output pairs that match a desired target behavior. For example, we might aim to find a non-toxic input that starts with "Barack Obama" that a model maps to a toxic output. This optimization problem is difficult to solve as the set of feasible points is sparse, the space is discrete, and the language models we audit are non-linear and high-dimensional. To combat these challenges, we introduce a discrete optimization algorithm, ARCA, that jointly and efficiently optimizes over inputs and outputs. Our approach automatically uncovers derogatory completions about celebrities (e.g. "Barack Obama is a legalized unborn" -> "child murderer"), produces French inputs that complete to English outputs, and finds inputs that generate a specific name. Our work offers a promising new tool to uncover models' failure-modes before deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of transforming natural language domain descriptions into plausibly looking PDDL markup. However, ensuring that actions are consistent within domains still remains a challenging task. In this paper we present a novel concept to significantly improve the quality of LLM-generated PDDL models by performing automated consistency checking during the generation process. Although the proposed consistency checking strategies still can't guarantee absolute correctness of generated models, they can serve as valuable source of feedback reducing the amount of correction efforts expected from a human in the loop. We demonstrate the capabilities of our error detection approach on a number of classical and custom planning domains (logistics, gripper, tyreworld, household, pizza).

Production assertions are statements embedded in the code to help developers validate their assumptions about the code. They assist developers in debugging, provide valuable documentation, and enhance code comprehension. Current research in this area primarily focuses on assertion generation for unit tests using techniques, such as static analysis and deep learning. While these techniques have shown promise, they fall short when it comes to generating production assertions, which serve a different purpose. This preprint addresses the gap by introducing Assertify, an automated end-to-end tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering with few-shot learning to generate production assertions. By creating context-rich prompts, the tool emulates the approach developers take when creating production assertions for their code. To evaluate our approach, we compiled a dataset of 2,810 methods by scraping 22 mature Java repositories from GitHub. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of few-shot learning by producing assertions with an average ROUGE-L score of 0.526, indicating reasonably high structural similarity with the assertions written by developers. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs in automating the generation of production assertions that resemble the original assertions.

Different from the flow semantics of natural languages, programming languages are inherently rigid in structure and grammar. Existing fine-tuning methodologies for code vulnerability detection generally treat code as long text sequences, stripping away structural elements such as newlines ('/n') and whitespace. However, this approach inadvertently results in the loss of crucial structural information, diminishing the distinct characteristics of code and impairing the accuracy of vulnerability detection. To address these challenges, we propose a novel network architecture method based on pre-trained code models, which incorporates structural information awareness. We propose an enhanced code text processing workflow that retains structural elements prior to modeling. This refinement allows the model to retain and exploit line-level structural information and semantic information during the modeling process. Furthermore, we introduce a new network architecture, the Code Structure-Aware Network through Line-level Semantic Learning (CSLS), which integrates three key components: global vulnerability awareness, line-structural awareness, and sensitive-line awareness. We have conducted comprehensive experiments using vulnerability detection datasets from real-world projects. Extensive experiments were conducted on vulnerability detection datasets derived from real-world projects. The results demonstrate that our new code pre-processing flow significantly improves existing baselines (e.g., a 3\% accuracy improvement on the Devign dataset when applied to popular models such as CoderBert and UniXcoder). The proposed network architecture also demonstrates superior accuracy in detecting vulnerabilities, surpassing newly established benchmarks. These findings underscore the importance of structural information in enhancing the efficacy of code vulnerability detection models.

In recent years, the wood product industry has been facing a skilled labor shortage. The result is more frequent sudden failures, resulting in additional costs for these companies already operating in a very competitive market. Moreover, sawmills are challenging environments for machinery and sensors. Given that experienced machine operators may be able to diagnose defects or malfunctions, one possible way of assisting novice operators is through acoustic monitoring. As a step towards the automation of wood-processing equipment and decision support systems for machine operators, in this paper, we explore using a deep convolutional autoencoder for acoustic anomaly detection of wood planers on a new real-life dataset. Specifically, our convolutional autoencoder with skip connections (Skip-CAE) and our Skip-CAE transformer outperform the DCASE autoencoder baseline, one-class SVM, isolation forest and a published convolutional autoencoder architecture, respectively obtaining an area under the ROC curve of 0.846 and 0.875 on a dataset of real-factory planer sounds. Moreover, we show that adding skip connections and attention mechanism under the form of a transformer encoder-decoder helps to further improve the anomaly detection capabilities.

