Building Android applications reliably remains a persistent challenge due to complex dependencies, diverse configurations, and the rapid evolution of the Android ecosystem. This study conducts an empirical analysis of 200 open-source Android projects written in Java and Kotlin to diagnose and resolve build failures. Through a five-phase process encompassing data collection, build execution, failure classification, repair strategy design, and LLM-assisted evaluation, we identified four primary types of build errors: environment issues, dependency and Gradle task errors, configuration problems, and syntax/API incompatibilities. Among the 135 projects that initially failed to build, our diagnostic and repair strategy enabled developers to resolve 102 cases (75.56%), significantly reducing troubleshooting effort. We further examined the potential of Large Language Models, such as GPT-5, to assist in error diagnosis, achieving a 53.3% success rate in suggesting viable fixes. An analysis of project attributes revealed that build success is influenced by programming language, project age, and app size. These findings provide practical insights into improving Android build reliability and advancing AI-assisted software maintenance.

Abstract As the Virtual Reality (VR) industry expands, the need for automated GUI testing is growing rapidly. Large Language Models (LLMs), capable of retaining information long-term and analyzing both visual and textual data, are emerging as a potential key to deciphering the complexities of VR’s evolving user interfaces. In this paper, we conduct a case study to investigate the capability of using LLMs, particularly GPT-4o, for field of view (FOV) analysis in VR exploration testing. Specifically, we validate that LLMs can identify test entities in FOVs and that prompt engineering can effectively enhance the accuracy of test entity identification from $$\varvec{41.67\%}$$ to $$\varvec{71.30\%}$$ . Our study also shows that LLMs can accurately describe identified entities’ features with at least a $$\varvec{90\%}$$ accuracy rate. We further find out that the core features that effectively represent an entity are color, placement, and shape. Furthermore, the combination of the three features can especially be used to improve the accuracy of determining identical entities in multiple FOVs with the highest F1-score of $$\varvec{0.70}$$ . Additionally, our study demonstrates that LLMs are capable of scene recognition and spatial understanding in VR with precisely designed structured prompts. Finally, we find that LLMs fail to label the identified test entities, and we discuss potential solutions as future research directions.

Biometric authentication has become increasingly popular due to its security and convenience; however, traditional biometrics are becoming less desirable in scenarios such as new mobile devices, Virtual Reality, and Smart Vehicles. For example, while face authentication is widely used, it suffers from significant privacy concerns. The collection of complete facial data makes it less desirable for privacy-sensitive applications. Lip authentication, on the other hand, has emerged as a promising biometrics method. However, existing lip-based authentication methods heavily depend on static lip shape when the mouth is closed, which can be less robust due to lip shape dynamic motion and can barely work when the user is speaking. In this paper, we revisit the nature of lip biometrics and extract shape-independent features from the lips. We study the dynamic characteristics of lip biometrics based on articulator motion. Building on the knowledge, we propose a system for shape-independent continuous authentication via lip articulator dynamics. This system enables robust, shape-independent, and continuous authentication, making it particularly suitable for scenarios with high security and privacy requirements. We conducted comprehensive experiments in different environments and attack scenarios and collected a dataset of 50 subjects. The results indicate that our system achieves an overall accuracy of 99.06% and demonstrates robustness under advanced replay attacks and AI deepfake attacks, making it a viable solution for continuous biometric authentication in various applications.

The rise of cloud gaming makes interactive 3D applications an emerging type of data center workload. However, the excessive rendering in current cloud 3D systems leads to large gaps between the cloud and client frame rates (FPS, frames per second), thus wasting resources and power. Although FPS regulation can remove excessive rendering, due to the highly-varying frame processing time and the use of rendering delays, existing cloud FPS regulation solutions have low FPS and slow motion-to-photon (MtP) latency, causing violations of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements.

While various defense mechanisms have been proposed in cybersecurity, it is still unclear how these defense mechanisms should be dynamically employed to mitigate the damage of multi-stage attacks. In this work, we consider the problem of generating defense strategy in real-time to thwart multi-stage attacks. We use the Bayesian condition dependency graph (BCDG) to model the interactions between the attacker and the defender. Considering that both the attacker and the defender have uncertainty about their respective observations, we formulate the strategy selection problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where the attacker and the defender need to find their optimal strategies in a partially observation environment. To solve the problem of state space explosion, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based approach to seek the optimal strategies. We conduct experiments with various settings to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Experiment results show that our DRL-based approach outperforms baselines, and the approach is robust to the uncertain security environment.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software development tools like GitHub Copilot holds the promise of transforming code generation processes. While AI-driven code generation presents numerous advantages for software development, code generated by large language models may introduce challenges related to security, privacy, and copyright issues. However, the performance implications of AI-generated code remain insufficiently explored. This study conducts an empirical analysis focusing on the performance regressions of code generated by GitHub Copilot across three distinct datasets: HumanEval, AixBench, and MBPP. We adopt a comprehensive methodology encompassing static and dynamic performance analyses to assess the effectiveness of the generated code. Our findings reveal that although the generated code is functionally correct, it frequently exhibits performance regressions compared to code solutions crafted by humans. We further investigate the code-level root causes responsible for these performance regressions. We identify four major root causes, i.e., inefficient function calls, inefficient looping, inefficient algorithm, and inefficient use of language features. We further identify a total of ten sub-categories of root causes attributed to the performance regressions of generated code. Additionally, we explore prompt engineering as a potential strategy for optimizing performance. The outcomes suggest that meticulous prompt designs can enhance the performance of AI-generated code. This research offers valuable insights contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of AI-assisted code generation.

