Kenji Tei

Toshihide Ubukata, Enhong Mu, Takuto Yamauchi et al.

Controller synthesis is a formal method approach for automatically generating Labeled Transition System (LTS) controllers that satisfy specified properties. The efficiency of the synthesis process, however, is critically dependent on exploration policies. These policies often rely on fixed rules or strategies learned through reinforcement learning (RL) that consider only a limited set of current features. To address this limitation, this paper introduces GCRL, an approach that enhances RL-based methods by integrating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). GCRL encodes the history of LTS exploration into a graph structure, allowing it to capture a broader, non-current-based context. In a comparative experiment against state-of-the-art methods, GCRL exhibited superior learning efficiency and generalization across four out of five benchmark domains, except one particular domain characterized by high symmetry and strictly local interactions.

Jialong Li, Mingyue Zhang, Nianyu Li et al.

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) are designed to handle changes and uncertainties through a feedback loop with four core functionalities: monitoring, analyzing, planning, and execution. Recently, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially the area of large language models, has shown impressive performance in data comprehension and logical reasoning. These capabilities are highly aligned with the functionalities required in SASs, suggesting a strong potential to employ GenAI to enhance SASs. However, the specific benefits and challenges of employing GenAI in SASs remain unclear. Yet, providing a comprehensive understanding of these benefits and challenges is complex due to several reasons: limited publications in the SAS field, the technological and application diversity within SASs, and the rapid evolution of GenAI technologies. To that end, this paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners a comprehensive snapshot that outlines the potential benefits and challenges of employing GenAI's within SAS. Specifically, we gather, filter, and analyze literature from four distinct research fields and organize them into two main categories to potential benefits: (i) enhancements to the autonomy of SASs centered around the specific functions of the MAPE-K feedback loop, and (ii) improvements in the interaction between humans and SASs within human-on-the-loop settings. From our study, we outline a research roadmap that highlights the challenges of integrating GenAI into SASs. The roadmap starts with outlining key research challenges that need to be tackled to exploit the potential for applying GenAI in the field of SAS. The roadmap concludes with a practical reflection, elaborating on current shortcomings of GenAI and proposing possible mitigation strategies.

Toshihide Ubukata, Jialong Li, Kenji Tei

Diffusion models, which leverage stochastic processes to capture complex data distributions effectively, have shown their performance as generative models, achieving notable success in image-related tasks through iterative denoising processes. Recently, diffusion models have been further applied and show their strong abilities in planning tasks, leading to a significant growth in related publications since 2023. To help researchers better understand the field and promote the development of the field, we conduct a systematic literature review of recent advancements in the application of diffusion models for planning. Specifically, this paper categorizes and discusses the current literature from the following perspectives: (i) relevant datasets and benchmarks used for evaluating diffusion modelbased planning; (ii) fundamental studies that address aspects such as sampling efficiency; (iii) skill-centric and condition-guided planning for enhancing adaptability; (iv) safety and uncertainty managing mechanism for enhancing safety and robustness; and (v) domain-specific application such as autonomous driving. Finally, given the above literature review, we further discuss the challenges and future directions in this field.

Shogo Morita, Yan Zhang, Takuto Yamauchi et al.

People with color vision deficiency often face challenges in distinguishing colors such as red and green, which can complicate daily tasks and require the use of assistive tools or environmental adjustments. Current support tools mainly focus on presentation-based aids, like the color vision modes found in iPhone accessibility settings. However, offering context-aware support, like indicating the doneness of meat, remains a challenge since task-specific solutions are not cost-effective for all possible scenarios. To address this, our paper proposes an application that provides contextual and autonomous assistance. This application is mainly composed of: (i) an augmented reality interface that efficiently captures context; and (ii) a multi-modal large language model-based reasoner that serves to cognitize the context and then reason about the appropriate support contents. Preliminary user experiments with two color vision deficient users across five different scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness and universality of our application.

Yusei Ishimizu, Jialong Li, Jinglue Xu et al.

Rule-based adaptation is a foundational approach to self-adaptation, characterized by its human readability and rapid response. However, building high-performance and robust adaptation rules is often a challenge because it essentially involves searching the optimal design in a complex (variables) space. In response, this paper attempt to employ large language models (LLMs) as a optimizer to construct and optimize adaptation rules, leveraging the common sense and reasoning capabilities inherent in LLMs. Preliminary experiments conducted in SWIM have validated the effectiveness and limitation of our method.

