Cuiyun Gao

SE
h-index43
81papers
5,469citations
Novelty46%
AI Score59

81 Papers

SEMay 29Code
Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Code Generation for Complex Interactive Webpages

Fan Wu, Lishuai Dong, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning and code generation, catalyzing a new paradigm for front-end development. In particular, these models can directly transform visual designs into executable code, significantly improving the efficiency and adaptability of web development. Modern web applications are dynamic and interactive, featuring frequent user-page interactions. However, existing benchmarks largely evaluate the code generation of static webpages, ignoring the complex interactive behaviors in real-world applications. Besides, their evaluation criteria remain confined to visual fidelity and code structure, overlooking the interaction consistency between the generated and the reference webpages. To address these limitations, we introduce WebIGBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate code generation for interactive webpages with complex interactions. By combining manually designed interaction paths with UI automation, we collected 103 complex webpages from real-world websites. This benchmark covers 5 popular interactive action types (e.g., click, input) involving 871 distinct interactive actions. Moreover, we propose a novel evaluation pipeline to address the gap in automated assessment of interactive actions. Extensive experiments on several representative MLLMs reveal the performance boundaries of current models in interactive webpage code generation using WebIGBench. The proposed benchmark is available at https://github.com/anoa12159-hue/WebIGBench_eval.

SEMar 28Code
VulInstruct: Teaching LLMs Root-Cause Reasoning for Vulnerability Detection via Security Specifications

Hao Zhu, Jia Li, Cuiyun Gao et al. · pku

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code understanding tasks. However, they demonstrate limited performance in vulnerability detection and struggle to distinguish vulnerable code from patched code. We argue that LLMs lack understanding of security specifications -- the expectations about how code should behave to remain safe. When code behavior differs from these expectations, it becomes a potential vulnerability. However, such knowledge is rarely explicit in training data, leaving models unable to reason about security flaws. We propose VulInstruct, a specification-guided approach that systematically extracts security specifications from historical vulnerabilities to detect new ones. VulInstruct constructs a specification knowledge base from two perspectives: (i) General specifications from high-quality patches across projects, capturing fundamental safe behaviors; and (ii) Domain-specific specifications from repeated violations in particular repositories relevant to the target code. VulInstruct retrieves relevant past cases and specifications, enabling LLMs to reason about expected safe behaviors rather than relying on surface patterns. We evaluate VulInstruct under strict criteria requiring both correct predictions and valid reasoning. On PrimeVul, VulInstruct achieves 45.0% F1-score (32.7% improvement) and 37.7% recall (50.8% improvement) compared to baselines, while uniquely detecting 24.3% of vulnerabilities -- 2.4x more than any baseline. In pair-wise evaluation, VulInstruct achieves 32.3% relative improvement. VulInstruct also discovered a previously unknown high-severity vulnerability (CVE-2025-56538) in production code, demonstrating practical value for real-world vulnerability discovery. All code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/zhuhaopku/VulInstruct-temp.

SEDec 19, 2024Code
CodeRepoQA: A Large-scale Benchmark for Software Engineering Question Answering

Ruida Hu, Chao Peng, Jingyi Ren et al.

In this work, we introduce CodeRepoQA, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed for evaluating repository-level question-answering capabilities in the field of software engineering. CodeRepoQA encompasses five programming languages and covers a wide range of scenarios, enabling comprehensive evaluation of language models. To construct this dataset, we crawl data from 30 well-known repositories in GitHub, the largest platform for hosting and collaborating on code, and carefully filter raw data. In total, CodeRepoQA is a multi-turn question-answering benchmark with 585,687 entries, covering a diverse array of software engineering scenarios, with an average of 6.62 dialogue turns per entry. We evaluate ten popular large language models on our dataset and provide in-depth analysis. We find that LLMs still have limitations in question-answering capabilities in the field of software engineering, and medium-length contexts are more conducive to LLMs' performance. The entire benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/kinesiatricssxilm14/CodeRepoQA.

SEJul 24, 2022
No More Fine-Tuning? An Experimental Evaluation of Prompt Tuning in Code Intelligence

Chaozheng Wang, Yuanhang Yang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Pre-trained models have been shown effective in many code intelligence tasks. These models are pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus and then fine-tuned in downstream tasks. However, as the inputs to pre-training and downstream tasks are in different forms, it is hard to fully explore the knowledge of pre-trained models. Besides, the performance of fine-tuning strongly relies on the amount of downstream data, while in practice, the scenarios with scarce data are common. Recent studies in the natural language processing (NLP) field show that prompt tuning, a new paradigm for tuning, alleviates the above issues and achieves promising results in various NLP tasks. In prompt tuning, the prompts inserted during tuning provide task-specific knowledge, which is especially beneficial for tasks with relatively scarce data. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the usage and effect of prompt tuning in code intelligence tasks. We conduct prompt tuning on popular pre-trained models CodeBERT and CodeT5 and experiment with three code intelligence tasks including defect prediction, code summarization, and code translation. Our experimental results show that prompt tuning consistently outperforms fine-tuning in all three tasks. In addition, prompt tuning shows great potential in low-resource scenarios, e.g., improving the BLEU scores of fine-tuning by more than 26\% on average for code summarization. Our results suggest that instead of fine-tuning, we could adapt prompt tuning for code intelligence tasks to achieve better performance, especially when lacking task-specific data.

CLSep 29, 2023
Split and Merge: Aligning Position Biases in LLM-based Evaluators

Zongjie Li, Chaozheng Wang, Pingchuan Ma et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as automated evaluators for assessing the quality of answers generated by AI systems. However, these LLM-based evaluators exhibit position bias, or inconsistency, when used to evaluate candidate answers in pairwise comparisons, favoring either the first or second answer regardless of content. To address this limitation, we propose PORTIA, an alignment-based system designed to mimic human comparison strategies to calibrate position bias in a lightweight yet effective manner. Specifically, PORTIA splits the answers into multiple segments, aligns similar content across candidate answers, and then merges them back into a single prompt for evaluation by LLMs. We conducted extensive experiments with six diverse LLMs to evaluate 11,520 answer pairs. Our results show that PORTIA markedly enhances the consistency rates for all the models and comparison forms tested, achieving an average relative improvement of 47.46%. Remarkably, PORTIA enables less advanced GPT models to achieve 88% agreement with the state-of-the-art GPT-4 model at just 10% of the cost. Furthermore, it rectifies around 80% of the position bias instances within the GPT-4 model, elevating its consistency rate up to 98%. Subsequent human evaluations indicate that the PORTIA-enhanced GPT-3.5 model can even surpass the standalone GPT-4 in terms of alignment with human evaluators. These findings highlight PORTIA's ability to correct position bias, improve LLM consistency, and boost performance while keeping cost-efficiency. This represents a valuable step toward a more reliable and scalable use of LLMs for automated evaluations across diverse applications.

SEJun 12, 2023
LIVABLE: Exploring Long-Tailed Classification of Software Vulnerability Types

Xin-Cheng Wen, Cuiyun Gao, Feng Luo et al.

Prior studies generally focus on software vulnerability detection and have demonstrated the effectiveness of Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based approaches for the task. Considering the various types of software vulnerabilities and the associated different degrees of severity, it is also beneficial to determine the type of each vulnerable code for developers. In this paper, we observe that the distribution of vulnerability type is long-tailed in practice, where a small portion of classes have massive samples (i.e., head classes) but the others contain only a few samples (i.e., tail classes). Directly adopting previous vulnerability detection approaches tends to result in poor detection performance, mainly due to two reasons. First, it is difficult to effectively learn the vulnerability representation due to the over-smoothing issue of GNNs. Second, vulnerability types in tails are hard to be predicted due to the extremely few associated samples.To alleviate these issues, we propose a Long-taIled software VulnerABiLity typE classification approach, called LIVABLE. LIVABLE mainly consists of two modules, including (1) vulnerability representation learning module, which improves the propagation steps in GNN to distinguish node representations by a differentiated propagation method. A sequence-to-sequence model is also involved to enhance the vulnerability representations. (2) adaptive re-weighting module, which adjusts the learning weights for different types according to the training epochs and numbers of associated samples by a novel training loss.

