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Software security has been an important research topic over the years. The community has proposed processes and tools for secure software development and security analysis. However, a significant number of vulnerabilities remains in…

TypeScript is a quickly evolving superset of JavaScript with active development of new features. Our paper seeks to understand how quickly these features are adopted by the developer community. Existing work in JavaScript shows the adoption…

Program synthesis is a class of regression problems where one seeks a solution, in the form of a source-code program, mapping the inputs to their corresponding outputs exactly. Due to its precise and combinatorial nature, program synthesis…

Large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3, Codex, and Google's language model are now capable of generating code from natural language specifications of programmer intent. We view these developments with a mixture of optimism and…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) generally enhances large language models' (LLMs) ability to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. But RAG may also lead to performance degradation due to imperfect retrieval and the model's limited ability to…

Code changes are an integral part of the software development process. Many code changes are meant to improve the code without changing its functional behavior, e.g., refactorings and performance improvements. Unfortunately, validating…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed with increasing real-world responsibilities, it is important to be able to specify and constrain the behavior of these systems in a reliable manner. Model developers may wish to set explicit…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs…

A great part of software development involves conceptualizing or communicating the underlying procedures and logic that needs to be expressed in programs. One major difficulty of programming is turning concept into code, especially when…

Despite recent advances, Large Language Models (LLMs) still generate vulnerable code. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has the potential to enhance LLMs for secure code generation by incorporating external security knowledge. However,…

Regular expressions constitute a fundamental notion in formal language theory and are frequently used in computer science to define search patterns. A classic algorithm for these problems constructs and simulates a non-deterministic finite…

The design of effective programming languages, libraries, frameworks, tools, and platforms for data engineering strongly depends on their ease and correctness of use. Anyone who ignores that it is humans who use these tools risks building…

This work aims at discussing the complexity aspect of software while demonstrating its relationship with security. Complexity is an essential part of software; however, numerous studies indicate that they increase the vulnerability of the…

The evidence-based approach has increasingly been employed to synthesize empirical findings from the primary research in software engineering. Nevertheless, the reproducibility of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) studies seems to…

We target the problem of provably computing the equivalence between two complex expression trees. To this end, we formalize the problem of equivalence between two such programs as finding a set of semantics-preserving rewrite rules from one…

Algorithmic reasoning refers to the ability to understand the complex patterns behind the problem and decompose them into a sequence of reasoning steps towards the solution. Such nature of algorithmic reasoning makes it a challenge for…

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is increasingly adopted to ground Large Language Models (LLMs) in software artifacts, the optimal configuration of its components remains an open question for software engineering (SE) tasks. The…

We study 4 problems in string matching, namely, regular expression matching, approximate regular expression matching, string edit distance, and subsequence indexing, on a standard word RAM model of computation that allows logarithmic-sized…

This paper proposes CES, a task to evaluate the abilities of LLMs in simulating program execution and using that reasoning in programming tasks. Besides measuring the correctness of variable predictions during execution simulation, CES…

Reimplementing solutions to previously solved software engineering problems is not only inefficient but also introduces inadequate and error-prone code. Many existing methods achieve impressive performance on this issue by using…