Related papers: Demystifying and Assessing Code Understandability …

JavaScript's widespread adoption has made it an attractive target for malicious attackers who employ sophisticated obfuscation techniques to conceal harmful code. Current deobfuscation tools suffer from critical limitations that severely…

Much software, whether beneficent or malevolent, is distributed only as binaries, sans source code. Absent source code, understanding binaries' behavior can be quite challenging, especially when compiled under higher levels of compiler…

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires not only the ability to reason over raw text but also the ability to combine multiple evidence. We propose a novel learning approach that helps language models better understand difficult multi-hop…

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Mode decomposition is a prototypical pattern recognition problem that can be addressed from the (a priori distinct) perspectives of numerical approximation, statistical inference and deep learning. Could its analysis through these combined…

Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems.…

WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode language designed for client-side execution in web browsers. The need for decompilation techniques that recover high-level source code from WASM binaries has grown as WASM continues to gain widespread…

Suboptimal code is prevalent in software systems. Developers often write low-quality code due to factors like technical knowledge gaps, insufficient experience, time pressure, management decisions, or personal factors. Once integrated, the…

Evaluating the effectiveness of software protection is crucial for selecting the most effective methods to safeguard assets within software applications. Obfuscation involves techniques that deliberately modify software to make it more…

Analogy has been shown to be important in many key cognitive abilities, including learning, problem solving, creativity and language change. For cognitive models of analogy, the fundamental computational question is how its inherent…

Descriptive comments play a crucial role in the software engineering process. They decrease development time, enable better bug detection, and facilitate the reuse of previously written code. However, comments are commonly the last of a…

What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…

The lexical and syntactic disparities among different programming languages (e.g., Java and Python) pose significant challenges for multi-language software engineering tasks such as cross-language code clone detection and code retrieval,…

Code decompilation analysis is a fundamental yet challenging task in malware reverse engineering, particularly due to the pervasive use of sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Although recent large language models (LLMs) have shown promise…

Software quality is critical in modern software engineering, especially in large and evolving codebases. This study analyzes the evolution of software quality metrics in five successive versions of the open-source Java testing framework…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code-related tasks. Despite their advancement, empirical evidence reveals that they still struggle with \emph{deductive code reasoning}, the ability to reason about the…

In the past years, software reverse engineering dealt with source code understanding. Nowadays, it is levered to software requirements abstract level, supported by feature model notations, language independent, and simpler than the source…

Since decade understanding of programs has become a compulsory task for the students as well as for others who are involved in the process of developing software and providing solutions to open problems. In that aspect showing the problem…

Reading and understanding code are fundamental skills for novice programmers, and especially important with the growing prevalence of AI-generated code and the need to evaluate its accuracy and reliability. ``Explain in Plain English''…

Decompilation is a well-studied area with numerous high-quality tools available. These are frequently used for security tasks and to port legacy code. However, they regularly generate difficult-to-read programs and require a large amount of…