SEAug 21, 2023
When Less is Enough: Positive and Unlabeled Learning Model for Vulnerability Detection

Xin-Cheng Wen, Xinchen Wang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Automated code vulnerability detection has gained increasing attention in recent years. The deep learning (DL)-based methods, which implicitly learn vulnerable code patterns, have proven effective in vulnerability detection. The performance of DL-based methods usually relies on the quantity and quality of labeled data. However, the current labeled data are generally automatically collected, such as crawled from human-generated commits, making it hard to ensure the quality of the labels. Prior studies have demonstrated that the non-vulnerable code (i.e., negative labels) tends to be unreliable in commonly-used datasets, while vulnerable code (i.e., positive labels) is more determined. Considering the large numbers of unlabeled data in practice, it is necessary and worth exploring to leverage the positive data and large numbers of unlabeled data for more accurate vulnerability detection. In this paper, we focus on the Positive and Unlabeled (PU) learning problem for vulnerability detection and propose a novel model named PILOT, i.e., PositIve and unlabeled Learning mOdel for vulnerability deTection. PILOT only learns from positive and unlabeled data for vulnerability detection. It mainly contains two modules: (1) A distance-aware label selection module, aiming at generating pseudo-labels for selected unlabeled data, which involves the inter-class distance prototype and progressive fine-tuning; (2) A mixed-supervision representation learning module to further alleviate the influence of noise and enhance the discrimination of representations.

AINov 10, 2022
Syntax-Guided Domain Adaptation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Anguo Dong, Cuiyun Gao, Yan Jia et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at extracting opinionated aspect terms in review texts and determining their sentiment polarities, which is widely studied in both academia and industry. As a fine-grained classification task, the annotation cost is extremely high. Domain adaptation is a popular solution to alleviate the data deficiency issue in new domains by transferring common knowledge across domains. Most cross-domain ABSA studies are based on structure correspondence learning (SCL), and use pivot features to construct auxiliary tasks for narrowing down the gap between domains. However, their pivot-based auxiliary tasks can only transfer knowledge of aspect terms but not sentiment, limiting the performance of existing models. In this work, we propose a novel Syntax-guided Domain Adaptation Model, named SDAM, for more effective cross-domain ABSA. SDAM exploits syntactic structure similarities for building pseudo training instances, during which aspect terms of target domain are explicitly related to sentiment polarities. Besides, we propose a syntax-based BERT mask language model for further capturing domain-invariant features. Finally, to alleviate the sentiment inconsistency issue in multi-gram aspect terms, we introduce a span-based joint aspect term and sentiment analysis module into the cross-domain End2End ABSA. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with respect to Micro-F1 metric for the cross-domain End2End ABSA task.

CLDec 12, 2022
A Survey on Natural Language Processing for Programming

Qingfu Zhu, Xianzhen Luo, Fang Liu et al.

Natural language processing for programming aims to use NLP techniques to assist programming. It is increasingly prevalent for its effectiveness in improving productivity. Distinct from natural language, a programming language is highly structured and functional. Constructing a structure-based representation and a functionality-oriented algorithm is at the heart of program understanding and generation. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review covering tasks, datasets, evaluation methods, techniques, and models from the perspective of the structure-based and functionality-oriented property, aiming to understand the role of the two properties in each component. Based on the analysis, we illustrate unexplored areas and suggest potential directions for future work.

SEApr 8, 2022
HINNPerf: Hierarchical Interaction Neural Network for Performance Prediction of Configurable Systems

Jiezhu Cheng, Cuiyun Gao, Zibin Zheng

Modern software systems are usually highly configurable, providing users with customized functionality through various configuration options. Understanding how system performance varies with different option combinations is important to determine optimal configurations that meet specific requirements. Due to the complex interactions among multiple options and the high cost of performance measurement under a huge configuration space, it is challenging to study how different configurations influence the system performance. To address these challenges, we propose HINNPerf, a novel hierarchical interaction neural network for performance prediction of configurable systems. HINNPerf employs the embedding method and hierarchic network blocks to model the complicated interplay between configuration options, which improves the prediction accuracy of the method. Besides, we devise a hierarchical regularization strategy to enhance the model robustness. Empirical results on 10 real-world configurable systems show that our method statistically significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving average 22.67% improvement in prediction accuracy. In addition, combined with the Integrated Gradients method, the designed hierarchical architecture provides some insights about the interaction complexity and the significance of configuration options, which might help users and developers better understand how the configurable system works and efficiently identify significant options affecting the performance.

CLDec 19, 2022
MultiCoder: Multi-Programming-Lingual Pre-Training for Low-Resource Code Completion

Zi Gong, Yinpeng Guo, Pingyi Zhou et al.

Code completion is a valuable topic in both academia and industry. Recently, large-scale mono-programming-lingual (MonoPL) pre-training models have been proposed to boost the performance of code completion. However, the code completion on low-resource programming languages (PL) is difficult for the data-driven paradigm, while there are plenty of developers using low-resource PLs. On the other hand, there are few studies exploring the effects of multi-programming-lingual (MultiPL) pre-training for the code completion, especially the impact on low-resource programming languages. To this end, we propose the MultiCoder to enhance the low-resource code completion via MultiPL pre-training and MultiPL Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers. We further propose a novel PL-level MoE routing strategy (PL-MoE) for improving the code completion on all PLs. Experimental results on CodeXGLUE and MultiCC demonstrate that 1) the proposed MultiCoder significantly outperforms the MonoPL baselines on low-resource programming languages, and 2) the PL-MoE module further boosts the performance on six programming languages. In addition, we analyze the effects of the proposed method in details and explore the effectiveness of our method in a variety of scenarios.

IRMay 14, 2022
Generating Tips from Song Reviews: A New Dataset and Framework

Jingya Zang, Cuiyun Gao, Yupan Chen et al.

Reviews of songs play an important role in online music service platforms. Prior research shows that users can make quicker and more informed decisions when presented with meaningful song reviews. However, reviews of music songs are generally long in length and most of them are non-informative for users. It is difficult for users to efficiently grasp meaningful messages for making decisions. To solve this problem, one practical strategy is to provide tips, i.e., short, concise, empathetic, and self-contained descriptions about songs. Tips are produced from song reviews and should express non-trivial insights about the songs. To the best of our knowledge, no prior studies have explored the tip generation task in music domain. In this paper, we create a dataset named MTips for the task and propose a framework named GENTMS for automatically generating tips from song reviews. The dataset involves 8,003 Chinese tips/non-tips from 128 songs which are distributed in five different song genres. Experimental results show that GENTMS achieves top-10 precision at 85.56%, outperforming the baseline models by at least 3.34%. Besides, to simulate the practical usage of our proposed framework, we also experiment with previously-unseen songs, during which GENTMS also achieves the best performance with top-10 precision at 78.89% on average. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in tip generation of the music domain.

SEAug 22, 2024
Search-Based LLMs for Code Optimization

Shuzheng Gao, Cuiyun Gao, Wenchao Gu et al.

The code written by developers usually suffers from efficiency problems and contain various performance bugs. These inefficiencies necessitate the research of automated refactoring methods for code optimization. Early research in code optimization employs rule-based methods and focuses on specific inefficiency issues, which are labor-intensive and suffer from the low coverage issue. Recent work regards the task as a sequence generation problem, and resorts to deep learning (DL) techniques such as large language models (LLMs). These methods typically prompt LLMs to directly generate optimized code. Although these methods show state-of-the-art performance, such one-step generation paradigm is hard to achieve an optimal solution. First, complex optimization methods such as combinatorial ones are hard to be captured by LLMs. Second, the one-step generation paradigm poses challenge in precisely infusing the knowledge required for effective code optimization within LLMs, resulting in under-optimized code.To address these problems, we propose to model this task from the search perspective, and propose a search-based LLMs framework named SBLLM that enables iterative refinement and discovery of improved optimization methods. SBLLM synergistically integrate LLMs with evolutionary search and consists of three key components: 1) an execution-based representative sample selection part that evaluates the fitness of each existing optimized code and prioritizes promising ones to pilot the generation of improved code; 2) an adaptive optimization pattern retrieval part that infuses targeted optimization patterns into the model for guiding LLMs towards rectifying and progressively enhancing their optimization methods; and 3) a genetic operator-inspired chain-of-thought prompting part that aids LLMs in combining different optimization methods and generating improved optimization methods.

