Lu Zhang

SE
h-index16
9papers
1,159citations
Novelty54%
AI Score53

9 Papers

12.1CVJul 6, 2024Code
OmChat: A Recipe to Train Multimodal Language Models with Strong Long Context and Video Understanding

Tiancheng Zhao, Qianqian Zhang, Kyusong Lee et al. · cmu

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

10.9SEJul 14
LogiDroid: Individual Functional Test Generation via Business Logic Extraction and Adaptation

Yakun Zhang, Zihan Wang, Xinzhi Peng et al.

Functional testing is essential for verifying that the business logic of mobile applications aligns with user requirements. Despite its importance, functional testing remains heavily dependent on manual effort due to two core challenges. First, acquiring and reusing business logic from unstructured requirements remains difficult, which hinders the understanding of specific functionalities. Second, a significant semantic gap exists when adapting business logic to the diverse GUI environments, which hinders the generation of test cases for specific mobile applications. To address the preceding challenges, we propose LogiDroid, a two-stage approach that generates individual functional test cases by extracting business logic and adapting it to target applications. First, in the Knowledge Retrieval and Fusion stage, two LLM-based agents are employed to construct a functional test dataset, retrieve relevant test cases, and extract structured business logic for the target functionality. Second, in the Context-Aware Test Generation stage, two other LLM-based agents jointly analyze the extracted business logic and the real time GUI environment to incrementally generate context adaptive functional test cases. This design allows LogiDroid to accurately understand application semantics and use domain expertise to generate complete test cases with verification assertions. We assess the effectiveness of LogiDroid using two widely-used datasets that cover 28 real-world applications and 190 functional requirements. Experimental results show that LogiDroid successfully tested 40% of functional requirements on the FrUITeR dataset (an improvement of over 25% compared to the state-of-the-art approaches) and 65% on the Lin dataset (an improvement of over 55% compared to the state-of-the-art approaches). These results demonstrate the significant effectiveness of LogiDroid in functional test generation.

9.3IRAug 18, 2023Code
Meta-learning enhanced next POI recommendation by leveraging check-ins from auxiliary cities

Jinze Wang, Lu Zhang, Zhu Sun et al.

Most existing point-of-interest (POI) recommenders aim to capture user preference by employing city-level user historical check-ins, thus facilitating users' exploration of the city. However, the scarcity of city-level user check-ins brings a significant challenge to user preference learning. Although prior studies attempt to mitigate this challenge by exploiting various context information, e.g., spatio-temporal information, they ignore to transfer the knowledge (i.e., common behavioral pattern) from other relevant cities (i.e., auxiliary cities). In this paper, we investigate the effect of knowledge distilled from auxiliary cities and thus propose a novel Meta-learning Enhanced next POI Recommendation framework (MERec). The MERec leverages the correlation of check-in behaviors among various cities into the meta-learning paradigm to help infer user preference in the target city, by holding the principle of "paying more attention to more correlated knowledge". Particularly, a city-level correlation strategy is devised to attentively capture common patterns among cities, so as to transfer more relevant knowledge from more correlated cities. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the proposed MERec against state-of-the-art algorithms.

7.9SEApr 4
Toward Executable Repository-Level Code Generation via Environment Alignment

Ruwei Pan, Junlei Shen, Linhao Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on code generation, but existing methods still struggle with repository-level code generation under executable validation. Under this evaluation setting, success is determined not by the plausibility of isolated code fragments, but by whether a generated multi-file repository can be successfully installed, have its dependencies and internal references resolved, be launched, and be validated in a real execution environment. To address this challenge, we propose EnvGraph, a framework for repository-level code generation that formulates repository executability as an environment alignment problem. EnvGraph jointly models two coupled conditions for successful repository execution, namely external dependency satisfaction and repository-internal reference resolution. It maintains a dual-layer environment representation, uses execution evidence to perform execution-evidence-based attribution, and guides repository generation through a unified targeted revision mechanism within an iterative alignment loop. We evaluate EnvGraph on repository-level code generation with three representative backbone LLMs and compare it against representative environment-aware and repository-level baselines. Experimental results show that EnvGraph consistently achieves the best performance on these repository-level benchmarks. In particular, it outperforms the strongest non-EnvGraph baseline by an absolute margin of 5.72--5.87 percentage points in Functional Correctness and 4.58--8.66 percentage points in Non-Functional Quality.

8.6SEApr 4
Persistent Cross-Attempt State Optimization for Repository-Level Code Generation

Ruwei Pan, Jiangshuai Wang, Qisheng Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in repository-level code generation. However, solving the same repository-level task often requires multiple attempts, while existing methods still optimize each attempt in isolation and do not preserve or reuse task-specific state across attempts. In this paper, we propose LiveCoder, a novel framework for repository-level code generation based on cross-attempt knowledge optimization. LiveCoder maintains persistent task-specific state from prior attempts to guide subsequent generation. This state includes success knowledge, which captures reusable signals from previously strong repositories, failure knowledge, which records unsuccessful outcomes and their diagnostic signals, and a historical-best repository, which preserves the strongest result found so far and prevents regression. These components collectively transform repeated repository generation into a persistent, knowledge-driven optimization process. We evaluate LiveCoder using four frontier LLMs on two representative repository-level code generation benchmarks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LiveCoder, improving the functional score by up to 22.94 percentage points, increasing repository reuse to 81.58%, and reducing cost by up to 53.63% on RAL-Bench while maintaining broadly stable non-functional quality.

