Tung Nguyen, Tue Le, Hoang Tran Vuong, Quang Duc Nguyen, Duc Anh Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Sang Dinh, Thien Huu Nguyen. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) through preference optimization is crucial for aligning model outputs with human values. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a simple yet effective method by directly optimizing on preference data without the need for explicit reward models. However, DPO typically relies on human-labeled preference data, which can limit its scalability. Self-Play Fine-Tuning (SPIN) addresses this by allowing models to generate their own rejected samples, reducing the dependence on human annotations. Nevertheless, SPIN uniformly applies learning signals across all tokens, ignoring the fine-grained quality variations within responses. As the model improves, rejected samples increasingly contain high-quality tokens, making the uniform treatment of tokens suboptimal. In this paper, we propose SWIFT (Self-Play Weighted Fine-Tuning), a fine-grained self-refinement method that assigns token-level importance weights estimated from a stronger teacher model. Beyond alignment, we also demonstrate that SWIFT serves as an effective knowledge distillation strategy by using the teacher not for logits matching, but for reward-guided token weighting. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks and settings demonstrate that SWIFT consistently surpasses both existing alignment approaches and conventional knowledge distillation methods.

Function identification is a preliminary step in binary analysis for many extensive applications from malware detection, common vulnerability detection and binary instrumentation to name a few. In this paper, we propose the Code Pointer Network that leverages the underlying idea of a pointer network to efficiently and effectively tackle function scope identification - the hardest and most crucial task in function identification. We establish extensive experiments to compare our proposed method with the deep learning based baseline. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in terms of both predictive performance and running time.

Due to the ubiquity of computer software, software vulnerability detection (SVD) has become crucial in the software industry and in the field of computer security. Two significant issues in SVD arise when using machine learning, namely: i) how to learn automatic features that can help improve the predictive performance of vulnerability detection and ii) how to overcome the scarcity of labeled vulnerabilities in projects that require the laborious labeling of code by software security experts. In this paper, we address these two crucial concerns by proposing a novel architecture which leverages deep domain adaptation with automatic feature learning for software vulnerability identification. Based on this architecture, we keep the principles and reapply the state-of-the-art deep domain adaptation methods to indicate that deep domain adaptation for SVD is plausible and promising. Moreover, we further propose a novel method named Semi-supervised Code Domain Adaptation Network (SCDAN) that can efficiently utilize and exploit information carried in unlabeled target data by considering them as the unlabeled portion in a semi-supervised learning context. The proposed SCDAN method enforces the clustering assumption, which is a key principle in semi-supervised learning. The experimental results using six real-world software project datasets show that our SCDAN method and the baselines using our architecture have better predictive performance by a wide margin compared with the Deep Code Network (VulDeePecker) method without domain adaptation. Also, the proposed SCDAN significantly outperforms the DIRT-T which to the best of our knowledge is currently the-state-of-the-art method in deep domain adaptation and other baselines.