CLOct 11, 2022
Once is Enough: A Light-Weight Cross-Attention for Fast Sentence Pair Modeling

Yuanhang Yang, Shiyi Qi, Chuanyi Liu et al.

Transformer-based models have achieved great success on sentence pair modeling tasks, such as answer selection and natural language inference (NLI). These models generally perform cross-attention over input pairs, leading to prohibitive computational costs. Recent studies propose dual-encoder and late interaction architectures for faster computation. However, the balance between the expressive of cross-attention and computation speedup still needs better coordinated. To this end, this paper introduces a novel paradigm MixEncoder for efficient sentence pair modeling. MixEncoder involves a light-weight cross-attention mechanism. It conducts query encoding only once while modeling the query-candidate interaction in parallel. Extensive experiments conducted on four tasks demonstrate that our MixEncoder can speed up sentence pairing by over 113x while achieving comparable performance as the more expensive cross-attention models.

SENov 10, 2025Code
Benchmarking LLMs for Fine-Grained Code Review with Enriched Context in Practice

Ruida Hu, Xinchen Wang, Xin-Cheng Wen et al.

Code review is a cornerstone of software quality assurance, and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating this process. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-based code review face three major limitations. (1) Lack of semantic context: most benchmarks provide only code diffs without textual information such as issue descriptions, which are crucial for understanding developer intent. (2) Data quality issues: without rigorous validation, many samples are noisy-e.g., reviews on outdated or irrelevant code-reducing evaluation reliability. (3) Coarse granularity: most benchmarks operate at the file or commit level, overlooking the fine-grained, line-level reasoning essential for precise review. We introduce ContextCRBench, a high-quality, context-rich benchmark for fine-grained LLM evaluation in code review. Our construction pipeline comprises: (1) Raw Data Crawling, collecting 153.7K issues and pull requests from top-tier repositories; (2) Comprehensive Context Extraction, linking issue-PR pairs for textual context and extracting the full surrounding function or class for code context; and (3) Multi-stage Data Filtering, combining rule-based and LLM-based validation to remove outdated, malformed, or low-value samples, resulting in 67,910 context-enriched entries. ContextCRBench supports three evaluation scenarios aligned with the review workflow: (1) hunk-level quality assessment, (2) line-level defect localization, and (3) line-level comment generation. Evaluating eight leading LLMs (four closed-source and four open-source) reveals that textual context yields greater performance gains than code context alone, while current LLMs remain far from human-level review ability. Deployed at ByteDance, ContextCRBench drives a self-evolving code review system, improving performance by 61.98% and demonstrating its robustness and industrial utility.

SESep 17, 2024
Grounded GUI Understanding for Vision-Based Spatial Intelligent Agent: Exemplified by Extended Reality Apps

Shuqing Li, Binchang Li, Yepang Liu et al.

In recent years, spatial computing a.k.a. Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a transformative technology, offering users immersive and interactive experiences across diversified virtual environments. Users can interact with XR apps through interactable GUI elements (IGEs) on the stereoscopic three-dimensional (3D) graphical user interface (GUI). The accurate recognition of these IGEs is instrumental, serving as the foundation of many software engineering tasks, including automated testing and effective GUI search. The most recent IGE detection approaches for 2D mobile apps typically train a supervised object detection model based on a large-scale manually-labeled GUI dataset, usually with a pre-defined set of clickable GUI element categories like buttons and spinners. Such approaches can hardly be applied to IGE detection in XR apps, due to a multitude of challenges including complexities posed by open-vocabulary and heterogeneous IGE categories, intricacies of context-sensitive interactability, and the necessities of precise spatial perception and visual-semantic alignment for accurate IGE detection results. Thus, it is necessary to embark on the IGE research tailored to XR apps. In this paper, we propose the first zero-shot cOntext-sensitive inteRactable GUI ElemeNT dEtection framework for virtual Reality apps, named Orienter. By imitating human behaviors, Orienter observes and understands the semantic contexts of XR app scenes first, before performing the detection. The detection process is iterated within a feedback-directed validation and reflection loop. Specifically, Orienter contains three components, including (1) Semantic context comprehension, (2) Reflection-directed IGE candidate detection, and (3) Context-sensitive interactability classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Orienter is more effective than the state-of-the-art GUI element detection approaches.

SEApr 15
On the Effectiveness of Context Compression for Repository-Level Tasks: An Empirical Investigation

Jia Feng, Zhanyue Qin, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Repository-level code intelligence tasks require large language models (LLMs) to process long, multi-file contexts. Such inputs introduce three challenges: crucial context can be obscured by noise, truncated due to limited windows, and increased inference latency. Context compression mitigates these risks by condensing inputs. While studied in NLP, its applicability to code tasks remains largely unexplored. We present the first systematic empirical study of context compression for repository-level code intelligence, organizing eight methods into three paradigms: discrete token sequences, continuous latent vectors, and visual tokens. We evaluate them on code completion and generation, measuring performance and efficiency. Results show context compression is effective: at 4x compression, continuous latent vector methods surpass full-context performance by up to 28.3% in BLEU score, indicating they filter noise rather than just truncating. On efficiency, all paradigms reduce inference cost. Both visual and text-based compression achieve up to 50% reduction in end-to-end latency at high ratios, approaching the cost of inference without repository context. These findings establish context compression as a viable approach and provide guidance for paradigm selection.

SEAug 7, 2024
RepoMasterEval: Evaluating Code Completion via Real-World Repositories

Qinyun Wu, Chao Peng, Pengfei Gao et al.

With the growing reliance on automated code completion tools in software development, the need for comprehensive evaluation benchmarks has become critical. Existing benchmarks focus more on code completion in function and class level by providing text descriptions to prompt the model. By contrast, such descriptive prompt is commonly unavailable in real development and code completion can occur in wider range of situations such as in the middle of a function or a code block. These limitations makes existing evaluation benchmarks poorly align with the practical scenarios of code completion tools. In this paper, we propose RepoMasterEval, a novel benchmark for evaluating code completion models constructed from real-world repositories. Each benchmark datum is generated by masking a code snippet (ground truth) from one source code file with existing test suites. To improve test accuracy of model generated code, we employ mutation testing to measure the effectiveness of the test cases and we manually crafted new test cases for those test suites with low mutation score. Our empirical evaluation on 10 state-of-the-art models shows that test argumentation is critical in improving the accuracy of the benchmark and RepoMasterEval is able to report variance in model performance in real-world scenarios. The deployment of RepoMasterEval also revealed that the benchmark is useful to give accurate feedback during model training and the score is in high correlation with the model's performance in practice.

SEJul 31, 2025Code
Trae Agent: An LLM-based Agent for Software Engineering with Test-time Scaling

Trae Research Team, Pengfei Gao, Zhao Tian et al. · pku

Software issue resolution is a critical challenge in software engineering and has garnered increasing attention in recent years. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), substantial progress has been made in addressing real-world software engineering tasks. Recent studies have introduced ensemble reasoning techniques to enhance the performance of LLM-based issue resolution. However, existing prompting-based methods still face limitations in effectively exploring large ensemble spaces and lack the capacity for repository-level understanding, both of which constrain their overall effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Trae Agent, the first agent-based ensemble reasoning approach for repository-level issue resolution. Trae Agent formulates our goal as an optimal solution search problem and addresses two key challenges, i.e., large ensemble spaces and repository-level understanding, through modular agents for generation, pruning, and selection. We conduct extensive experiments using three leading LLMs on the widely-adopted SWE-bench benchmark, comparing Trae Agent against four state-of-the-art ensemble reasoning techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that Trae Agent consistently achieves superior performance, with an average improvement of 10.22% over all baselines in terms of Pass@1. Trae Agent has achieved first place on the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard, with a notable Pass@1 score of 75.20%. We are pleased to release Trae Agent as an open-source project to support the research community, with all resources available at https://github.com/bytedance/trae-agent.

