Deep learning (DL) libraries are widely used in critical applications, where even subtle silent bugs can lead to serious consequences. While existing DL fuzzing techniques have made progress in detecting crashes, they inherently struggle to detect silent bugs due to the lack of effective test programs and corresponding oracles. Building on the observation that historical bug reports contain rich, underutilized information about silent bugs, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to perform versatile yet controlled bug transfer for silent bug fuzzing. Specifically, our approach uses LLMs to extract context-aware bug patterns from historical issues, match semantically related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) using functionality-based embeddings, and synthesize test cases with customized oracles. This enables proactive detection of silent bugs by transferring high-risk contexts and oracle designs from known buggy APIs to functionally similar target APIs. To ensure the reliability of our context-aware bug transfer, we introduce an LLM-powered self-validation module that systematically evaluates the validity of each transferred bug instance. We implement this methodology in a tool named TransFuzz and evaluate it on three mainstream DL libraries: PyTorch, TensorFlow, and MindSpore. TransFuzz successfully discovers 79 previously unknown bugs (12 confirmed as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)) in 10 bug types, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability in migrating DL library bug discovery capabilities.

In software development, developers extensively utilize third-party libraries to avoid implementing existing functionalities. When a new third-party library vulnerability is disclosed, project maintainers need to determine whether their projects are affected by the vulnerability, which requires developers to invest substantial effort in assessment. However, existing tools face a series of issues: static analysis tools produce false alarms, dynamic analysis tools require existing tests and test generation tools have low success rates when facing complex vulnerabilities.

Test migration, which enables the reuse of test cases crafted with knowledge and creativity by testers across various platforms and programming languages, has exhibited effectiveness in mobile app testing. However, unit test migration at the source code level has not garnered adequate attention and exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-language and cross-platform test migration methodology, named MUT, which consists of four modules: code mapping, test case filtering, test case translation, and test case adaptation. MUT initially calculates code mappings to establish associations between source and target projects, and identifies suitable unit tests for migration from the source project. Then, MUT's code translation component generates a syntax tree by parsing the code to be migrated and progressively converts each node in the tree, ultima tely generating the target tests, which are compiled and executed in the target project. Moreover, we develop a web tool to assist developers in test migration. The effectiveness of our approach has been validated on five prevalent functional domain projects within the open-source community. We migrate a total of 550 unit tests and submitted pull requests to augment test code in the target projects on GitHub. By the time of this paper submission, 253 of these tests have already been merged into the projects (including 197 unit tests in the Luliyucoordinate-LeetCode project and 56 unit tests in the Rangerlee-HtmlParser project). Through running these tests, we identify 5 bugs, and 2 functional defects, and submitted corresponding issues to the project. The evaluation substantiates that MUT's test migration is both viable and beneficial across programming languages and different projects.

To date, over 40 Automated Program Repair (APR) tools have been designed with varying bug-fixing strategies, which have been demonstrated to have complementary performance in terms of being effective for different bug classes. Intuitively, it should be feasible to improve the overall bug-fixing performance of APR via assembling existing tools. Unfortunately, simply invoking all available APR tools for a given bug can result in unacceptable costs on APR execution as well as on patch validation (via expensive testing). Therefore, while assembling existing tools is appealing, it requires an efficient strategy to reconcile the need to fix more bugs and the requirements for practicality. In light of this problem, we propose a Preference-based Ensemble Program Repair framework (P-EPR), which seeks to effectively rank APR tools for repairing different bugs. P-EPR is the first non-learning-based APR ensemble method that is novel in its exploitation of repair patterns as a major source of knowledge for ranking APR tools and its reliance on a dynamic update strategy that enables it to immediately exploit and benefit from newly derived repair results. Experimental results show that P-EPR outperforms existing strategies significantly both in flexibility and effectiveness.

End-to-end UI testing plays an indispensable role in web testing. However, the maintenance of UI test scripts can become a challenge as web applications undergo changes, leading to the potential breakage of these scripts. The manual repair of broken scripts is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, making it imperative to study automated repair approaches. Existing approaches have relied on either the Document Object Model (DOM) or visual information alone to repair broken scripts, which show limited effectiveness as they only utilize a subset of the available information. Furthermore, merely combining the two approaches is not sufficient to improve effectiveness, as the use of two disparate methods may result in conflicting repair outcomes. In this study, we present a novel approach to web test repair that considers both information in the DOM and UI. To optimize the utilization of this information, our method classifies it as either identity-related or appearance-related, subsequently prioritizing its application in the repair process. In addition, we propose a more advanced lightweight Convolutional Neural Network based approach for better processing visual information. Our approach has been implemented as a tool named Webrl, which is available for practical use and further research. The effectiveness of Webrl was evaluated on a set of broken UI scripts constructed from 38 real-world web sites and was found to outperform the state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.

