Large Language Models (LLMs) are wildly popular today and it is important to serve them efficiently. Existing LLM serving systems are stateless across requests. Consequently, when LLMs are used in the common setting of multi-turn conversations, a growing log of the conversation history must be processed alongside any request by the serving system at each turn, resulting in repeated processing.

To meet the increasing demand for customized software, highly configurable systems become essential in practice. Such systems offer many options to configure, and ensuring the reliability of these systems is critical. A widely used evaluation metric for testing these systems is \(t\) -wise coverage, where \(t\) represents testing strength, and its value typically ranges from 2 to 6. It is crucial to design effective and efficient methods for generating test suites that achieve high \(t\) -wise coverage. However, current state-of-the-art methods need to generate large test suites for achieving high \(t\) -wise coverage. In this work, we propose a novel method called LS-Sampling-Plus that can efficiently generate test suites with high \(t\) -wise coverage for \(2\leq t\leq 6\) while being smaller in size compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. LS-Sampling-Plus incorporates many core algorithmic techniques, including two novel scoring functions, a dynamic mechanism for updating sampling probabilities, and a validity-guaranteed systematic search method. Our experiments on various practical benchmarks show that LS-Sampling-Plus can achieve higher \(t\) -wise coverage than current state-of-the-art methods, through building a test suite of the same size. Moreover, our evaluations indicate the effectiveness of all core algorithmic techniques of LS-Sampling-Plus . Furthermore, LS-Sampling-Plus exhibits better scalability and fault detection capability than existing state-of-the-art methods.

Move structures have been studied in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) for decades. However, there are few move annotation corpora for Research Article (RA) abstracts. In this paper, we introduce RAAMove, a comprehensive multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in RA abstracts. The primary objective of RAAMove is to facilitate move analysis and automatic move identification. This paper provides a thorough discussion of the corpus construction process, including the scheme, data collection, annotation guidelines, and annotation procedures. The corpus is constructed through two stages: initially, expert annotators manually annotate high-quality data; subsequently, based on the human-annotated data, a BERT-based model is employed for automatic annotation with the help of experts’ modification. The result is a large-scale and high-quality corpus comprising 33,988 annotated instances. We also conduct preliminary move identification experiments using the BERT-based model to verify the effectiveness of the proposed corpus and model. The annotated corpus is available for academic research purposes and can serve as essential resources for move analysis, English language teaching and writing, as well as move/discourse-related tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Deep-learning (DL) compilers such as TVM and TensorRT are increasingly being used to optimize deep neural network (DNN) models to meet performance, resource utilization and other requirements. Bugs in these compilers can result in models whose semantics differ from the original ones, producing incorrect results that corrupt the correctness of downstream applications. However, finding bugs in these compilers is challenging due to their complexity. In this work, we propose a new fuzz testing approach for finding bugs in deep-learning compilers. Our core approach consists of (i) generating diverse yet valid DNN test models that can exercise a large part of the compiler's transformation logic using light-weight operator specifications; (ii) performing gradient-based search to find model inputs that avoid any floating-point exceptional values during model execution, reducing the chance of missed bugs or false alarms; and (iii) using differential testing to identify bugs. We implemented this approach in NNSmith which has found 72 new bugs for TVM, TensorRT, ONNXRuntime, and PyTorch to date. Of these 58 have been confirmed and 51 have been fixed by their respective project maintainers.