LGFeb 27, 2024Code
XMoE: Sparse Models with Fine-grained and Adaptive Expert Selection

Yuanhang Yang, Shiyi Qi, Wenchao Gu et al.

Sparse models, including sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, have emerged as an effective approach for scaling Transformer models. However, they often suffer from computational inefficiency since a significant number of parameters are unnecessarily involved in computations via multiplying values by zero or low activation values. To address this issue, we present \tool, a novel MoE designed to enhance both the efficacy and efficiency of sparse MoE models. \tool leverages small experts and a threshold-based router to enable tokens to selectively engage only essential parameters. Our extensive experiments on language modeling and machine translation tasks demonstrate that \tool can enhance model performance while decreasing the computation load at MoE layers by over 50\% without sacrificing performance. Furthermore, we present the versatility of \tool by applying it to dense models, enabling sparse computation during inference. We provide a comprehensive analysis and make our code available at https://github.com/ysngki/XMoE.

SEMar 17
SR-Eval: Evaluating LLMs on Code Generation under Stepwise Requirement Refinement

Zexun Zhan, Shuzheng Gao, Ruida Hu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation. However, existing benchmarks mainly formalize the task as a static, single-turn problem, overlooking the stepwise requirement changes and iterative workflows in real-world software development. This mismatch limits the understanding of how well LLMs can support real-world development workflows. Constructing such iterative benchmarks is challenging due to the lack of public interaction traces and the difficulty of creating discriminative, turn-specific test cases. To bridge this gap, we present SR-Eval, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on iterative code generation under Stepwise requirements Refinement. SR-Eval spans both function-level and repository-level tasks in Python and Java, enabling fine-grained and progressive evaluation across evolving requirements. The construction of SR-Eval follows a carefully designed pipeline that first leverages a multi-agent-based requirement generation method to simulate the development process and recover the multi-round interaction process from final requirements, then employs a semantic-aware discriminative test case generation component to ensure discriminative and consistent evaluation at each turn. SR-Eval comprises 443 multi-turn tasks and 1,857 questions at both function and repository levels. Using SR-Eval, we evaluate 11 representative LLMs with three prompting strategies that simulate different usage patterns. Results show that iterative code generation under stepwise requirement refinement remains highly challenging: the best-performing model achieves only 22.67% completion rate on function-level tasks and 20.00% on repository-level tasks. We further observe that prompting strategies substantially influence performance, highlighting the need for the development of advanced methods.

CLApr 11
Adapt to Thrive! Adaptive Power-Mean Policy Optimization for Improved LLM Reasoning

Yiming Huang, Zhenbo Shi, Shuzheng Gao et al.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an essential paradigm that enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on static policy optimization schemes that misalign with the model's evolving reasoning capabilities. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Power-Mean Policy Optimization (APMPO), which comprises two main innovations: Power-Mean Policy Optimization (PMPO) and Feedback-Adaptive Clipping (FAC). Specifically, PMPO introduces a generalized power-mean objective. This enables the model to adaptively transition from the signal-amplifying behavior of the arithmetic mean to the consistency-enforcing behavior of the geometric mean. FAC adaptively adjusts clipping bounds based on real-time reward statistics to overcome the limitations of static mechanisms. Capitalizing on these innovations, APMPO improves learning dynamics and reasoning performance. Extensive experiments on nine datasets across three reasoning tasks showcase the superiority of APMPO over state-of-the-art RLVR-based baselines. For instance, APMPO boosts the average Pass@1 score on mathematical reasoning benchmarks by 3.0 points compared to GRPO when using Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.

CLApr 11
Free Energy-Driven Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Advantage Shaping for Unsupervised Reasoning in LLMs

Yiming Huang, Zhenbo Shi, Xin-Cheng Wen et al.

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling self-improvement in large language models (LLMs). However, existing unsupervised RL-based methods often lack the capacity to adapt to the model's evolving reasoning capabilities during training. Therefore, these methods can misdirect policy optimization in the absence of ground-truth supervision. To address this issue, we introduce FREIA, a novel RL-based algorithm built on two key innovations: (1) Free Energy-Driven Reward (FER) adapts rewards to balance consensus and exploration based on the Free Energy Principle. (2) Adaptive Advantage Shaping (AAS) adaptively adjusts learning signals based on the statistical characteristics of sampled rewards. Empirical evaluations on nine datasets across three reasoning tasks showcase that FREIA outperforms other unsupervised RL-based baselines. Notably, in mathematical reasoning tasks, FREIA surpasses other methods by an average of 0.5 to 3.5 points in Pass@1 using the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B model.

LGMay 18
Enhancing the Code Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Consistency-based Reinforcement Learning

Zhanyue Qin, Jia Feng, Yibo Lyu et al.

Code reasoning refers to the task of predicting the output of a program given its source code and specific inputs. It can measure the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) and also benefit downstream tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. Existing work has verified the effectiveness of reinforcement learning on the task. However, these methods design rewards solely based on final outputs or coarse-grained signals, and neglect the inherent consistency of the stepwise reasoning process in the task. Therefore, these methods often result in sparse reward or reward hacking, which limits the full play of enhanced learning capabilities. To alleviate these issues, we propose CodeThinker, a consistency-driven reinforcement learning framework for code reasoning. Specifically, CodeThinker has three key components: (1) a stepwise reasoning-aware model training module, which utilizes a consistency tracing paradigm as a template to synthesize training data that captures the stepwise reasoning process; (2) a dynamic beam sampling strategy, which aims to improve the quality of sampled outputs under a fixed sampling budget; and (3) a consistency reward mechanism that can effectively alleviate reward hacking. Experiments on three popular benchmarks show that CodeThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple LLMs. For instance, it outperforms the strongest baseline by 4.3% in accuracy when deployed on Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct. We also validate the effectiveness of CodeThinker on downstream tasks. Results show that, without additional training, CodeThinker obtains average accuracy gains of 5.33 and 3.11 percentage points on mathematical reasoning and code reasoning tasks covering 17 programming languages, respectively.

SEFeb 19, 2025Code
Repo2Run: Automated Building Executable Environment for Code Repository at Scale

Ruida Hu, Chao Peng, Xinchen Wang et al.

Scaling up executable code data is significant for improving language models' software engineering capability. The intricate nature of the process makes it labor-intensive, time-consuming and expert-knowledge-dependent to build a large number of executable code repositories, limiting the scalability of existing work based on running tests. The primary bottleneck lies in the automated building of test environments for different repositories, which is an essential yet underexplored task. To mitigate the gap, we introduce Repo2Run, the first LLM-based agent aiming at automating the building of executable test environments for any repositories at scale. Specifically, given a code repository, Repo2Run iteratively builds the Docker image, runs unit tests based on the feedback of the building, and synthesizes the Dockerfile until the entire pipeline is executed successfully. The resulting Dockerfile can then be used to create Docker container environments for running code and tests. We created a benchmark containing 420 Python repositories with unit tests for evaluation. The results illustrate that Repo2Run achieves an 86.0% success rate, outperforming SWE-agent by 77.0%. The resources of Repo2Run are available at https://github.com/bytedance/Repo2Run.

CVDec 7, 2023Code
VRPTEST: Evaluating Visual Referring Prompting in Large Multimodal Models

Zongjie Li, Chaozheng Wang, Chaowei Liu et al.

With recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) across various domains, a novel prompting method called visual referring prompting has emerged, showing significant potential in enhancing human-computer interaction within multimodal systems. This method offers a more natural and flexible approach to human interaction with these systems compared to traditional text descriptions or coordinates. However, the categorization of visual referring prompting remains undefined, and its impact on the performance of LMMs has yet to be formally examined. In this study, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LMMs using a variety of visual referring prompting strategies. We introduce a benchmark dataset called VRPTEST, comprising 3 different visual tasks and 2,275 images, spanning diverse combinations of prompt strategies. Using VRPTEST, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of eight versions of prominent open-source and proprietary foundation models, including two early versions of GPT-4V. We develop an automated assessment framework based on software metamorphic testing techniques to evaluate the accuracy of LMMs without the need for human intervention or manual labeling. We find that the current proprietary models generally outperform the open-source ones, showing an average accuracy improvement of 22.70%; however, there is still potential for improvement. Moreover, our quantitative analysis shows that the choice of prompt strategy significantly affects the accuracy of LMMs, with variations ranging from -17.5% to +7.3%. Further case studies indicate that an appropriate visual referring prompting strategy can improve LMMs' understanding of context and location information, while an unsuitable one might lead to answer rejection. We also provide insights on minimizing the negative impact of visual referring prompting on LMMs.

SEApr 8
Evaluating Repository-level Software Documentation via Question Answering and Feature-Driven Development

Xinchen Wang, Ruida Hu, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Software documentation is crucial for repository comprehension. While Large Language Models (LLMs) advance documentation generation from code snippets to entire repositories, existing benchmarks have two key limitations: (1) they lack a holistic, repository-level assessment, and (2) they rely on unreliable evaluation strategies, such as LLM-as-a-judge, which suffers from vague criteria and limited repository-level knowledge. To address these issues, we introduce SWD-Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating repository-level software documentation. Inspired by documentation-driven development, our strategy evaluates documentation quality by assessing an LLM's ability to understand and implement functionalities using the documentation, rather than by directly scoring it. This is measured through function-driven Question Answering (QA) tasks. SWD-Bench comprises three interconnected QA tasks: (1) Functionality Detection, to determine if a functionality is described; (2) Functionality Localization, to evaluate the accuracy of locating related files; and (3) Functionality Completion, to measure the comprehensiveness of implementation details. We construct the benchmark, containing 4,170 entries, by mining high-quality Pull Requests and enriching them with repository-level context. Experiments reveal limitations in current documentation generation methods and show that source code provides complementary value. Notably, documentation from the best-performing method improves the issue-solving rate of SWE-Agent by 20.00%, which demonstrates the practical value of high-quality documentation in supporting documentation-driven development.

AIJun 9, 2025Code
Boosting Vulnerability Detection of LLMs via Curriculum Preference Optimization with Synthetic Reasoning Data

Xin-Cheng Wen, Yijun Yang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate considerable proficiency in numerous coding-related tasks; however, their capabilities in detecting software vulnerabilities remain limited. This limitation primarily stems from two factors: (1) the absence of reasoning data related to vulnerabilities, which hinders the models' ability to capture underlying vulnerability patterns; and (2) their focus on learning semantic representations rather than the reason behind them, thus failing to recognize semantically similar vulnerability samples. Furthermore, the development of LLMs specialized in vulnerability detection is challenging, particularly in environments characterized by the scarcity of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework ReVD that excels at mining vulnerability patterns through reasoning data synthesizing and vulnerability-specific preference optimization. Specifically, we construct forward and backward reasoning processes for vulnerability and corresponding fixed code, ensuring the synthesis of high-quality reasoning data. Moreover, we design the triplet supervised fine-tuning followed by curriculum online preference optimization for enabling ReVD to better understand vulnerability patterns. The extensive experiments conducted on PrimeVul and SVEN datasets demonstrate that ReVD sets new state-of-the-art for LLM-based software vulnerability detection, e.g., 12.24\%-22.77\% improvement in the accuracy. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/Xin-Cheng-Wen/PO4Vul.

SEApr 18, 2025Code
CodeVisionary: An Agent-based Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation

Xinchen Wang, Pengfei Gao, Chao Peng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, underscoring the critical need for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches fall into three categories, including human-centered, metric-based, and LLM-based. Considering that human-centered approaches are labour-intensive and metric-based ones overly rely on reference answers, LLM-based approaches are gaining increasing attention due to their stronger contextual understanding capabilities. However, they generally evaluate the generated code based on static prompts, and tend to fail for complex code scenarios which typically involve multiple requirements and require more contextual information. In addition, these approaches lack fine-grained evaluation for complex code, resulting in limited explainability. To mitigate the limitations, we propose CodeVisionary, the first agent-based evaluation framework for complex code generation. CodeVisionary consists of two stages: (1) Requirement-guided multi-dimensional context distillation stage and (2) Fine-grained scoring and summarization stage. A comprehensive evaluation report is also generated for enhanced explainability. For validation, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 363 samples spanning 37 coding scenarios and 23 programming languages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CodeVisionary achieves the best performance among three baselines for evaluating complex code generation, outperforming the best baseline with average improvements of 0.217, 0.163, and 0.141 in Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall-Tau coefficients, respectively. The resources of CodeVisionary are available at https://github.com/Eshe0922/CodeVisionary.

SEApr 21
Cascaded Code Editing: Large-Small Model Collaboration for Effective and Efficient Code Editing

Chaozheng Wang, Zezhou Yang, Shuzheng Gao et al.

Code editing constitutes a fundamental practice in software development, wherein developers modify existing codebases according to natural language requirements. Accurate code editing necessitates a comprehensive understanding of both the existing codebase and the modification requirements. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in code editing tasks, they suffer from substantial inefficiency by generating entire modified files that largely consist of unchanged code. While smaller models could potentially address this inefficiency, they typically lack the capacity to effectively comprehend long code contexts required for accurate editing. To ensure both effectiveness and efficiency, we propose to decompose code editing into a two-stage cascade: \textbf{edit sketch generation}, wherein a large model first produces concise sketches representing the requisite modifications (the more challenging phase), and \textbf{edit sketch application}, wherein a smaller model integrates these sketches into the original code to produce the final output edited code (the simpler phase). This cascaded design reduces the number of tokens generated by the large model, as the majority of the output is handled by the smaller, more efficient model, thereby enhancing overall efficiency. However, the effectiveness of this approach is constrained by current small models' limited capabilities in handling long-context scenarios and cross-file dependencies, which are essential for accurate sketch application in real-world codebases. To address these limitations and enhance smaller models' sketch application capabilities, ...

CLMay 15
ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Jiahui Guang, Yingjie Zhu, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining, making machine unlearning (MU) crucial. Existing methods typically evaluate unlearning effectiveness based on output deviations, while overlooking the generation quality after unlearning. This can easily lead to hallucinated or rigid responses, thereby affecting the usability and safety of the unlearned model. To address this issue, we propose ASRU, a controllable multimodal unlearning framework that incorporates generation quality as a core evaluation objective. ASRU first induces initial refusal behavior through activation redirection, and then optimizes fine-grained refusal boundaries using a customized reward function, thereby achieving a better trade-off between target knowledge unlearning and model utility. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that ASRU significantly improves unlearning effectiveness (+24.6%) on average and generation quality (5.8x) on average while effectively preserving model utility, using only a small amount of retained supervision data.

SEDec 23, 2025
AXIOM: Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Code via Rule-Based Perturbation and Multisource Quality Calibration

Ruiqi Wang, Xinchen Wang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed in real-world software engineering, fostering the development of code evaluation metrics to study the quality of LLM-generated code. Conventional rule-based metrics merely score programs based on their surface-level similarities with reference programs instead of analyzing functionality and code quality in depth. To address this limitation, researchers have developed LLM-as-a-judge metrics, prompting LLMs to evaluate and score code, and curated various code evaluation benchmarks to validate their effectiveness. However, these benchmarks suffer from critical limitations, hindering reliable assessments of evaluation capability: Some feature coarse-grained binary labels, which reduce rich code behavior to a single bit of information, obscuring subtle errors. Others propose fine-grained but subjective, vaguely-defined evaluation criteria, introducing unreliability in manually-annotated scores, which is the ground-truth they rely on. Furthermore, they often use uncontrolled data synthesis methods, leading to unbalanced score distributions that poorly represent real-world code generation scenarios. To curate a diverse benchmark with programs of well-balanced distributions across various quality levels and streamline the manual annotation procedure, we propose AXIOM, a novel perturbation-based framework for synthesizing code evaluation benchmarks at scale. It reframes program scores as the refinement effort needed for deployment, consisting of two stages: (1) Rule-guided perturbation, which prompts LLMs to apply sequences of predefined perturbation rules to existing high-quality programs to modify their functionality and code quality, enabling us to precisely control each program's target score to achieve balanced score distributions. (2) Multisource quality calibration, which first selects a subset of...

