Chi Yu

Chi Yu, Hongyu Yuan, Zhiyi Duan

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to model a student's learning trajectory and predict performance on the next question. A key challenge is how to better represent the relationships among students, questions, and knowledge concepts (KCs). Recently, graph-based KT paradigms have shown promise for this problem. However, existing methods have not sufficiently explored inter-concept relations, often inferred solely from interaction sequences. In addition, the scale and heterogeneity of KT graphs make full-graph encoding both computationally both costly and noise-prone, causing attention to bleed into student-irrelevant regions and degrading the fidelity of inter-KC relations. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework: Multi-Agent Graph-Enhanced Knowledge Tracing (MAGE-KT). It constructs a multi-view heterogeneous graph by combining a multi-agent KC relation extractor and a student-question interaction graph, capturing complementary semantic and behavioral signals. Conditioned on the target student's history, it retrieves compact, high-value subgraphs and integrates them using an Asymmetric Cross-attention Fusion Module to enhance prediction while avoiding attention diffusion and irrelevant computation. Experiments on three widely used KT datasets show substantial improvements in KC-relation accuracy and clear gains in next-question prediction over existing methods.

Ke Liu, Guang Yang, Xiang Chen et al.

On Stack Overflow, developers can not only browse question posts to solve their programming problems but also gain expertise from the question posts to help improve their programming skills. Therefore, improving the quality of question posts in Stack Overflow has attracted the wide attention of researchers. A concise and precise title can play an important role in helping developers understand the key information of the question post, which can improve the post quality. However, the quality of the generated title is not high due to the lack of professional knowledge related to their questions or the poor presentation ability of developers. A previous study aimed to automatically generate the title by analyzing the code snippets in the question post. However, this study ignored the useful information in the corresponding problem description. Therefore, we propose an approach SOTitle for automatic post title generation by leveraging the code snippets and the problem description in the question post (i.e., the multi-modal input). SOTitle follows the Transformer structure, which can effectively capture long-term dependencies through a multi-head attention mechanism. To verify the effectiveness of SOTitle, we construct a large-scale high-quality corpus from Stack Overflow, which includes 1,168,257 high-quality question posts for four popular programming languages. Experimental results show that SOTitle can significantly outperform six state-of-the-art baselines in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. To encourage follow-up studies, we make our corpus and approach publicly available

Guang Yang, Xiang Chen, Yanlin Zhou et al.

A shellcode is a small piece of code and it is executed to exploit a software vulnerability, which allows the target computer to execute arbitrary commands from the attacker through a code injection attack. Similar to the purpose of automated vulnerability generation techniques, the automated generation of shellcode can generate attack instructions, which can be used to detect vulnerabilities and implement defensive measures. While the automated summarization of shellcode can help users unfamiliar with shellcode and network information security understand the intent of shellcode attacks. In this study, we propose a novel approach DualSC to solve the automatic shellcode generation and summarization tasks. Specifically, we formalize automatic shellcode generation and summarization as dual tasks, use a shallow Transformer for model construction, and design a normalization method Adjust QKNorm to adapt these low-resource tasks (i.e., insufficient training data). Finally, to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary problem, we propose a rulebased repair component to improve the performance of automatic shellcode generation. In our empirical study, we select a highquality corpus Shellcode IA32 as our empirical subject. This corpus was gathered from two real-world projects based on the line-by-line granularity. We first compare DualSC with six state-of-the-art baselines from the code generation and code summarization domains in terms of four performance measures. The comparison results show the competitiveness of DualSC. Then, we verify the effectiveness of the component setting in DualSC. Finally, we conduct a human study to further verify the effectiveness of DualSC.

Guang Yang, Yanlin Zhou, Chi Yu et al.

In software engineering-related tasks (such as programming language tag prediction based on code snippets from Stack Overflow), the programming language classification for code snippets is a common task. In this study, we propose a novel method DeepSCC, which uses a fine-tuned RoBERTa model to classify the programming language type of the source code. In our empirical study, we choose a corpus collected from Stack Overflow, which contains 224,445 pairs of code snippets and corresponding language types. After comparing nine state-of-the-art baselines from the fields of source code classification and neural text classification in terms of four performance measures (i.e., Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1), we show the competitiveness of our proposed method DeepSCC

Guang Yang, Xiang Chen, Jinxin Cao et al.

Developers often write low-quality code comments due to the lack of programming experience, which can reduce the efficiency of developers program comprehension. Therefore, developers hope that code comment generation tools can be developed to illustrate the functionality and purpose of the code. Recently, researchers mainly model this problem as the neural machine translation problem and tend to use deep learning-based methods. In this study, we propose a novel method ComFormer based on Transformer and fusion method-based hybrid code presentation. Moreover, to alleviate OOV (out-of-vocabulary) problem and speed up model training, we further utilize the Byte-BPE algorithm to split identifiers and Sim_SBT method to perform AST Traversal. We compare ComFormer with seven state-of-the-art baselines from code comment generation and neural machine translation domains. Comparison results show the competitiveness of ComFormer in terms of three performance measures. Moreover, we perform a human study to verify that ComFormer can generate high-quality comments.

Guang Yang, Yanlin Zhou, Xiang Chen et al.

Pseudo-code written by natural language is helpful for novice developers' program comprehension. However, writing such pseudo-code is time-consuming and laborious. Motivated by the research advancements of sequence-to-sequence learning and code semantic learning, we propose a novel deep pseudo-code generation method DeepPseudo via code feature extraction and Transformer. In particular, DeepPseudo utilizes a Transformer encoder to perform encoding for source code and then use a code feature extractor to learn the knowledge of local features. Finally, it uses a pseudo-code generator to perform decoding, which can generate the corresponding pseudo-code. We choose two corpora (i.e., Django and SPoC) from real-world large-scale projects as our empirical subjects. We first compare DeepPseudo with seven state-of-the-art baselines from pseudo-code generation and neural machine translation domains in terms of four performance measures. Results show the competitiveness of DeepPseudo. Moreover, we also analyze the rationality of the component settings in DeepPseudo.