The increasing demand for software customization has led to the development of highly configurable systems. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is an effective method for testing these types of systems. The ultimate goal of CIT is to generate a test suite of acceptable size, called a t-wise covering array (CA), where t is the testing strength. Pairwise testing (i.e., CIT with t=2) is recognized to be the most widely-used CIT technique and has strong fault detection capability. In pairwise testing, the most important problem is pairwise CA generation (PCAG), which is to generate a pairwise CA (PCA) of minimum size. However, existing state-of-the-art PCAG algorithms suffer from the severe scalability challenge; that is, they cannot tackle large-scale PCAG instances effectively, resulting in PCAs of large sizes. To alleviate this challenge, in this paper we propose CAmpactor, a novel and effective local search algorithm for compacting given PCAs into smaller sizes. Extensive experiments on a large number of real-world, public PCAG instances show that the sizes of CAmpactor's generated PCAs are around 45% smaller than the sizes of PCAs constructed by existing state-of-the-art PCAG algorithms, indicating its superiority. Also, our evaluation confirms the generality of CAmpactor, since CAmpactor can reduce the sizes of PCAs generated by a variety of PCAG algorithms.

We develop a new, principled algorithm for estimating the contribution of training data points to the behavior of a deep learning model, such as a specific prediction it makes. Our algorithm estimates the AME, a quantity that measures the expected (average) marginal effect of adding a data point to a subset of the training data, sampled from a given distribution. When subsets are sampled from the uniform distribution, the AME reduces to the well-known Shapley value. Our approach is inspired by causal inference and randomized experiments: we sample different subsets of the training data to train multiple submodels, and evaluate each submodel’s behavior. We then use a LASSO regression to jointly estimate the AME of each data point, based on the subset compositions. Under sparsity assumptions ($k \ll N$ datapoints have large AME), our estimator requires only $O(k\log N)$ randomized submodel trainings, improving upon the best prior Shapley value estimators.

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is an important technique for testing highly configurable software systems with demonstrated effectiveness in practice. The goal of CIT is to generate test cases covering the interactions of configuration options, under certain hard constraints. In this context, constrained covering arrays (CCAs) are frequently used as test cases in CIT. Constrained Covering Array Generation (CCAG) is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, solving which requires an effective method for generating small CCAs. In particular, effectively solving t-way CCAG with t>=4 is even more challenging. Inspired by the success of automated algorithm configuration and automated algorithm selection in solving combinatorial optimization problems, in this paper, we investigate the efficacy of automated algorithm configuration and automated algorithm selection for the CCAG problem, and propose a novel, automated CCAG approach called AutoCCAG. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that AutoCCAG can find much smaller-sized CCAs than current state-of-the-art approaches, indicating the effectiveness of AutoCCAG. More encouragingly, to our best knowledge, our paper reports the first results for CCAG with a high coverage strength (i.e., 5-way CCAG) on public benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that AutoCCAG can bring considerable benefits in testing highly configurable software systems.

There has been a rapidly increasing demand for developing highly configurable software systems, which urgently calls for effective testing methods. In practice, t-wise coverage has been widely recognized as a useful metric to evaluate the quality of a test suite for testing highly configurable software systems, and achieving high t-wise coverage is important for ensuring test adequacy. However, state-of-the-art methods usually cost a fairly long time to generate large test suites for high pairwise coverage (i.e., 2-wise coverage), which would lead to ineffective and inefficient testing of highly configurable software systems. In this paper, we propose a novel local search based sampling approach dubbed LS-Sampling for achieving high t-wise coverage. Extensive experiments on a large number of public benchmarks, which are collected from real-world, highly configurable software systems, show that LS-Sampling achieves higher 2-wise and 3-wise coverage than the current state of the art. LS-Sampling is effective, since on average it achieves the 2-wise coverage of 99.64% and the 3-wise coverage of 97.87% through generating a small test suite consisting of only 100 test cases (90% smaller than the test suites generated by its state-of-the-art competitors). Furthermore, LS-Sampling is efficient, since it only requires an average execution time of less than one minute to generate a test suite with high 2-wise and 3-wise coverage.