SEMar 23
LLM-Based Test Case Generation in DBMS through Monte Carlo Tree Search

Yujia Chen, Yingli Zhou, Fangyuan Zhang et al.

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are fundamental infrastructure for modern data-driven applications, where thorough testing with high-quality SQL test cases is essential for ensuring system reliability. Traditional approaches such as fuzzing can be effective for specific DBMSs, but adapting them to different proprietary dialects requires substantial manual effort. Large Language Models (LLMs) present promising opportunities for automated SQL test generation, but face critical challenges in industrial environments. First, lightweight models are widely used in organizations due to security and privacy constraints, but they struggle to generate syntactically valid queries for proprietary SQL dialects. Second, LLM-generated queries are often semantically similar and exercise only shallow execution paths, thereby quickly reaching a coverage plateau. To address these challenges, we propose MIST, an LLM-based test case generatIon framework for DBMS through Monte Carlo Tree search. MIST consists of two stages: Feature-Guided Error-Driven Test Case Synthetization, which constructs a hierarchical feature tree and uses error feedback to guide LLM generation, aiming to produce syntactically valid and semantically diverse queries for different DBMS dialects, and Monte Carlo Tree Search-Based Test Case Mutation, which jointly optimizes seed query selection and mutation rule application guided by coverage feedback, aiming at boosting code coverage by exploring deeper execution paths. Experiments on three widely-used DBMSs with four lightweight LLMs show that MIST achieves average improvements of 43.3% in line coverage, 32.3% in function coverage, and 46.4% in branch coverage compared to the baseline approach with the highest line coverage of 69.3% in the Optimizer module.

SEApr 8
Evaluating LLM-Based 0-to-1 Software Generation in End-to-End CLI Tool Scenarios

Ruida Hu, Xinchen Wang, Chao Peng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving a shift towards intent-driven development, where agents build complete software from scratch. However, existing benchmarks fail to assess this 0-to-1 generation capability due to two limitations: reliance on predefined scaffolds that ignore repository structure planning, and rigid white-box unit testing that lacks end-to-end behavioral validation. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLI-Tool-Bench, a structure-agnostic benchmark for evaluating the ground-up generation of Command-Line Interface (CLI) tools. It features 100 diverse real-world repositories evaluated via a black-box differential testing framework. Agent-generated software is executed in sandboxes, comparing system side effects and terminal outputs against human-written oracles using multi-tiered equivalence metrics. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art LLMs, we reveal that top models achieve under 43% success, highlighting the ongoing challenge of 0-to-1 generation. Furthermore, higher token consumption does not guarantee better performance, and agents tend to generate monolithic code.

SEDec 2, 2020Code
CRaDLe: Deep Code Retrieval Based on Semantic Dependency Learning

Wenchao Gu, Zongjie Li, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Code retrieval is a common practice for programmers to reuse existing code snippets in open-source repositories. Given a user query (i.e., a natural language description), code retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant ones from a set of code snippets. The main challenge of effective code retrieval lies in mitigating the semantic gap between natural language descriptions and code snippets. With the ever-increasing amount of available open-source code, recent studies resort to neural networks to learn the semantic matching relationships between the two sources. The statement-level dependency information, which highlights the dependency relations among the program statements during the execution, reflects the structural importance of one statement in the code, which is favorable for accurately capturing the code semantics but has never been explored for the code retrieval task. In this paper, we propose CRaDLe, a novel approach for Code Retrieval based on statement-level semantic Dependency Learning. Specifically, CRaDLe distills code representations through fusing both the dependency and semantic information at the statement level and then learns a unified vector representation for each code and description pair for modeling the matching relationship. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can accurately retrieve code snippets for a given query and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches to the task.

SEDec 20, 2019Code
CORE: Automating Review Recommendation for Code Changes

JingKai Siow, Cuiyun Gao, Lingling Fan et al.

Code review is a common process that is used by developers, in which a reviewer provides useful comments or points out defects in the submitted source code changes via pull request. Code review has been widely used for both industry and open-source projects due to its capacity in early defect identification, project maintenance, and code improvement. With rapid updates on project developments, code review becomes a non-trivial and labor-intensive task for reviewers. Thus, an automated code review engine can be beneficial and useful for project development in practice. Although there exist prior studies on automating the code review process by adopting static analysis tools or deep learning techniques, they often require external sources such as partial or full source code for accurate review suggestion. In this paper, we aim at automating the code review process only based on code changes and the corresponding reviews but with better performance. The hinge of accurate code review suggestion is to learn good representations for both code changes and reviews. To achieve this with limited source, we design a multi-level embedding (i.e., word embedding and character embedding) approach to represent the semantics provided by code changes and reviews. The embeddings are then well trained through a proposed attentional deep learning model, as a whole named CORE. We evaluate the effectiveness of CORE on code changes and reviews collected from 19 popular Java projects hosted on Github. Experimental results show that our model CORE can achieve significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art model (DeepMem), with an increase of 131.03% in terms of Recall@10 and 150.69% in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank. Qualitative general word analysis among project developers also demonstrates the performance of CORE in automating code review.

CVMay 9
PPU-Bench:Real World Benchmark for Personalized Partial Unlearning in Vision Language Models

Jiahui Guang, Zexun Zhan, Zhenlin Xu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining. However, existing MLLM unlearning benchmarks rely on synthetic knowledge injection or complete subject-level deletion, which fail to capture realistic, personalized deletion requests that require fine-grained factual control. In this paper, we introduce PPU-Bench, a real-world and fine-tuning-free benchmark for personalized partial unlearning in MLLMs. PPU-Bench contains 24K multimodal and unimodal samples derived from pre-existing knowledge of 500 public figures under three progressively challenging settings: Complete, Selective, and Personalized unlearning. The benchmark evaluates whether methods can remove target knowledge while preserving non-target facts, model utility, and cross-modal consistency. Extensive experiments show that Complete Unlearning often suppresses visual identity rather than factual knowledge, while Selective and Personalized Unlearning expose significant forget--retain trade-offs and challenges in intra-subject factual boundaries. Robustness analysis under cross-image and prompt-based attacks reveals distinct vulnerabilities across different unlearning settings. Motivated by these findings, we propose Boundary-Aware Optimization (BAO), which explicitly models intra-subject forget-retain boundaries. Experimental results on two representative methods demonstrate that BAO can effectively enforce intra-subject factual boundaries.

SEMay 7
Schedule-and-Calibrate: Utility-Guided Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Code LLMs

Yujia Chen, Yang Ye, Xiao Chu et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has proven effective at post-training LLMs for coding, yet deploying separate task-specific specialists incurs costs that scale with the number of tasks, motivating a unified multi-task RL (MTRL) approach. However, existing MTRL methods treat all coding tasks uniformly, relying on fixed data curricula under a shared optimization strategy, ultimately limiting the effectiveness of multi-task training. To address these limitations, we propose ASTOR, a multi-tASk code reinforcement learning framework via uTility-driven coORdination. Centered on task utility, a signal capturing each task learning potential and cross-task synergy, ASTOR comprises two coupled modules: 1) Hierarchical Utility-Routed Data Scheduling module hierarchically allocates training budget and prioritizes informative prompts, steering training toward the most valuable data and 2) Adaptive Utility-Calibrated Policy Optimization module dynamically scales per-task KL regularization, matching update constraints to each tasks current training state. Experiments on two widely-used LLMs across four representative coding tasks demonstrate that ASTOR consistently improves a single model across all tasks, outperforming the best task-specific specialist by 9.0%-9.5% and surpassing the strongest MTRL baseline by 7.5%-12.8%.

