SEApr 3
A Multi-Language Perspective on the Robustness of LLM Code GenerationFazle Rabbi, Zishuo Ding, Jinqiu Yang
Large language models have gained significant traction and popularity in recent times, extending their usage to code-generation tasks. While this field has garnered considerable attention, the exploration of testing and evaluating the robustness of code generation models remains an ongoing endeavor. Previous studies have primarily focused on code generation models specifically for the Python language, overlooking other widely used programming languages. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis to assess the robustness performance of several prominent code generation models and investigate whether robustness can be improved by repairing perturbed docstrings using an LLM. Furthermore, we investigate how their performance varies across different programming languages. To accomplish this, we introduce perturbations in four key areas of the prompt: DocString, function name, syntax, and format. We have compiled and released a dedicated dataset for this purpose. Our results show that all models consistently degrade under perturbations across all three languages, but vary in magnitude depending on the language and perturbation type. Larger model size does not reliably improve robustness, and semantic perturbations prove at least as disruptive as syntactic ones. Our LLM-based docString repair yields only marginal gains for simple perturbations and can degrade performance for semantic ones, highlighting the limits of prompt-level mitigation.
CVJul 20, 2024
GreenStableYolo: Optimizing Inference Time and Image Quality of Text-to-Image GenerationJingzhi Gong, Sisi Li, Giordano d'Aloisio et al.
Tuning the parameters and prompts for improving AI-based text-to-image generation has remained a substantial yet unaddressed challenge. Hence we introduce GreenStableYolo, which improves the parameters and prompts for Stable Diffusion to both reduce GPU inference time and increase image generation quality using NSGA-II and Yolo. Our experiments show that despite a relatively slight trade-off (18%) in image quality compared to StableYolo (which only considers image quality), GreenStableYolo achieves a substantial reduction in inference time (266% less) and a 526% higher hypervolume, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art for text-to-image generation.
SEApr 22
Towards Secure Logging: Characterizing and Benchmarking Logging Code Security Issues with LLMsHe Yang Yuan, Xin Wang, Kundi Yao et al.
Logging code plays an important role in software systems by recording key events and behaviors, which are essential for debugging and monitoring. However, insecure logging practices can inadvertently expose sensitive information or enable attacks such as log injection, posing serious threats to system security and privacy. Prior research has examined general defects in logging code, but systematic analysis of logging code security issues remains limited, particularly in leveraging LLMs for detection and repair. In this paper, we derive a comprehensive taxonomy of logging code security issues, encompassing four common issue categories and 10 corresponding patterns. We further construct a benchmark dataset with 101 real-world logging security issue reports that have been manually reviewed and annotated. We then propose an automated framework that incorporates various contextual knowledge to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in detecting and repairing logging security issues. Our experimental results reveal a notable disparity in performance: while LLMs are moderately effective at detecting security issues (e.g., the accuracy ranges from 12.9% to 52.5% on average), they face noticeable challenges in reliably generating correct code repairs. We also find that the issue description alone improves the LLMs' detection accuracy more than the security pattern explanation or a combination of both. Overall, our findings provide actionable insights for practitioners and highlight the potential and limitations of current LLMs for secure logging.
SEMar 31
Logging Like Humans for LLMs: Rethinking Logging via Execution and Runtime FeedbackXin Wang, Yang Feng, Jiaoxiao Qian et al.
Logging statements are essential for software debugging and maintenance. However, existing approaches to automatic logging generation rely on static analysis and produce statements in a single pass without considering runtime behavior. They are also typically evaluated by similarity to developer-written logs, assuming these logs form an adequate gold standard. This assumption is increasingly limiting in the LLM era, where logs are consumed not only by developers but also by LLMs for downstream tasks. As a result, optimizing logs for human similarity does not necessarily reflect their practical utility. To address these limitations, we introduce ReLog, an iterative logging generation framework guided by runtime feedback. ReLog leverages LLMs to generate, execute, evaluate, and refine logging statements so that runtime logs better support downstream tasks. Instead of comparing against developer-written logs, we evaluate ReLog through downstream debugging tasks, including defect localization and repair. We construct a benchmark based on Defects4J under both direct and indirect debugging settings. Results show that ReLog consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving an F1 score of 0.520 and repairing 97 defects in the direct setting, and the best F1 score of 0.408 in the indirect setting where source code is unavailable. Additional experiments across multiple LLMs demonstrate the generality of the framework, while ablations confirm the importance of iterative refinement and compilation repair. Overall, our work reframes logging as a runtime-guided, task-oriented process and advocates evaluating logs by their downstream utility rather than textual similarity.