Ryoya Koyama, Zhiyao Wang, Devi Karolita et al.

Modern automated accessibility testing tools for mobile applications have significantly improved the detection of interface violations, yet their impact on remediation remains limited. A key reason is that existing tools typically produce low-level, technical outputs that are difficult for non-specialist stakeholders, such as product managers and designers, to interpret in terms of real user harm and compliance risk. In this paper, we present \textsc{HEAR} (\underline{H}uman-c\underline{E}ntered \underline{A}ccessibility \underline{R}eporting), a framework that bridges this interpretation gap by transforming raw accessibility bug reports into empathetic, stakeholder-oriented narratives. Given the outputs of the existing accessibility testing tool, \textsc{HEAR} first reconstructs the UI context through semantic slicing and visual grounding, then dynamically injects disability-oriented personas matched to each violation type, and finally performs multi-layer reasoning to explain the physical barrier, functional blockage, and relevant legal or compliance concerns. We evaluate the framework on real-world accessibility issues collected from four popular Android applications and conduct a user study (N=12). The results show that \textsc{HEAR} generates factually grounded reports and substantially improves perceived empathy, urgency, persuasiveness, and awareness of legal risk compared with raw technical logs, while imposing little additional cognitive burden.

Toshihide Ubukata, Zhiyao Wang, Enhong Mu et al.

On-the-fly Directed Controller Synthesis (OTF-DCS) mitigates state-space explosion by incrementally exploring the system and relies critically on an exploration policy to guide search efficiently. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn such policies and achieve promising zero-shot generalization from small training instances to larger unseen ones. However, a fundamental limitation is anisotropic generalization, where an RL policy exhibits strong performance only in a specific region of the domain-parameter space while remaining fragile elsewhere due to training stochasticity and trajectory-dependent bias. To address this, we propose a Soft Mixture-of-Experts framework that combines multiple RL experts via a prior-confidence gating mechanism and treats these anisotropic behaviors as complementary specializations. The evaluation on the Air Traffic benchmark shows that Soft-MoE substantially expands the solvable parameter space and improves robustness compared to any single expert.

Enhong Mu, Jinyu Cai, Yijun Lu et al.

The rapid iteration and frequent updates of modern video games pose significant challenges to the efficiency and specificity of testing. Although automated playtesting methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise, they often lack structured knowledge accumulation mechanisms, making it difficult to conduct precise and efficient testing tailored for incremental game updates. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a KLPEG framework. The framework constructs and maintains a Knowledge Graph (KG) to systematically model game elements, task dependencies, and causal relationships, enabling knowledge accumulation and reuse across versions. Building on this foundation, the framework utilizes LLMs to parse natural language update logs, identify the scope of impact through multi-hop reasoning on the KG, enabling the generation of update-tailored test cases. Experiments in two representative game environments, Overcooked and Minecraft, demonstrate that KLPEG can more accurately locate functionalities affected by updates and complete tests in fewer steps, significantly improving both playtesting effectiveness and efficiency.

Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li, Zhen Liu et al.

Recently, program synthesis driven by large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly popular. However, program synthesis for machine learning (ML) tasks still poses significant challenges. This paper explores a novel form of program synthesis, targeting ML programs, by combining LLMs and automated machine learning (autoML). Specifically, our goal is to fully automate the generation and optimization of the code of the entire ML workflow, from data preparation to modeling and post-processing, utilizing only textual descriptions of the ML tasks. To manage the length and diversity of ML programs, we propose to break each ML program into smaller, manageable parts. Each part is generated separately by the LLM, with careful consideration of their compatibilities. To ensure compatibilities, we design a testing technique for ML programs. Unlike traditional program synthesis, which typically relies on binary evaluations (i.e., correct or incorrect), evaluating ML programs necessitates more than just binary judgments. Our approach automates the numerical evaluation and optimization of these programs, selecting the best candidates through autoML techniques. In experiments across various ML tasks, our method outperforms existing methods in 10 out of 12 tasks for generating ML programs. In addition, autoML significantly improves the performance of the generated ML programs. In experiments, given the textual task description, our method, Text-to-ML, generates the complete and optimized ML program in a fully autonomous process. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/JLX0/llm-automl.