SEFeb 10, 2025
Can LLMs Replace Human Evaluators? An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge in Software Engineering

Ruiqi Wang, Jiyu Guo, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been deployed to tackle various software engineering (SE) tasks like code generation, significantly advancing the automation of SE tasks. However, assessing the quality of these LLM-generated code and text remains challenging. The commonly used Pass@k metric necessitates extensive unit tests and configured environments, demands a high labor cost, and is not suitable for evaluating LLM-generated text. Conventional metrics like BLEU, which measure only lexical rather than semantic similarity, have also come under scrutiny. In response, a new trend has emerged to employ LLMs for automated evaluation, known as LLM-as-a-judge. These LLM-as-a-judge methods are claimed to better mimic human assessment than conventional metrics without relying on high-quality reference answers. Nevertheless, their exact human alignment in SE tasks remains unexplored. In this paper, we empirically explore LLM-as-a-judge methods for evaluating SE tasks, focusing on their alignment with human judgments. We select seven LLM-as-a-judge methods that utilize general-purpose LLMs, alongside two LLMs specifically fine-tuned for evaluation. After generating and manually scoring LLM responses on three recent SE datasets of code translation, code generation, and code summarization, we then prompt these methods to evaluate each response. Finally, we compare the scores generated by these methods with human evaluation. The results indicate that output-based methods reach the highest Pearson correlation of 81.32 and 68.51 with human scores in code translation and generation, achieving near-human evaluation, noticeably outperforming ChrF++, one of the best conventional metrics, at 34.23 and 64.92. Such output-based methods prompt LLMs to output judgments directly, and exhibit more balanced score distributions that resemble human score patterns. Finally, we provide...

LGDec 1, 2025
A Fine Evaluation Method for Cube Copying Test for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease

Xinyu Jiang, Cuiyun Gao, Wenda Huang et al.

Background: Impairment of visual spatial cognitive function is the most common early clinical manifestation of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). When the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) uses the "0/1" binary method ("pass/fail") to evaluate the visual spatial cognitive ability represented by the Cube Copying Test(CCT), the elder with less formal education generally score 0 point, resulting in serious bias in the evaluation results. Therefore, this study proposes a fine evaluation method for CCT based on dynamic handwriting feature extraction of DH-SCSM-BLA. method : The Cogni-CareV3.0 software independently developed by our team was used to collect dynamic handwriting data of CCT. Then, the spatial and motion features of segmented dynamic handwriting were extracted, and feature matrix with unequal dimensions were normalized. Finally, a bidirectional long short-term memory network model combined with attention mechanism (BiLSTM-Attention) was adopted for classification. Result: The experimental results showed that: The proposed method has significant superiority compared to similar studies, with a classification accuracy of 86.69%. The distribution of cube drawing ability scores has significant regularity for three aspects such as MCI patients and healthy control group, age, and levels of education. It was also found that score for each cognitive task including cube drawing ability score is negatively correlated with age. Score for each cognitive task including cube drawing ability score, but positively correlated with levels of education significantly. Conclusion: This study provides a relatively objective and comprehensive evaluation method for early screening and personalized intervention of visual spatial cognitive impairment.

SEApr 29
When Model Editing Meets Service Evolution: A Knowledge-Update Perspective for Service Recommendation

Guodong Fan, Cuiyun Gao, Chun Yong Chong et al.

The rapid evolution of software services poses substantial challenges to the design and implementation of effective recommendation systems. Traditional service recommendation approaches often rely on static representations and historical usage data, which are insufficient for adapting to the dynamic and evolving nature of service ecosystems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential to overcome these limitations by leveraging rich contextual understanding. However, their practical use faces two major challenges: outdated service facts and invalid or redundant services. To address these issues, we propose EVOREC, an evolution-aware framework for service recommendation that leverages model editing in a locate-then-edit paradigm to incorporate updated service facts without costly retraining efficiently. This allows the model to remain aligned with evolving service ecosystems. To address invalid service issues, we introduce a Finite Automata (FA)-based constrained decoding mechanism with deduplication, which enforces structural and semantic validity while eliminating repeated services. Experiments on real-world service datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing baselines, e.g., achieving an average relative improvement of 25.9% in Recall@5. Moreover, under evolving service scenarios, our approach outperforms model fine-tuning approaches by 22.3%, demonstrating strong adaptability to service evolution and providing a practical solution for service recommendation in dynamic ecosystems

SEJan 2, 2025
The Prompt Alchemist: Automated LLM-Tailored Prompt Optimization for Test Case Generation

Shuzheng Gao, Chaozheng Wang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Test cases are essential for validating the reliability and quality of software applications. Recent studies have demonstrated the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate useful test cases for given source code. However, the existing work primarily relies on human-written plain prompts, which often leads to suboptimal results since the performance of LLMs can be highly influenced by the prompts. Moreover, these approaches use the same prompt for all LLMs, overlooking the fact that different LLMs might be best suited to different prompts. Given the wide variety of possible prompt formulations, automatically discovering the optimal prompt for each LLM presents a significant challenge. Although there are methods on automated prompt optimization in the natural language processing field, they are hard to produce effective prompts for the test case generation task. First, the methods iteratively optimize prompts by simply combining and mutating existing ones without proper guidance, resulting in prompts that lack diversity and tend to repeat the same errors in the generated test cases. Second, the prompts are generally lack of domain contextual knowledge, limiting LLMs' performance in the task.

SENov 27, 2024
AEGIS: An Agent-based Framework for General Bug Reproduction from Issue Descriptions

Xinchen Wang, Pengfei Gao, Xiangxin Meng et al.

In software maintenance, bug reproduction is essential for effective fault localization and repair. Manually writing reproduction scripts is a time-consuming task with high requirements for developers. Hence, automation of bug reproduction has increasingly attracted attention from researchers and practitioners. However, the existing studies on bug reproduction are generally limited to specific bug types such as program crashes, and hard to be applied to general bug reproduction. In this paper, considering the superior performance of agent-based methods in code intelligence tasks, we focus on designing an agent-based framework for the task. Directly employing agents would lead to limited bug reproduction performance, due to entangled subtasks, lengthy retrieved context, and unregulated actions. To mitigate the challenges, we propose an Automated gEneral buG reproductIon Scripts generation framework, named AEGIS, which is the first agent-based framework for the task. AEGIS mainly contains two modules: (1) A concise context construction module, which aims to guide the code agent in extracting structured information from issue descriptions, identifying issue-related code with detailed explanations, and integrating these elements to construct the concise context; (2) A FSM-based multi-feedback optimization module to further regulate the behavior of the code agent within the finite state machine (FSM), ensuring a controlled and efficient script generation process based on multi-dimensional feedback. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark dataset show that AEGIS outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by 23.0% in F->P metric. In addition, the bug reproduction scripts generated by AEGIS can improve the relative resolved rate of Agentless by 12.5%.

SEDec 11, 2024
EvalSVA: Multi-Agent Evaluators for Next-Gen Software Vulnerability Assessment

Xin-Cheng Wen, Jiaxin Ye, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Software Vulnerability (SV) assessment is a crucial process of determining different aspects of SVs (e.g., attack vectors and scope) for developers to effectively prioritize efforts in vulnerability mitigation. It presents a challenging and laborious process due to the complexity of SVs and the scarcity of labeled data. To mitigate the above challenges, we introduce EvalSVA, a multi-agent evaluators team to autonomously deliberate and evaluate various aspects of SV assessment. Specifically, we propose a multi-agent-based framework to simulate vulnerability assessment strategies in real-world scenarios, which employs multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) into an integrated group to enhance the effectiveness of SV assessment in the limited data. We also design diverse communication strategies to autonomously discuss and assess different aspects of SV. Furthermore, we construct a multi-lingual SV assessment dataset based on the new standard of CVSS, comprising 699, 888, and 1,310 vulnerability-related commits in C++, Python, and Java, respectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that EvalSVA averagely outperforms the 44.12\% accuracy and 43.29\% F1 for SV assessment compared with the previous methods. It shows that EvalSVA offers a human-like process and generates both reason and answer for SV assessment. EvalSVA can also aid human experts in SV assessment, which provides more explanation and details for SV assessment.

