1.8SEAug 5, 2024Code
The Impact of Environment Configurations on the Stability of AI-Enabled SystemsMusfiqur Rahman, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi, Ahmad Abdellatif et al.
Nowadays, software systems tend to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) components. Changes in the operational environment have been known to negatively impact the stability of AI-enabled software systems by causing unintended changes in behavior. However, how an environment configuration impacts the behavior of such systems has yet to be explored. Understanding and quantifying the degree of instability caused by different environment settings can help practitioners decide the best environment configuration for the most stable AI systems. To achieve this goal, we performed experiments with eight different combinations of three key environment variables (operating system, Python version, and CPU architecture) on $30$ open-source AI-enabled systems using the Travis CI platform. We determine the existence and the degree of instability introduced by each configuration using three metrics: the output of an AI component of the system (model performance), the time required to build and run the system (processing time), and the cost associated with building and running the system (expense). Our results indicate that changes in environment configurations lead to instability across all three metrics; however, it is observed more frequently with respect to processing time and expense rather than model performance. For example, between Linux and MacOS, instability is observed in 23\%, 96.67\%, and 100\% of the studied projects in model performance, processing time, and expense, respectively. Our findings underscore the importance of identifying the optimal combination of configuration settings to mitigate drops in model performance and reduce the processing time and expense before deploying an AI-enabled system.
4.7SESep 2, 2024
Automatic Detection of LLM-Generated Code: A Comparative Case Study of Contemporary Models Across Function and Class GranularitiesMusfiqur Rahman, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi, Ahmad Abdellatif et al.
The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation risks incorporating vulnerable code into software systems. Existing detectors face two critical limitations: a lack of systematic cross-model validation and opaque "black box" operation. We address this through a comparative study of code generated by four distinct LLMs: GPT-3.5, Claude 3 Haiku, Claude Haiku 4.5, and GPT-OSS. Analyzing 14,485 Python functions and 11,913 classes from the CodeSearchNet dataset, we generated corresponding code with all four LLMs. Using interpretable software metrics, we trained CatBoost classifiers for each configuration. Our analysis reveals that granularity effects dominate model differences by a factor of 8.6, with negligible feature overlap, indicating that function-level and class-level detection rely on fundamentally disjoint structural signatures. We discover critical granularity-dependent inversions: while modern models (Claude, GPT-OSS) are more detectable at the class level, GPT-3.5 is an anomaly that uniquely excels at the function level. SHAP analysis identifies the Comment-to-Code Ratio as the sole universal discriminator. However, its predictive magnitude varies drastically across models, explaining why detectors trained on specific LLMs fail to generalize. Our findings demonstrate that GPT-3.5's exceptional detectability (AUC-ROC 0.96) is unrepresentative of contemporary models (AUC-ROC approximately between 0.68 and 0.80). Robust detection requires moving beyond single-model studies to account for substantial diversity in structural fingerprints across architectures and granularities.
9.8SEApr 22, 2025Code
A Large-scale Class-level Benchmark Dataset for Code Generation with LLMsMusfiqur Rahman, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi, Emad Shihab
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in code generation tasks. However, most existing benchmarks focus on isolated functions and fail to capture the complexity of real-world, class-level software structures. To address this gap, we introduce a large-scale, Python class-level dataset curated from $13{,}174$ real-world open-source projects. The dataset contains over 842,000 class skeletons, each including class and method signatures, along with associated docstrings when available. We preserve structural and contextual dependencies critical to realistic software development scenarios and enrich the dataset with static code metrics to support downstream analysis. To evaluate the usefulness of this dataset, we use extracted class skeletons as prompts for GPT-4 to generate full class implementations. Results show that the LLM-generated classes exhibit strong lexical and structural similarity to human-written counterparts, with average ROUGE@L, BLEU, and TSED scores of 0.80, 0.59, and 0.73, respectively. These findings confirm that well-structured prompts derived from real-world class skeletons significantly enhance LLM performance in class-level code generation. This dataset offers a valuable resource for benchmarking, training, and improving LLMs in realistic software engineering contexts.