Zhenyu Mao, Jialong Li, Dongming Jin et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the potential for vulnerability detection, a crucial component of software quality assurance. Despite this progress, most studies have been limited to the perspective of a single role, usually testers, lacking diverse viewpoints from different roles in a typical software development life-cycle, including both developers and testers. To this end, this paper introduces a multi-role approach to employ LLMs to act as different roles simulating a real-life code review process and engaging in discussions toward a consensus on the existence and classification of vulnerabilities in the code. Preliminary evaluation of this approach indicates a 13.48% increase in the precision rate, an 18.25% increase in the recall rate, and a 16.13% increase in the F1 score.

Jinyu Cai, Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li et al.

Evolutionary computation (EC), as a powerful optimization algorithm, has been applied across various domains. However, as the complexity of problems increases, the limitations of EC have become more apparent. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has not only transformed natural language processing but also extended their capabilities to diverse fields. By harnessing LLMs' vast knowledge and adaptive capabilities, we provide a forward-looking overview of potential improvements LLMs can bring to EC, focusing on the algorithms themselves, population design, and additional enhancements. This presents a promising direction for future research at the intersection of LLMs and EC.

Jinyu Cai, Jialong Li, Mingyue Zhang et al.

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Sina Weibo play a crucial role in global communication but often encounter strict regulations in geopolitically sensitive regions. This situation has prompted users to ingeniously modify their way of communicating, frequently resorting to coded language in these regulated social media environments. This shift in communication is not merely a strategy to counteract regulation, but a vivid manifestation of language evolution, demonstrating how language naturally evolves under societal and technological pressures. Studying the evolution of language in regulated social media contexts is of significant importance for ensuring freedom of speech, optimizing content moderation, and advancing linguistic research. This paper proposes a multi-agent simulation framework using Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the evolution of user language in regulated social media environments. The framework employs LLM-driven agents: supervisory agent who enforce dialogue supervision and participant agents who evolve their language strategies while engaging in conversation, simulating the evolution of communication styles under strict regulations aimed at evading social media regulation. The study evaluates the framework's effectiveness through a range of scenarios from abstract scenarios to real-world situations. Key findings indicate that LLMs are capable of simulating nuanced language dynamics and interactions in constrained settings, showing improvement in both evading supervision and information accuracy as evolution progresses. Furthermore, it was found that LLM agents adopt different strategies for different scenarios.

Jinyu Cai, Yusei Ishimizu, Mingyue Zhang et al.

Social media platforms frequently impose restrictive policies to moderate user content, prompting the emergence of creative evasion language strategies. This paper presents a multi-agent framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate the iterative evolution of language strategies under regulatory constraints. In this framework, participant agents, as social media users, continuously evolve their language expression, while supervisory agents emulate platform-level regulation by assessing policy violations. To achieve a more faithful simulation, we employ a dual design of language strategies (constraint and expression) to differentiate conflicting goals and utilize an LLM-driven GA (Genetic Algorithm) for the selection, mutation, and crossover of language strategies. The framework is evaluated using two distinct scenarios: an abstract password game and a realistic simulated illegal pet trade scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that as the number of dialogue rounds increases, both the number of uninterrupted dialogue turns and the accuracy of information transmission improve significantly. Furthermore, a user study with 40 participants validates the real-world relevance of the generated dialogues and strategies. Moreover, ablation studies validate the importance of the GA, emphasizing its contribution to long-term adaptability and improved overall results.

Jinyu Cai, Jialong Li, Mingyue Zhang et al.

In this paper, we address the challenges faced by Value Iteration Networks (VIN) in handling larger input maps and mitigating the impact of accumulated errors caused by increased iterations. We propose a novel approach, Value Iteration Networks with Gated Summarization Module (GS-VIN), which incorporates two main improvements: (1) employing an Adaptive Iteration Strategy in the Value Iteration module to reduce the number of iterations, and (2) introducing a Gated Summarization module to summarize the iterative process. The adaptive iteration strategy uses larger convolution kernels with fewer iteration times, reducing network depth and increasing training stability while maintaining the accuracy of the planning process. The gated summarization module enables the network to emphasize the entire planning process, rather than solely relying on the final global planning outcome, by temporally and spatially resampling the entire planning process within the VI module. We conduct experiments on 2D grid world path-finding problems and the Atari Mr. Pac-man environment, demonstrating that GS-VIN outperforms the baseline in terms of single-step accuracy, planning success rate, and overall performance across different map sizes. Additionally, we provide an analysis of the relationship between input size, kernel size, and the number of iterations in VI-based models, which is applicable to a majority of VI-based models and offers valuable insights for researchers and industrial deployment.