Injection vulnerabilities are among the most serious and dangerous security defects, as they can be exploited by attackers to inject malicious inputs and carry out cybercrimes. Timely fixing of injection vulnerabilities is crucial. However, manual repairs of injection vulnerabilities often require specialized knowledge and are prone to errors, posing a challenge and a heavy burden on developers. In recent years, Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have shown promising momentum in automatically fixing general defects. Yet, there has been no research on how APR techniques perform in repairing injection vulnerabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study. We first construct a benchmark for injection vulnerability repair and evaluate several representative state-of-the-art APR approaches on this benchmark. The results show that existing APR tools do not adequately support the repair of injection vulnerabilities. To investigate the underlying reasons, we compare the characteristics of patches for injection vulnerabilities and general defects, and explore whether the plastic surgery hypothesis widely used in APR still holds for injection vulnerabilities. The results reveal that fixing injection vulnerabilities is more complex than fixing general defects due to significant differences in the characteristics of their patches. Additionally, the support for the plastic surgery hypothesis is much lower in the context of injection vulnerability repair. We also analyzed developers' intentions when fixing injection vulnerabilities. Finally, we summarize the implications and point out potential research directions for injection vulnerability repair.

The coordinated vulnerability disclosure model, widely adopted in open-source software (OSS) organizations, recommends the silent resolution of vulnerabilities without revealing vulnerability information until their public disclosure. However, the inherently public nature of OSS development leads to security fixes becoming publicly available in repositories weeks before the official disclosure of vulnerabilities. This time gap poses a significant security risk to OSS users, as attackers could discover the fix and exploit vulnerabilities before disclosure. Thus, there is a critical need for OSS users to sense fixes as early as possible to address the vulnerability before any exploitation occurs. In response to this challenge, we introduce EarlyVulnFix, a novel approach designed to identify silent fixes for taint-style vulnerabilities—a persistent class of security weaknesses where attacker-controlled input reaches sensitive operations (sink) without proper sanitization. Leveraging data flow and dependency analysis, our tool distinguishes two types of connections between newly introduced code and sinks, tailored for two common fix scenarios. Our evaluation demonstrates that EarlyVulnFix surpasses state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin in terms of F1 score. Furthermore, when applied to the 700 latest commits across seven projects, EarlyVulnFix detected three security fixes before their respective security releases, highlighting its effectiveness in identifying unreported vulnerability fixes in the wild.

Code completion is an important feature in Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). These years, researchers have been making efforts for intelligent code completion. However, existing work on intelligent code completion either only considered production code, or did not distinguish between production code and test code. It is unclear how effective existing completion models are for test code completion, nor whether we can further improve it. In this work, we focus on the completion of test code. We first find through experiments that completion models for production code are suboptimal for test code completion. Then we analyze the specific characteristics of test code, and observe that test code has inter- and intra-project similarities, and a strong relationship with its focal class and other production classes depending on the focal class (i.e., focal-related code). By incorporating test code from other projects to fine-tune existing models, we leverage the inter-project similarity of test code to improve the completion of tokens specific to test code. By introducing a local component and constructing existing test code as well as the focal-related code in the project as references, we enhance existing code completion models with the intra-project similarity and the focal-related code of test code. Experiments show that each characteristic of test code we exploit can bring substantial improvement to test code completion and our integrated framework outperforms other baseline frameworks. Compared to the base completion model, on token-level completion, our optimal model for test code completion relatively improves all-token and identifier completion accuracy by 7.68% and 19.96%, respectively; on line-level completion, it relatively improves edit-distance similarity and exact-match metrics by 8.89% and 22.82%, respectively. Moreover, we perform error analysis and point out potential directions for future work.