SEDec 11, 2024
Repository-Level Graph Representation Learning for Enhanced Security Patch Detection

Xin-Cheng Wen, Zirui Lin, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Software vendors often silently release security patches without providing sufficient advisories (e.g., Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) or delayed updates via resources (e.g., National Vulnerability Database). Therefore, it has become crucial to detect these security patches to ensure secure software maintenance. However, existing methods face the following challenges: (1) They primarily focus on the information within the patches themselves, overlooking the complex dependencies in the repository. (2) Security patches typically involve multiple functions and files, increasing the difficulty in well learning the representations. To alleviate the above challenges, this paper proposes a Repository-level Security Patch Detection framework named RepoSPD, which comprises three key components: 1) a repository-level graph construction, RepoCPG, which represents software patches by merging pre-patch and post-patch source code at the repository level; 2) a structure-aware patch representation, which fuses the graph and sequence branch and aims at comprehending the relationship among multiple code changes; 3) progressive learning, which facilitates the model in balancing semantic and structural information. To evaluate RepoSPD, we employ two widely-used datasets in security patch detection: SPI-DB and PatchDB. We further extend these datasets to the repository level, incorporating a total of 20,238 and 28,781 versions of repository in C/C++ programming languages, respectively, denoted as SPI-DB* and PatchDB*. We compare RepoSPD with six existing security patch detection methods and five static tools. Our experimental results demonstrate that RepoSPD outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline, with improvements of 11.90%, and 3.10% in terms of accuracy on the two datasets, respectively.

SEDec 9, 2024
XRZoo: A Large-Scale and Versatile Dataset of Extended Reality (XR) Applications

Shuqing Li, Chenran Zhang, Cuiyun Gao et al.

The rapid advancement of Extended Reality (XR, encompassing AR, MR, and VR) and spatial computing technologies forms a foundational layer for the emerging Metaverse, enabling innovative applications across healthcare, education, manufacturing, and entertainment. However, research in this area is often limited by the lack of large, representative, and highquality application datasets that can support empirical studies and the development of new approaches benefiting XR software processes. In this paper, we introduce XRZoo, a comprehensive and curated dataset of XR applications designed to bridge this gap. XRZoo contains 12,528 free XR applications, spanning nine app stores, across all XR techniques (i.e., AR, MR, and VR) and use cases, with detailed metadata on key aspects such as application descriptions, application categories, release dates, user review numbers, and hardware specifications, etc. By making XRZoo publicly available, we aim to foster reproducible XR software engineering and security research, enable cross-disciplinary investigations, and also support the development of advanced XR systems by providing examples to developers. Our dataset serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in improving the scalability, usability, and effectiveness of XR applications. XRZoo will be released and actively maintained.

CLMay 28, 2025
Exploring the Landscape of Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models: Progresses, Challenges and Opportunities

Yiming Huang, Jiyu Guo, Wenxin Mao et al.

Converting natural language (NL) questions into SQL queries, referred to as Text-to-SQL, has emerged as a pivotal technology for facilitating access to relational databases, especially for users without SQL knowledge. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has markedly propelled the field of natural language processing (NLP), opening new avenues to improve text-to-SQL systems. This study presents a systematic review of LLM-based text-to-SQL, focusing on four key aspects: (1) an analysis of the research trends in LLM-based text-to-SQL; (2) an in-depth analysis of existing LLM-based text-to-SQL techniques from diverse perspectives; (3) summarization of existing text-to-SQL datasets and evaluation metrics; and (4) discussion on potential obstacles and avenues for future exploration in this domain. This survey seeks to furnish researchers with an in-depth understanding of LLM-based text-to-SQL, sparking new innovations and advancements in this field.

SEApr 3
Dependency-Guided Repository-Level C-to-Rust Translation with Reinforcement Alignment

Jia Feng, Wenjie Gan, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Automating C-to-Rust migration is critical for improving software security without sacrificing performance. Traditional rule-based methods struggle with diverse C idioms, often producing rigid and unidiomatic Rust code. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive code corpora, offer a promising alternative by leveraging cross-language generalization to generate more idiomatic and maintainable Rust code. However, several challenges remain. First, existing LLM-based approaches fail to handle cross-file dependencies effectively, either ignoring them or including entire files as context, which limits accurate dependency modeling. Second, complex dependencies and structured inputs and outputs make it difficult to verify syntactic correctness and functional equivalence at the repository level. Third, the lack of large-scale C-Rust parallel data constrains model performance. We propose DepTrans, a framework that combines model capability enhancement with structured inference. DepTrans introduces Reinforcement-Aligned Syntax Training to improve generation quality through multi-task fine-tuning and feedback-driven reinforcement learning. It further applies Dependency-Guided Iterative Refinement to capture fine-grained cross-file dependencies and iteratively refine generated Rust code. We construct a dataset of 85k training samples and a benchmark of 145 repository-level instances. Experiments show that DepTrans achieves a 60.7 percent compilation success rate and 43.5 percent computational accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 22.8 and 17.3 percentage points. It also successfully builds 7 of 15 industrial C projects, demonstrating its practical potential.

AIOct 7, 2025
Vul-R2: A Reasoning LLM for Automated Vulnerability Repair

Xin-Cheng Wen, Zirui Lin, Yijun Yang et al.

The exponential increase in software vulnerabilities has created an urgent need for automatic vulnerability repair (AVR) solutions. Recent research has formulated AVR as a sequence generation problem and has leveraged large language models (LLMs) to address this problem. Typically, these approaches prompt or fine-tune LLMs to generate repairs for vulnerabilities directly. Although these methods show state-of-the-art performance, they face the following challenges: (1) Lack of high-quality, vulnerability-related reasoning data. Current approaches primarily rely on foundation models that mainly encode general programming knowledge. Without vulnerability-related reasoning data, they tend to fail to capture the diverse vulnerability repair patterns. (2) Hard to verify the intermediate vulnerability repair process during LLM training. Existing reinforcement learning methods often leverage intermediate execution feedback from the environment (e.g., sandbox-based execution results) to guide reinforcement learning training. In contrast, the vulnerability repair process generally lacks such intermediate, verifiable feedback, which poses additional challenges for model training.

SESep 7, 2025
Empirical Study of Code Large Language Models for Binary Security Patch Detection

Qingyuan Li, Binchang Li, Cuiyun Gao et al.

Security patch detection (SPD) is crucial for maintaining software security, as unpatched vulnerabilities can lead to severe security risks. In recent years, numerous learning-based SPD approaches have demonstrated promising results on source code. However, these approaches typically cannot be applied to closed-source applications and proprietary systems that constitute a significant portion of real-world software, as they release patches only with binary files, and the source code is inaccessible. Given the impressive performance of code large language models (LLMs) in code intelligence and binary analysis tasks such as decompilation and compilation optimization, their potential for detecting binary security patches remains unexplored, exposing a significant research gap between their demonstrated low-level code understanding capabilities and this critical security task. To address this gap, we construct a large-scale binary patch dataset containing \textbf{19,448} samples, with two levels of representation: assembly code and pseudo-code, and systematically evaluate \textbf{19} code LLMs of varying scales to investigate their capability in binary SPD tasks. Our initial exploration demonstrates that directly prompting vanilla code LLMs struggles to accurately identify security patches from binary patches, and even state-of-the-art prompting techniques fail to mitigate the lack of domain knowledge in binary SPD within vanilla models. Drawing on the initial findings, we further investigate the fine-tuning strategy for injecting binary SPD domain knowledge into code LLMs through two levels of representation. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned LLMs achieve outstanding performance, with the best results obtained on the pseudo-code representation.