Without proper safeguards, large language models will readily follow malicious instructions and generate toxic content. This motivates safety efforts such as red-teaming and large-scale feedback learning, which aim to make models both helpful and harmless. However, there is a tension between these two objectives, since harmlessness requires models to refuse complying with unsafe prompts, and thus not be helpful. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that some models may have struck a poor balance, so that even clearly safe prompts are refused if they use similar language to unsafe prompts or mention sensitive topics. In this paper, we introduce a new test suite called XSTest to identify such eXaggerated Safety behaviours in a structured and systematic way. In its current form, XSTest comprises 200 safe prompts across ten prompt types that well-calibrated models should not refuse to comply with. We describe XSTest's creation and composition, and use the test suite to highlight systematic failure modes in a recently-released state-of-the-art language model.

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based Agents have been applied to fix bugs automatically, demonstrating the capability in addressing software defects by engaging in development environment interaction, iterative validation and code modification. However, systematic analysis of these agent and non-agent systems remain limited, particularly regarding performance variations among top-performing ones. In this paper, we examine seven proprietary and open-source systems on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark for automated bug fixing. We first assess each system's overall performance, noting instances solvable by all or none of these sytems, and explore why some instances are uniquely solved by specific system types. We also compare fault localization accuracy at file and line levels and evaluate bug reproduction capabilities, identifying instances solvable only through dynamic reproduction. Through analysis, we concluded that further optimization is needed in both the LLM itself and the design of Agentic flow to improve the effectiveness of the Agent in bug fixing.

Detecting anomalies is important for identifying inefficiencies, errors, or fraud in business processes. Traditional process mining approaches focus on analyzing 'flattened', sequential, event logs based on a single case notion. However, many real-world process executions exhibit a graph-like structure, where events can be associated with multiple cases. Flattening event logs requires selecting a single case identifier which creates a gap with the real event data and artificially introduces anomalies in the event logs. Object-centric process mining avoids these limitations by allowing events to be related to different cases. This study proposes a novel framework for anomaly detection in business processes that exploits graph neural networks and the enhanced information offered by object-centric process mining. We first reconstruct and represent the process dependencies of the object-centric event logs as attributed graphs and then employ a graph convolutional autoencoder architecture to detect anomalous events. Our results show that our approach provides promising performance in detecting anomalies at the activity type and attributes level, although it struggles to detect anomalies in the temporal order of events.

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges of higher training cost and unintended degradation of helpfulness. To overcome such challenges, a modular approach employing a smaller LLM to detect harmful user queries is regarded as a convenient solution in designing LLM-based system with safety requirements. In this paper, we leverage a smaller LLM for both harmful query detection and safeguard response generation. We introduce our safety requirements and the taxonomy of harmfulness categories, and then propose a multi-task learning mechanism fusing the two tasks into a single model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, providing on par or surpassing harmful query detection and safeguard response performance compared to the publicly available LLMs.

API misuses often lead to software bugs, crashes, and vulnerabilities. While several API misuse detectors have been proposed, there are no automatic repair tools specifically designed for this purpose. In a recent study, test-suite-based automatic program repair (APR) tools were found to be ineffective in repairing API misuses. Still, since the study focused on non-learning-aided APR tools, it remains unknown whether learning-aided APR tools are capable of fixing API misuses. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded greatly in many natural language processing tasks. There is a rising interest in applying PLMs to APR. However, there has not been any study that investigates the effectiveness of PLMs in repairing API misuse. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on 11 learning-aided APR tools, which include 9 of the state-of-the-art general-purpose PLMs and two APR tools. We evaluate these models with an API-misuse repair dataset, consisting of two variants. Our results show that PLMs perform better than the studied APR tools in repairing API misuses. Among the 9 pre-trained models tested, CodeT5 is the best performer in the exact match. We also offer insights and potential exploration directions for future research.

