Hao Yu

Tao Fan, Hanlin Gu, Xuemei Cao et al.

Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) represent a distributed learning paradigm that fuses general competences of foundation models as well as privacy-preserving capabilities of federated learning. This combination allows the large foundation models and the small local domain models at the remote clients to learn from each other in a teacher-student learning setting. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the ten challenging problems inherent in FedFMs, encompassing foundational theory, utilization of private data, continual learning, unlearning, Non-IID and graph data, bidirectional knowledge transfer, incentive mechanism design, game mechanism design, model watermarking, and efficiency. The ten challenging problems manifest in five pivotal aspects: ``Foundational Theory," which aims to establish a coherent and unifying theoretical framework for FedFMs. ``Data," addressing the difficulties in leveraging domain-specific knowledge from private data while maintaining privacy; ``Heterogeneity," examining variations in data, model, and computational resources across clients; ``Security and Privacy," focusing on defenses against malicious attacks and model theft; and ``Efficiency," highlighting the need for improvements in training, communication, and parameter efficiency. For each problem, we offer a clear mathematical definition on the objective function, analyze existing methods, and discuss the key challenges and potential solutions. This in-depth exploration aims to advance the theoretical foundations of FedFMs, guide practical implementations, and inspire future research to overcome these obstacles, thereby enabling the robust, efficient, and privacy-preserving FedFMs in various real-world applications.

Dezhi Ran, Yuan Cao, Mengzhou Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in function-level code generation tasks. Unlike isolated functions, real-world applications demand reasoning over the entire software system: developers must orchestrate how different components interact, maintain consistency across states over time, and ensure the application behaves correctly within the lifecycle and framework constraints. Yet, no existing benchmark adequately evaluates whether LLMs can bridge this gap and construct entire software systems from scratch. To address this gap, we propose APPFORGE, a benchmark consisting of 101 software development problems drawn from real-world Android apps. Given a natural language specification detailing the app functionality, a language model is tasked with implementing the functionality into an Android app from scratch. Developing an Android app from scratch requires understanding and coordinating app states, lifecycle management, and asynchronous operations, calling for LLMs to generate context-aware, robust, and maintainable code. To construct APPFORGE, we design a multi-agent system to automatically summarize the main functionalities from app documents and navigate the app to synthesize test cases validating the functional correctness of app implementation. Following rigorous manual verification by Android development experts, APPFORGE incorporates the test cases within an automated evaluation framework that enables reproducible assessment without human intervention, making it easily adoptable for future research. Our evaluation on 12 flagship LLMs show that all evaluated models achieve low effectiveness, with the best-performing model (GPT-5) developing only 18.8% functionally correct applications, highlighting fundamental limitations in current models' ability to handle complex, multi-component software engineering challenges.