This paper explores techniques to quickly solve the maximum weight clique problem (MWCP) in very large scale sparse graphs. Due to their size, and the hardness of MWCP, it is infeasible to solve many of these graphs with exact algorithms. Although recent heuristic algorithms make progress in solving MWCP in large graphs, they still need considerable time to get a high-quality solution. In this work, we focus on solving MWCP for large sparse graphs within a short time limit. We propose a new method for MWCP which interleaves clique finding with data reduction rules. We propose novel ideas to make this process efficient, and develop an algorithm called FastWClq. Experiments on a broad range of large sparse graphs show that FastWClq finds better solutions than state-of-the-art algorithms while the running time of FastWClq is much shorter than the competitors for most instances. Further, FastWClq proves the optimality of its solutions for roughly half of the graphs, all with at least 105 vertices, with an average time of 21 seconds.

The minimum connected dominating set (MCDS) problem is an important extension of the minimum dominating set problem, with wide applications, especially in wireless networks. Despite its practical importance, there are few works on solving MCDS for massive graphs, mainly due to the complexity of maintaining connectivity. In this paper, we propose two novel ideas, and develop a new local search algorithm for MCDS called NuCDS. First, a hybrid dynamic connectivity maintenance method is designed to switch alternately between a novel fast connectivity maintenance method based on spanning tree and its previous counterpart. Second, we define a new vertex property called \emph{safety} to make the algorithm more considerate when selecting vertices. Experiments show that NuCDS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MCDS algorithms on both massive graphs and classic benchmarks.

Recent work has shown that decentralized algorithms can deliver superior performance over centralized ones in the context of machine learning. The two approaches, with the main difference residing in their distinct communication patterns, are both susceptible to performance degradation in heterogeneous environments. Although vigorous efforts have been devoted to supporting centralized algorithms against heterogeneity, little has been explored in decentralized algorithms regarding this problem. This paper proposes Hop, the first heterogeneity-aware decentralized training protocol. Based on a unique characteristic of decentralized training that we have identified, the iteration gap, we propose a queue-based synchronization mechanism that can efficiently implement backup workers and bounded staleness in the decentralized setting. To cope with deterministic slowdown, we propose skipping iterations so that the effect of slower workers is further mitigated. We build a prototype implementation of Hop on TensorFlow. The experiment results on CNN and SVM show significant speedup over standard decentralized training in heterogeneous settings.

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is a popular approach to detecting faults in highly configurable software systems. The core task of CIT is to generate a small test suite called a t-way covering array (CA), where t is the covering strength. Many meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve the constrained covering array generating (CCAG) problem. A major drawback of existing algorithms is that they usually need considerable time to obtain a good-quality solution, which hinders the wider applications of such algorithms. We observe that the high time consumption of existing meta-heuristic algorithms for CCAG is mainly due to the procedure of score computation. In this work, we propose a much more efficient method for score computation. The score computation method is applied to a state-of-the-art algorithm TCA, showing significant improvements. The new score computation method opens a way to utilize algorithmic ideas relying on scores which were not affordable previously. We integrate a gradient descent search step to further improve the algorithm, leading to a new algorithm called FastCA. Experiments on a broad range of real-world benchmarks and synthetic benchmarks show that, FastCA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for CCAG algorithms, in terms of both the size of obtained covering array and the run time.

The minimum weight vertex cover (MWVC) problem is an important combinatorial optimization problem with various real-world applications. Due to its NP hardness, most works on solving MWVC focus on heuristic algorithms that can return a good quality solution in reasonable time. In this work, we propose two dynamic strategies that adjust the behavior of the algorithm during search, which are used to improve a state of the art local search for MWVC named FastWVC, resulting in two local search algorithms called DynWVC1 and DynWVC2. Previous MWVC algorithms are evaluated on graphs with random or hand crafted weights. In this work, we evaluate the algorithms on the vertex weighted graphs that obtained from an important real world problem, the map labeling problem. Experiments show that our algorithm obtains better results than previous algorithms for MWVC and maximum weight independent set (MWIS) on these real world instances. We also test our algorithms on massive graphs studied in previous works, and show significant improvements there.