Software testing is one of the most essential parts of the software lifecycle and requires a substantial amount of time and effort. During the software evolution, test cases should co-evolve with the production code. However, the co-evolution of test cases often fails due to tight project schedules and other reasons. Obsolete test cases improve the cost of software maintenance and may fail to reveal faults and even lead to future bugs. Therefore, it is essential to detect and update these obsolete test cases in time. In this paper, we propose a novel approach Ceprot (Co-Evolution of Production-Test Code) to identify outdated test cases and update them automatically according to changes in the production code. Ceprot consists of two stages, i.e., obsolete test identification and updating. Specifically, given a production code change and a corresponding test case, Ceprot first identifies whether the test case should be updated. If the test is identified as obsolete, Ceprot will update it to a new version of test case. To evaluate the effectiveness of the two stages, we construct two datasets. Our dataset focuses on method-level production code changes and updates on their obsolete test cases. The experimental results show that Ceprot can effectively identify obsolete test cases with precision and recall of 98.3% and 90.0%, respectively. In addition, test cases generated by Ceprot are identical to the ground truth for 12.3% of samples that are identified as obsolete by Ceprot. We also conduct dynamic evaluation and human evaluation to measure the effectiveness of the updated test cases by Ceprot. 48.0% of updated test cases can be compiled and the average coverage of updated cases is 34.2% which achieves 89% coverage improvement over the obsolete tests. We believe that this study can motivate the co-evolution of production and test code.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code completion. However, due to the lack of domain-specific knowledge, they may not be optimal in completing code that requires intensive domain knowledge for example completing the library names. Although there are several works that have confirmed the effectiveness of fine-tuning techniques to adapt language models for code completion in specific domains. They are limited by the need for constant fine-tuning of the model when the project is in constant iteration. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose$k$NM-LM, a retrieval-augmented language model (R-LM), that integrates domain knowledge into language models without fine-tuning. Different from previous techniques, our approach is able to automatically adapt to different language models and domains. Specifically, it utilizes the in-domain code to build the retrieval-based database decoupled from LM, and then combines it with LM through Bayesian inference to complete the code. The extensive experiments on the completion of intra-project and intra-scenario have confirmed that$k$NM-LM brings about appreciable enhancements when compared to CodeGPT and UnixCoder. A deep analysis of our tool including the responding speed, storage usage, specific type code completion, and API invocation completion has confirmed that$k$NM-LM provides satisfactory performance, which renders it highly appropriate for domain adaptive code completion. Furthermore, our approach operates without the requirement for direct access to the language model's parameters. As a result, it can seamlessly integrate with black-box code completion models, making it easy to integrate our approach as a plugin to further enhance the performance of these models.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing is widely used to test mobile apps. As mobile apps are frequently updated and need repeated testing, to reduce the test cost, their test cases are often coded as scripts to enable automated execution using test harnesses/tools. When those mobile apps evolve, many of the test scripts, however, may become broken due to changes made to the app GUIs. While it is desirable that the broken scripts get repaired, doing it manually can be preventively expensive if the number of tests need repairing is large. We propose in this paper a novel approach namedMeterto repairing broken GUI test scripts automatically when mobile apps evolve.Meterleverages computer vision techniques to infer GUI changes between two versions of a mobile app and uses the inferred changes to guide the repair of GUI test scripts. SinceMeteronly relies on screenshots to repair GUI tests, it is applicable to apps targeting open or closed source mobile platforms. In experiments conducted on 22 Android apps and 6 iOS apps, repairs produced byMeterhelped preserve 63.7 and 38.8 percent of all the test actions broken by the GUI changes, respectively.

Fault localization is a crucial step of automated program repair, because accurately identifying program locations that are most closely implicated with a fault greatly affects the effectiveness of the patching process. An ideal fault localization technique would provide precise information while requiring moderate computational resources—to best support an efficient search for correct fixes. In contrast, most automated program repair tools use standard fault localization techniques—which are not tightly integrated with the overall program repair process, and hence deliver only subpar efficiency. In this paper, we presentretrospective fault localization: a novel fault localization technique geared to the requirements of automated program repair. A key idea of retrospective fault localization is to reuse the outcome of failed patch validation to support mutation-based dynamic analysis—providing accurate fault localization information without incurring onerous computational costs. We implemented retrospective fault localization in a tool calledRestore—based on theJaidJava program repair system. Experiments involving faults from theDefects4Jstandard benchmark indicate that retrospective fault localization can boost automated program repair:Restoreefficiently explores a large fix space, delivering state-of-the-art effectiveness (41Defects4Jbugs correctly fixed, 8 of which no other automated repair tool for Java can fix) while simultaneously boosting performance (speedup over 3 compared toJaid). Retrospective fault localization is applicable to any automated program repair techniques that rely on fault localization and dynamic validation of patches.

GUI testing is an essential part of regression testing for Android apps. For regression GUI testing to remain effective, it is important that obsolete GUI test scripts get repaired after the app has evolved. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named GUIDER to automated repair of GUI test scripts for Android apps. The key novelty of the approach lies in the utilization of both structural and visual information of widgets on app GUIs to better understand what widgets of the base version app become in the updated version. A supporting tool has been implemented for the approach. Experiments conducted on the popular messaging and social media app WeChat show that GUIDER is both effective and efficient. Repairs produced by GUIDER enabled 88.8% and 54.9% more test actions to run correctly than those produced by existing approaches to GUI test repair that rely solely on visual or structural information of app GUIs.

With the development and popularization of smart-phones, human activity recognition methods based on contact perception are proposed. The smartphones which are embedded with various sensors can be used as a platform of mobile sensing for human activity recognition. In this paper, we propose an automated human activity recognition network HDL with smartphone motion sensor units. The HDL network combines DBLSTM (Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) model and CNN (Convolutional neural network) model. The DBLSTM model is first used to model long sequence data and ultimately generate a bidirectional output vector in a abstract way. The DBLSTM model is good at dealing with serialization tasks but poor in the ability to extract features. Hence, the CNN model is then used to extract features from the abstract vector. Finally, the output layer employs a softmax function to classify human activities. We conduct experiments on the Public domain UCI dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed HDL network achieves reliable results with accuracy and F1 score as high as 97.95% and 97.27%. Compared with other networks based on the same smartphone dataset, the accuracy of HDL is higher than S-LSTM and Dropout CNN network by 2.14% and 6.97% respectively.