Ling Xu

Wenhan Mu, Ling Xu, Shuren Pei et al.

The widespread adoption of code language models in software engineering tasks has exposed vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, especially the identifier substitution attacks. Although existing identifier substitution attackers demonstrate high success rates, they often produce adversarial examples with unnatural code patterns. In this paper, we systematically assess the quality of adversarial examples using LLM-as-a-Judge. Our analysis reveals that over 80% of adversarial examples generated by state-of-the-art identifier substitution attackers (e.g., ALERT) are actually detectable. Based on this insight, we propose EP-Shield, a unified framework for evaluating and purifying identifier substitution attacks via naturalness-aware reasoning. Specifically, we first evaluate the naturalness of code and identify the perturbed adversarial code, then purify it so that the victim model can restore correct prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of EP-Shield over adversarial fine-tuning (up to 83.36% improvement) and its lightweight design 7B parameters) with GPT-4-level performance.

Wenyan Zhang, Ling Xu, Meng Yan et al.

In recent years, the number of online services has grown rapidly, invoke the required services through the cloud platform has become the primary trend. How to help users choose and recommend high-quality services among huge amounts of unused services has become a hot issue in research. Among the existing QoS prediction methods, the collaborative filtering(CF) method can only learn low-dimensional linear characteristics, and its effect is limited by sparse data. Although existing deep learning methods could capture high-dimensional nonlinear features better, most of them only use the single feature of identity, and the problem of network deepening gradient disappearance is serious, so the effect of QoS prediction is unsatisfactory. To address these problems, we propose an advanced probability distribution and location-aware ResNet approach for QoS Prediction(PLRes). This approach considers the historical invocations probability distribution and location characteristics of users and services, and first use the ResNet in QoS prediction to reuses the features, which alleviates the problems of gradient disappearance and model degradation. A series of experiments are conducted on a real-world web service dataset WS-DREAM. The results indicate that PLRes model is effective for QoS prediction and at the density of 5%-30%, which means the data is sparse, it significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art approach LDCF by 12.35%-15.37% in terms of MAE.

Jiasong Wu, Ling Xu, Youyong Kong et al.

Deep learning is a research hot topic in the field of machine learning. Real-value neural networks (Real NNs), especially deep real networks (DRNs), have been widely used in many research fields. In recent years, the deep complex networks (DCNs) and the deep quaternion networks (DQNs) have attracted more and more attentions. The octonion algebra, which is an extension of complex algebra and quaternion algebra, can provide more efficient and compact expression. This paper constructs a general framework of deep octonion networks (DONs) and provides the main building blocks of DONs such as octonion convolution, octonion batch normalization and octonion weight initialization; DONs are then used in image classification tasks for CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 data sets. Compared with the DRNs, the DCNs, and the DQNs, the proposed DONs have better convergence and higher classification accuracy. The success of DONs is also explained by multi-task learning.