The graph coloring problem (GCP) is one of the most studied NP hard problems and has numerous applications. Despite the practical importance of GCP, there are limited works in solving GCP for very large graphs. This paper explores techniques for solving GCP on very large real world graphs.We first propose a reduction rule for GCP, which is based on a novel concept called degree bounded independent set.The rule is iteratively executed by interleaving between lower bound computation and graph reduction. Based on this rule, we develop a novel method called FastColor, which also exploits fast clique and coloring heuristics. We carry out experiments to compare our method FastColor with two best algorithms for coloring large graphs we could find. Experiments on a broad range of real world large graphs show the superiority of our method. Additionally, our method maintains both upper bound and lower bound on the optimal solution, and thus it proves an optimal solution when the upper bound meets the lower bound. In our experiments, it proves the optimal solution for 97 out of 142 instances.

The problem of finding a minimum vertex cover (MinVC) in a graph is a well known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem of great importance in theory and practice. Due to its NP-hardness, there has been much interest in developing heuristic algorithms for finding a small vertex cover in reasonable time. Previously, heuristic algorithms for MinVC have focused on solving graphs of relatively small size, and they are not suitable for solving massive graphs as they usually have high-complexity heuristics. This paper explores techniques for solving MinVC in very large scale real-world graphs, including a construction algorithm, a local search algorithm and a preprocessing algorithm. Both the construction and search algorithms are based on low-complexity heuristics, and we combine them to develop a heuristic algorithm for MinVC called FastVC. Experimental results on a broad range of real-world massive graphs show that, our algorithms are very fast and have better performance than previous heuristic algorithms for MinVC. We also develop a preprocessing algorithm to simplify graphs for MinVC algorithms. By applying the preprocessing algorithm to local search algorithms, we obtain two efficient MinVC solvers called NuMVC2+p and FastVC2+p, which show further improvement on the massive graphs.

Minimum Vertex Cover (MinVC) is a well known NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, and local search has been shown to be one of the most effective approaches to this problem. State-of-the-art MinVC local search algorithms employ edge weighting techniques and prefer to select vertices with higher weighted score. These algorithms are not robust and especially have poor performance on instances with structures which defeat greedy heuristics. In this paper, we propose a vertex weighting scheme to address this shortcoming, and combine it within the current best MinVC local search algorithm NuMVC, leading to a new algorithm called TwMVC. Our experiments show that TwMVC outperforms NuMVC on the standard benchmarks namely DIMACS and BHOSLIB. To the best of our knowledge, TwMVC is the first MinVC algorithm that attains the best known solution for all instances in both benchmarks. Further, TwMVC shows superiority on a benchmark of real-world networks.

Covering arrays (CAs) are often used as test suites for combinatorial interaction testing to discover interaction faults of real-world systems. Most real-world systems involve constraints, so improving algorithms for covering array generation (CAG) with constraints is beneficial. Two popular methods for constrained CAG are greedy construction and meta-heuristic search. Recently, a meta-heuristic framework called two-mode local search has shown great success in solving classic NPhard problems. We are interested whether this method is also powerful in solving the constrained CAG problem. This work proposes a two-mode meta-heuristic framework for constrained CAG efficiently and presents a new meta-heuristic algorithm called TCA. Experiments show that TCA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solvers on 3-way constrained CAG. Further experiments demonstrate that TCA also performs much better than its competitors on 2-way constrained CAG.

The Artefact framework is a tool for building collaborative applications that deliver = representations of art objectoriented appXcation space to standard browsers.We present some aspects of Artefact's implementation, including_ enhancements to support synchronous collaboration, the de-coup~ng of input and output in the interaction protocol, a lighhveight gened-purpose Java appleqand tie Wera~en~ that bridge the gap behveen a browser and an appficahon.We describe some of the characteristics that m&e it easy to create multi-user applications witi ArtefacL and illustrate WISwith a simple example application.Finally, we compare Artefact to some existing distributed application platforms.