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in software engineering, addressing numerous long-standing challenges. However, a comprehensive study examining the capabilities of LLMs in software vulnerability detection (SVD), a crucial aspect of software security, is currently lacking. Existing research primarily focuses on evaluating LLMs using C/C++ datasets. It typically explores only one or two strategies among prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning for open-source LLMs. Consequently, there is a significant knowledge gap regarding the effectiveness of diverse LLMs in detecting vulnerabilities across various programming languages. To address this knowledge gap, we present a comprehensive empirical study evaluating the performance of LLMs on the SVD task. We have compiled a comprehensive dataset comprising 8,260 vulnerable functions in Python, 7,505 in Java, and 28,983 in JavaScript. We assess five open-source LLMs using multiple approaches, including prompt engineering, instruction tuning, and sequence classification fine-tuning. These LLMs are benchmarked against five fine-tuned small language models and two open-source static application security testing tools. Furthermore, we explore two avenues to improve LLM performance on SVD: a) Data perspective: Retraining models using downsampled balanced datasets. b) Model perspective: Investigating ensemble learning methods that combine predictions from multiple LLMs. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SVD remains a challenging task for LLMs. This study provides a thorough understanding of the role of LLMs in SVD and offers practical insights for future advancements in leveraging generative AI to enhance software security practices.

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-cases can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers have therefore proposed automated link-generation solutions primarily based on information-retrieval (IR) techniques; however, these solutions have failed to deliver the accuracy needed for full adoption in industrial projects. Improvements can be achieved using deep-learning traceability models; however, their efficacy is impeded by the limited size and availability of project-level artifacts and links to serve as training data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and evaluating several deep-learning approaches for text-to-text traceability. Our method, named NLTrace, explores three transfer learning strategies that use datasets mined from open world platforms. Through pretraining Language Models (LMs) and leveraging adjacent tracing tasks, we demonstrate that NLTrace can significantly improve the performance of LM based trace models when training links are available. In such scenarios NLTrace outperforms the best performing classical IR method with an 188% improvement in F2 score and 94.01% in Mean Average Precision (MAP). It also outperforms the general LM based trace model by 7% and 23% for F2 and MAP respectively. In addition, NLTrace can adapt to low-resource tracing scenarios where other LM models can not. The knowledge learned from adjacent tasks enables NLTrace to outperform VSM models by 28% F2 on generation challenges when presented with a small number of training examples.

Machine learning models always make a prediction, even when it is likely to be inaccurate. This behavior should be avoided in many decision support applications, where mistakes can have severe consequences. Albeit already studied in 1970, machine learning with rejection recently gained interest. This machine learning subfield enables machine learning models to abstain from making a prediction when likely to make a mistake. This survey aims to provide an overview on machine learning with rejection. We introduce the conditions leading to two types of rejection, ambiguity and novelty rejection, which we carefully formalize. Moreover, we review and categorize strategies to evaluate a model's predictive and rejective quality. Additionally, we define the existing architectures for models with rejection and describe the standard techniques for learning such models. Finally, we provide examples of relevant application domains and show how machine learning with rejection relates to other machine learning research areas.

In the future, powerful AI systems may be deployed in high-stakes settings, where a single failure could be catastrophic. One technique for improving AI safety in high-stakes settings is adversarial training, which uses an adversary to generate examples to train on in order to achieve better worst-case performance. In this work, we used a safe language generation task (``avoid injuries'') as a testbed for achieving high reliability through adversarial training. We created a series of adversarial training techniques -- including a tool that assists human adversaries -- to find and eliminate failures in a classifier that filters text completions suggested by a generator. In our task, we determined that we can set very conservative classifier thresholds without significantly impacting the quality of the filtered outputs. We found that adversarial training increased robustness to the adversarial attacks that we trained on -- doubling the time for our contractors to find adversarial examples both with our tool (from 13 to 26 minutes) and without (from 20 to 44 minutes) -- without affecting in-distribution performance. We hope to see further work in the high-stakes reliability setting, including more powerful tools for enhancing human adversaries and better ways to measure high levels of reliability, until we can confidently rule out the possibility of catastrophic deployment-time failures of powerful models.