To effectively utilize cloud computing, cloud practice and research require accurate knowledge of the performance of cloud applications. However, due to the random performance fluctuations, obtaining accurate performance results in the cloud is extremely difficult. To handle this random fluctuation, prior research on cloud performance testing relied on a non-parametric statistic tool called bootstrapping to design their stop criteria. However, in this paper, we show that the basic bootstrapping employed by prior work overlooks the internal dependency within cloud performance test data, which leads to inaccurate performance results.We then present Metior, a novel automated cloud performance testing methodology, which is designed based on statistical tools of block bootstrapping, the law of large numbers, and autocorrelation. These statistical tools allow Metior to properly consider the internal dependency within cloud performance test data. They also provide better coverage of cloud performance fluctuation and reduce the testing cost. Experimental evaluation on two public clouds showed that 98% of Metior’s tests could provide performance results with less than 3% error. Metior also significantly outperformed existing cloud performance testing methodologies in terms of accuracy and cost – with up to 14% increase in the accurate test count and up to 3.1 times reduction in testing cost.

With the growing popularity of cloud gaming and cloud virtual reality (VR), interactive 3D applications have become a major class of workloads for the cloud. However, despite their growing importance, there is limited public research on how to design cloud systems to efficiently support these applications due to the lack of an open and reliable research infrastructure, including benchmarks and performance analysis tools. The challenges of generating human-like inputs under various system/application nondeterminism and dissecting the performance of complex graphics systems make it very difficult to design such an infrastructure. In this paper, we present the design of a novel research infrastructure, Pictor, for cloud 3D applications and systems. Pictor employs AI to mimic human interactions with complex 3D applications. It can also track the processing of user inputs to provide in-depth performance measurements for the complex software and hardware stack used for cloud 3D-graphics rendering. With Pictor, we designed a benchmark suite with six interactive 3D applications. Performance analyses were conducted with these benchmarks, which show that cloud system designs, including both system software and hardware designs, are crucial to the performance of cloud 3D applications. The analyses also show that energy consumption can be reduced by at least 37% when two 3D applications share a could server. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Pictor, we also implemented two optimizations to address two performance bottlenecks discovered in a state-of-the-art cloud 3D-graphics rendering system. These two optimizations improved the frame rate by 57.7% on average.

The low cost of resource ownership and flexibility have led users to increasingly port their applications to the clouds. To fully realize the cost benefits of cloud services, users usually need to reliably know the execution performance of their applications. However, due to the random performance fluctuations experienced by cloud applications, the black box nature of public clouds and the cloud usage costs, testing on clouds to acquire accurate performance results is extremely difficult. In this paper, we present a novel cloud performance testing methodology called PT4Cloud. By employing non-parametric statistical approaches of likelihood theory and the bootstrap method, PT4Cloud provides reliable stop conditions to obtain highly accurate performance distributions with confidence bands. These statistical approaches also allow users to specify intuitive accuracy goals and easily trade between accuracy and testing cost. We evaluated PT4Cloud with 33 benchmark configurations on Amazon Web Service and Chameleon clouds. When compared with performance data obtained from extensive performance tests, PT4Cloud provides testing results with 95.4% accuracy on average while reducing the number of test runs by 62%. We also propose two test execution reduction techniques for PT4Cloud, which can reduce the number of test runs by 90.1% while retaining an average accuracy of 91%. We compared our technique to three other techniques and found that our results are much more accurate.

The paradigm shift of deploying applications to the cloud has introduced both opportunities and challenges. Although clouds use elasticity to scale resource usage at runtime to help meet an application's performance requirements, developers are still challenged by unpredictable performance, little control of execution environment, and differences among cloud service providers, all while being charged for their cloud usages. Application performance stability is particularly affected by multi-tenancy in which the hardware is shared among varying applications and virtual machines. Developers porting their applications need to meet performance requirements, but testing on the cloud under the effects of performance uncertainty is difficult and expensive, due to high cloud usage costs. This paper presents a first approach to testing an application with typical inputs for how its performance will be affected by performance uncertainty, without incurring undue costs of brute force testing in the cloud. We specify cloud uncertainty testing criteria, design a test-based strategy to characterize the black box cloud's performance distributions using these testing criteria, and support execution of tests to characterize the resource usage and cloud baseline performance of the application to be deployed. Importantly, we developed a smart test oracle that estimates the application's performance with certain confidence levels using the above characterization test results and determines whether it will meet its performance requirements. We evaluated our testing approach on both the Chameleon cloud and Amazon web services; results indicate that this testing strategy shows promise as a cost-effective approach to test for performance effects of cloud uncertainty when porting an application to the cloud.

In modern software development, software localization is a key process to support distribution of software products to the global market.During software localization, developers typically convert all user-visible strings, resource files, and other culture-related elements to the local versions that are well accepted by local users.Despite the popularity of software localization, there have been few studies on the its current status in software practice, such as the proportion of localized projects, the most popular locales, and more importantly, the quality of software localization.In this paper, we present an empirical study on the status of software localization in open source projects.We find from that, popularity of software localization varies a lot in different User Interface (UI) frameworks and domains.Furthermore, we surprisingly find that only about 60% of string keys are actually translated on average in localized top software projects and software localization often span a long period of time in the software development history.