13.0DBMar 24
Why Database Manuals Are Not Enough: Efficient and Reliable Configuration Tuning for DBMSs via Code-Driven LLM Agents

Xinyi Zhang, Tiantian Chen, Zhentao Han et al.

Modern database management systems (DBMSs) expose hundreds of configuration knobs that critically influence performance. Existing automated tuning methods either adopt a data-driven paradigm, which incurs substantial overhead, or rely on manual-driven heuristics extracted from database documentation, which are often limited and overly generic. Motivated by the fact that the control logic of configuration knobs is inherently encoded in the DBMS source code, we argue that promising tuning strategies can be mined directly from the code, uncovering fine-grained insights grounded in system internals. To this end, we propose SysInsight, a code-driven database tuning system that automatically extracts fine-grained tuning knowledge from DBMS source code to accelerate and stabilize the tuning process. SysInsight combines static code analysis with LLM-based reasoning to identify knob-controlled execution paths and extract semantic tuning insights. These insights are then transformed into quantitative and verifiable tuning rules via association rule mining grounded in tuning observations. During online tuning, system diagnosis is applied to identify critical knobs, which are adjusted under the rule guidance. Evaluations demonstrate that compared to the SOTA baseline, SysInsight converges to the best configuration on average 7.11X faster while achieving a 19.9% performance improvement.

8.2SEMar 30
Toward Functional and Non-Functional Evaluation of Application-Level Code Generation

Ruwei Pan, Yakun Zhang, Qingyuan Liang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on code generation. However, most prior evaluations focus on snippet-level outputs, such as function generation or repository completion. These settings do not fully evaluate application-level code generation, where the goal is to produce a runnable repository with coherent multi-file structure, dependency support, and end-to-end executability. In addition, real-world software quality depends not only on functional correctness but also on non-functional quality attributes, such as maintainability and security. In this paper, we present RAL-Bench, a benchmark and evaluation framework for application-level code generation. For each task, RAL-Bench derives a concise natural-language requirement from a high-quality reference project, constructs black-box system tests for both functional correctness and non-functional quality attributes. It also retains only the candidate tests that pass on the reference repository. Under this unified evaluation protocol, functional correctness is measured by the system test pass rate, while non-functional quality is evaluated along five ISO/IEC 25010-inspired dimensions, with per-dimension diagnostics and reference-normalized scoring.We evaluate 16 frontier LLMs under a controlled zero-shot setting with greedy decoding. The results show that functional correctness remains the primary bottleneck in application-level code generation, while non-functional quality also remains challenging. Under our evaluation protocol, no model exceeds a 45\% functional score. These findings suggest that strong performance on existing code generation benchmarks does not yet translate to strong performance on application-level repository generation. This result highlights the need for evaluation settings that directly assess end-to-end repository generation rather than relying only on snippet-level success.

1.9CLAug 12, 2020Code
OCoR: An Overlapping-Aware Code Retriever

Qihao Zhu, Zeyu Sun, Xiran Liang et al.

Code retrieval helps developers reuse the code snippet in the open-source projects. Given a natural language description, code retrieval aims to search for the most relevant code among a set of code. Existing state-of-the-art approaches apply neural networks to code retrieval. However, these approaches still fail to capture an important feature: overlaps. The overlaps between different names used by different people indicate that two different names may be potentially related (e.g., "message" and "msg"), and the overlaps between identifiers in code and words in natural language descriptions indicate that the code snippet and the description may potentially be related. To address these problems, we propose a novel neural architecture named OCoR, where we introduce two specifically-designed components to capture overlaps: the first embeds identifiers by character to capture the overlaps between identifiers, and the second introduces a novel overlap matrix to represent the degrees of overlaps between each natural language word and each identifier. The evaluation was conducted on two established datasets. The experimental results show that OCoR significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches and achieves 13.1% to 22.3% improvements. Moreover, we also conducted several in-depth experiments to help understand the performance of different components in OCoR.

3.6IRApr 3, 2025
Shallow AutoEncoding Recommender with Cold Start Handling via Side Features

Edward DongBo Cui, Lu Zhang, William Ping-hsun Lee

User and item cold starts present significant challenges in industrial applications of recommendation systems. Supplementing user-item interaction data with metadata is a common solution-but often at the cost of introducing additional biases. In this work, we introduce an augmented EASE model that seamlessly integrates both user and item side information to address these cold start issues. Our straightforward, autoencoder-based method produces a closed-form solution that leverages rich content signals for cold items while refining user representations in data-sparse environments. Importantly, our method strikes a balance by effectively recommending cold start items and handling cold start users without incurring extra bias, and it maintains strong performance in warm settings. Experimental results demonstrate improved recommendation accuracy and robustness compared to previous collaborative filtering approaches. Moreover, our model serves as a strong baseline for future comparative studies.