Large language models have catalyzed an unprecedented wave in code generation. While achieving significant advances, they blur the distinctions between machine- and human-authored source code, causing integrity and authenticity issues of software artifacts. Previous methods such as DetectGPT have proven effective in discerning machine-generated texts, but they do not identify and harness the unique patterns of machine-generated code. Thus, its applicability falters when applied to code. In this paper, we carefully study the specific patterns that characterize machine- and human-authored code. Through a rigorous analysis of code attributes such as lexical diversity, conciseness, and naturalness, we expose unique patterns inherent to each source. We particularly notice that the syntactic segmentation of code is a critical factor in identifying its provenance. Based on our findings, we propose DetectCodeGPT, a novel method for detecting machine-generated code, which improves DetectGPT by capturing the distinct stylized patterns of code. Diverging from conventional techniques that depend on external LLMs for perturbations, DetectCodeGPT perturbs the code corpus by strategically inserting spaces and newlines, ensuring both efficacy and efficiency. Experiment results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in detecting machine-generated code.

Most programmers make mistakes when writing code. Some of these mistakes are small and require few edits to the original program -- a class of errors recently termed last mile mistakes. These errors break the flow for experienced developers and can stump novice programmers. Existing automated repair techniques targeting this class of errors are language-specific and do not easily carry over to new languages. Transferring symbolic approaches requires substantial engineering and neural approaches require data and retraining. We introduce RING, a multilingual repair engine powered by a large language model trained on code (LLMC) such as Codex. Such a multilingual engine enables a flipped model for programming assistance, one where the programmer writes code and the AI assistance suggests fixes, compared to traditional code suggestion technology. Taking inspiration from the way programmers manually fix bugs, we show that a prompt-based strategy that conceptualizes repair as localization, transformation, and candidate ranking, can successfully repair programs in multiple languages with minimal effort. We present the first results for such a multilingual repair engine by evaluating on 6 different languages and comparing performance to language-specific repair engines. We show that RING can outperform language-specific repair engines for three of these languages.

Amid the expanding use of pre-training data, the phenomenon of benchmark dataset leakage has become increasingly prominent, exacerbated by opaque training processes and the often undisclosed inclusion of supervised data in contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This issue skews benchmark effectiveness and fosters potentially unfair comparisons, impeding the field's healthy development. To address this, we introduce a detection pipeline utilizing Perplexity and N-gram accuracy, two simple and scalable metrics that gauge a model's prediction precision on benchmark, to identify potential data leakages. By analyzing 31 LLMs under the context of mathematical reasoning, we reveal substantial instances of training even test set misuse, resulting in potentially unfair comparisons. These findings prompt us to offer several recommendations regarding model documentation, benchmark setup, and future evaluations. Notably, we propose the "Benchmark Transparency Card" to encourage clear documentation of benchmark utilization, promoting transparency and healthy developments of LLMs. we have made our leaderboard, pipeline implementation, and model predictions publicly available, fostering future research.

In the context of the rising interest in code language models (code LMs) and vulnerability detection, we study the effectiveness of code LMs for detecting vulnerabilities. Our analysis reveals significant shortcomings in existing vulnerability datasets, including poor data quality, low label accuracy, and high duplication rates, leading to unreliable model performance in realistic vulnerability detection scenarios. Additionally, the evaluation methods used with these datasets are not representative of real-world vulnerability detection. To address these challenges, we introduce PrimeVul, a new dataset for training and evaluating code LMs for vulnerability detection. PrimeVul incorporates a novel set of data labeling techniques that achieve comparable label accuracy to human-verified benchmarks while significantly expanding the dataset. It also implements a rigorous data de-duplication and chronological data splitting strategy to mitigate data leakage issues, alongside introducing more realistic evaluation metrics and settings. This comprehensive approach aims to provide a more accurate assessment of code LMs' performance in real-world conditions. Evaluating code LMs on PrimeVul reveals that existing benchmarks significantly overestimate the performance of these models. For instance, a state-of-the-art 7B model scored 68.26% F1 on BigVul but only 3.09% F1 on PrimeVul. Attempts to improve performance through advanced training techniques and larger models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 were unsuccessful, with results akin to random guessing in the most stringent settings. These findings underscore the considerable gap between current capabilities and the practical requirements for deploying code LMs in security roles, highlighting the need for more innovative research in this domain.