Pengcheng Jiang, Kenji Tei

Users interacting with a system through UI are typically obliged to perform their actions in a pre-determined order, to successfully achieve certain functional goals. However, such obligations are often not followed strictly by users, which may lead to the violation to security properties, especially in security-critical systems. To improve the security with the awareness of unexpected user behaviors, a system can be redesigned to a more robust one by changing the order of actions in its specification. Meanwhile, we anticipate that the functionalities would remain consistent following the modifications. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to automatically produce specification revisions tackling the attack scenarios caused by weakened user obligations. By our algorithm, all the revisions would be generated to maintain the integrity of the functionalities using a novel recomposition approach. Then, the eligible revisions that can satisfy the security requirements would be efficiently spotted by a hybrid approach combining model checking and machine learning techniques. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing its performance with a state-of-the-art approach regarding their coverage and searching speed of the desirable revisions.

Mingyue Zhang, Jialong Li, Haiyan Zhao et al.

A self-learning adaptive system (SLAS) uses machine learning to enable and enhance its adaptability. Such systems are expected to perform well in dynamic situations. For learning high-performance adaptation policy, some assumptions must be made on the environment-system dynamics when information about the real situation is incomplete. However, these assumptions cannot be expected to be always correct, and yet it is difficult to enumerate all possible assumptions. This leads to the problem of incomplete-information learning. We consider this problem as multiple model problem in terms of finding the adaptation policy that can cope with multiple models of environment-system dynamics. This paper proposes a novel approach to engineering the online adaptation of SLAS. It separates three concerns that are related to the adaptation policy and presents the modeling and synthesis process, with the goal of achieving higher model construction efficiency. In addition, it designs a meta-reinforcement learning algorithm for learning the meta policy over the multiple models, so that the meta policy can quickly adapt to the real environment-system dynamics. At last, it reports the case study on a robotic system to evaluate the adaptability of the approach.

Danny Weyns, Bradley Schmerl, Masako Kishida et al.

Two established approaches to engineer adaptive systems are architecture-based adaptation that uses a Monitor-Analysis-Planning-Executing (MAPE) loop that reasons over architectural models (aka Knowledge) to make adaptation decisions, and control-based adaptation that relies on principles of control theory (CT) to realize adaptation. Recently, we also observe a rapidly growing interest in applying machine learning (ML) to support different adaptation mechanisms. While MAPE and CT have particular characteristics and strengths to be applied independently, in this paper, we are concerned with the question of how these approaches are related with one another and whether combining them and supporting them with ML can produce better adaptive systems. We motivate the combined use of different adaptation approaches using a scenario of a cloud-based enterprise system and illustrate the analysis when combining the different approaches. To conclude, we offer a set of open questions for further research in this interesting area.

Javier Cámara, Alessandro V. Papadopoulos, Thomas Vogel et al.

Two of the main paradigms used to build adaptive software employ different types of properties to capture relevant aspects of the system's run-time behavior. On the one hand, control systems consider properties that concern static aspects like stability, as well as dynamic properties that capture the transient evolution of variables such as settling time. On the other hand, self-adaptive systems consider mostly non-functional properties that capture concerns such as performance, reliability, and cost. In general, it is not easy to reconcile these two types of properties or identify under which conditions they constitute a good fit to provide run-time guarantees. There is a need of identifying the key properties in the areas of control and self-adaptation, as well as of characterizing and mapping them to better understand how they relate and possibly complement each other. In this paper, we take a first step to tackle this problem by: (1) identifying a set of key properties in control theory, (2) illustrating the formalization of some of these properties employing temporal logic languages commonly used to engineer self-adaptive software systems, and (3) illustrating how to map key properties that characterize self-adaptive software systems into control properties, leveraging their formalization in temporal logics. We illustrate the different steps of the mapping on an exemplar case in the cloud computing domain and conclude with identifying open challenges in the area.