ASR Error Detection (AED) models aim to post-process the output of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, in order to detect transcription errors. Modern approaches usually use text-based input, comprised solely of the ASR transcription hypothesis, disregarding additional signals from the ASR model. Instead, we propose to utilize the ASR system's word-level confidence scores for improving AED performance. Specifically, we add an ASR Confidence Embedding (ACE) layer to the AED model's encoder, allowing us to jointly encode the confidence scores and the transcribed text into a contextualized representation. Our experiments show the benefits of ASR confidence scores for AED, their complementary effect over the textual signal, as well as the effectiveness and robustness of ACE for combining these signals. To foster further research, we publish a novel AED dataset consisting of ASR outputs on the LibriSpeech corpus with annotated transcription errors.

A major challenge in evaluating data-to-text (D2T) generation is measuring the semantic accuracy of the generated text, i.e. checking if the output text contains all and only facts supported by the input data. We propose a new metric for evaluating the semantic accuracy of D2T generation based on a neural model pretrained for natural language inference (NLI). We use the NLI model to check textual entailment between the input data and the output text in both directions, allowing us to reveal omissions or hallucinations. Input data are converted to text for NLI using trivial templates. Our experiments on two recent D2T datasets show that our metric can achieve high accuracy in identifying erroneous system outputs.

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs automatically and plays a crucial role in software development and maintenance. With the recent advances in deep learning (DL), an increasing number of APR techniques have been proposed to leverage neural networks to learn bug-fixing patterns from massive open-source code repositories. Such learning-based techniques usually treat APR as a neural machine translation (NMT) task, where buggy code snippets (i.e., source language) are translated into fixed code snippets (i.e., target language) automatically. Benefiting from the powerful capability of DL to learn hidden relationships from previous bug-fixing datasets, learning-based APR techniques have achieved remarkable performance. In this paper, we provide a systematic survey to summarize the current state-of-the-art research in the learning-based APR community. We illustrate the general workflow of learning-based APR techniques and detail the crucial components, including fault localization, patch generation, patch ranking, patch validation, and patch correctness phases. We then discuss the widely-adopted datasets and evaluation metrics and outline existing empirical studies. We discuss several critical aspects of learning-based APR techniques, such as repair domains, industrial deployment, and the open science issue. We highlight several practical guidelines on applying DL techniques for future APR studies, such as exploring explainable patch generation and utilizing code features. Overall, our paper can help researchers gain a comprehensive understanding about the achievements of the existing learning-based APR techniques and promote the practical application of these techniques. Our artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/QuanjunZhang/AwesomeLearningAPR.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for ensuring the safety of machine learning systems and has shaped the field of OOD detection. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection, including anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). To unify these problems, a generalized OOD detection framework was proposed, taxonomically categorizing these five problems. However, Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have significantly changed the paradigm and blurred the boundaries between these fields, again confusing researchers. In this survey, we first present a generalized OOD detection v2, encapsulating the evolution of AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD in the VLM era. Our framework reveals that, with some field inactivity and integration, the demanding challenges have become OOD detection and AD. In addition, we also highlight the significant shift in the definition, problem settings, and benchmarks; we thus feature a comprehensive review of the methodology for OOD detection, including the discussion over other related tasks to clarify their relationship to OOD detection. Finally, we explore the advancements in the emerging Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) era, such as GPT-4V. We conclude this survey with open challenges and future directions.

Training large-scale language models is increasingly critical in various domains, but it is hindered by frequent failures, leading to significant time and economic costs. Current failure recovery methods in cloud-based settings inadequately address the diverse and complex scenarios that arise, focusing narrowly on erasing downtime for individual tasks without considering the overall cost impact on a cluster. We introduce Unicron, a workload manager designed for efficient self-healing in large-scale language model training. Unicron optimizes the training process by minimizing failure-related costs across multiple concurrent tasks within a cluster. Its key features include in-band error detection for real-time error identification without extra overhead, a dynamic cost-aware plan generation mechanism for optimal reconfiguration, and an efficient transition strategy to reduce downtime during state changes. Deployed on a 128-GPU distributed cluster, Unicron demonstrates up to a 1.9x improvement in training efficiency over state-of-the-art methods, significantly reducing failure recovery costs and enhancing the reliability of large-scale language model training.

The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work. However, the role of large autoregressive transformers in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still developing in the literature. This work explores T5 and GPT-3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia. We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples. Our results suggest that large models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.). Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5). The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves a 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

Error analysis in NLP models is essential to successful model development and deployment. One common approach for diagnosing errors is to identify subpopulations in the dataset where the model produces the most errors. However, existing approaches typically define subpopulations based on pre-defined features, which requires users to form hypotheses of errors in advance. To complement these approaches, we propose iSEA, an Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis in NLP Models, which automatically discovers semantically-grounded subpopulations with high error rates in the context of a human-in-the-loop interactive system. iSEA enables model developers to learn more about their model errors through discovered subpopulations, validate the sources of errors through interactive analysis on the discovered subpopulations, and test hypotheses about model errors by defining custom subpopulations. The tool supports semantic descriptions of error-prone subpopulations at the token and concept level, as well as pre-defined higher-level features. Through use cases and expert interviews, we demonstrate how iSEA can assist error understanding and analysis.

Bug reports are an essential aspect of software development, and it is crucial to identify and resolve them quickly to ensure the consistent functioning of software systems. Retrieving similar bug reports from an existing database can help reduce the time and effort required to resolve bugs. In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of semantic textual similarity methods for retrieving similar bug reports based on a similarity score. We explored several embedding models such as TF-IDF (Baseline), FastText, Gensim, BERT, and ADA. We used the Software Defects Data containing bug reports for various software projects to evaluate the performance of these models. Our experimental results showed that BERT generally outperformed the rest of the models regarding recall, followed by ADA, Gensim, FastText, and TFIDF. Our study provides insights into the effectiveness of different embedding methods for retrieving similar bug reports and highlights the impact of selecting the appropriate one for this task. Our code is available on GitHub.

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the opportunities, challenges, and potential solutions of harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to dig out vulnerabilities within smart contracts based on our ongoing research. For the task of smart contract vulnerability detection, achieving practical usability hinges on identifying as many true vulnerabilities as possible while minimizing the number of false positives. Nonetheless, our empirical study reveals contradictory yet interesting findings: generating more answers with higher randomness largely boosts the likelihood of producing a correct answer but inevitably leads to a higher number of false positives. To mitigate this tension, we propose an adversarial framework dubbed GPTLens that breaks the conventional one-stage detection into two synergistic stages - generation and discrimination, for progressive detection and refinement, wherein the LLM plays dual roles, i.e., auditor and critic, respectively. The goal of auditor is to yield a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities with the hope of encompassing the correct answer, whereas the goal of critic that evaluates the validity of identified vulnerabilities is to minimize the number of false positives. Experimental results and illustrative examples demonstrate that auditor and critic work together harmoniously to yield pronounced improvements over the conventional one-stage detection. GPTLens is intuitive, strategic, and entirely LLM-driven without relying on specialist expertise in smart contracts, showcasing its methodical generality and potential to detect a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities. Our code is available at: https://github.com/git-disl/GPTLens.

Log data have facilitated various tasks of software development and maintenance, such as testing, debugging and diagnosing. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, log parsing is typically required to transform log messages into structured data for automated log analysis. Given the abundance of log parsers that employ various techniques, evaluating these tools to comprehend their characteristics and performance becomes imperative. Loghub serves as a commonly used dataset for benchmarking log parsers, but it suffers from limited scale and representativeness, posing significant challenges for studies to comprehensively evaluate existing log parsers or develop new methods. This limitation is particularly pronounced when assessing these log parsers for production use. To address these limitations, we provide a new collection of annotated log datasets, denoted Loghub-2.0, which can better reflect the characteristics of log data in real-world software systems. Loghub-2.0 comprises 14 datasets with an average of 3.6 million log lines in each dataset. Based on Loghub-2.0, we conduct a thorough re-evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art log parsers in a more rigorous and practical setting. Particularly, we introduce a new evaluation metric to mitigate the sensitivity of existing metrics to imbalanced data distributions. We are also the first to investigate the granular performance of log parsers on logs that represent rare system events, offering in-depth details for software diagnosis. Accurately parsing such logs is essential, yet it remains a challenge. We believe this work could shed light on the evaluation and design of log parsers in practical settings, thereby facilitating their deployment in production systems.