Related papers: The Effect of Code Obfuscation on Human Program Co…

In software development, it is common for programmers to copy-paste or port code snippets and then adapt them to their use case. This scenario motivates the code adaptation task -- a variant of program repair which aims to adapt variable…

Human reading behavior is tuned to the statistics of natural language: the time it takes human subjects to read a word can be predicted from estimates of the word's probability in context. However, it remains an open question what…

In contrast to software reverse engineering, there are hardly any tools available that support hardware reversing. Therefore, the reversing process is conducted by human analysts combining several complex semi-automated steps. However,…

Lowering the barriers to computer programming requires understanding how to scaffold learning. Parsons problems, which require learners to drag-and-drop blocks of code into the correct order and indentation, are proving to be beneficial for…

Code Language Models have been trained to generate accurate solutions, typically with no regard for runtime. On the other hand, previous works that explored execution optimisation have observed corresponding drops in functional correctness.…

Code completion entails the task of providing missing tokens given a surrounding context. It can boost developer productivity while providing a powerful code discovery tool. Following the Large Language Model (LLM) wave, code completion has…

Code completion aims at speeding up code writing by recommending to developers the next tokens they are likely to type. Deep Learning (DL) models pushed the boundaries of code completion by redefining what these coding assistants can do: We…

Language models are known to absorb biases from their training data, leading to predictions driven by statistical regularities rather than semantic relevance. We investigate the impact of these biases on answer choice preferences in the…

We study weakest precondition reasoning about the (co)variance of outcomes and the variance of run-times of probabilistic programs with conditioning. For outcomes, we show that approximating (co)variances is computationally more difficult…

Code obfuscation is widely adopted in modern software development to protect intellectual property and hinder reverse engineering, but it also provides attackers with a powerful means to conceal malicious logic inside otherwise legitimate…

The reasoning abilities are one of the most enigmatic and captivating aspects of large language models (LLMs). Numerous studies are dedicated to exploring and expanding the boundaries of this reasoning capability. However, tasks that embody…

In this work, we use language modeling to investigate the factors that influence insertional code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between one language variety (the primary language) and another (the secondary…

Code smells represent sub-optimal implementation choices applied by developers when evolving software systems. The negative impact of code smells has been widely investigated in the past: besides developers' productivity and ability to…

LLMs are increasingly embedded in programming workflows, from code generation to automated code review. Yet, how gendered communication styles interact with LLM-assisted programming and code review remains underexplored. We present a…

Some approaches to increasing program reliability involve a disciplined use of programming languages so as to minimise the hazards introduced by error-prone features. This is realised by writing code that is constrained to a subset of the a…

Largely known for attack scenarios, code reuse techniques at a closer look reveal properties that are appealing also for program obfuscation. We explore the popular return-oriented programming paradigm under this light, transforming program…

Humans are the final decision makers in critical tasks that involve ethical and legal concerns, ranging from recidivism prediction, to medical diagnosis, to fighting against fake news. Although machine learning models can sometimes achieve…

Often, a good explanation for a program's unexpected behavior is a bug in the programmer's code. But sometimes, an even better explanation is a bug in the programmer's mental model of the language or API they are using. Instead of merely…

Due to the growing number of cyber attacks against computer systems, we need to pay special attention to the security of our software systems. In order to maximize the effectiveness, excluding the human component from this process would be…

To perform recognition, molecules must locate and specifically bind their targets within a noisy biochemical environment with many look-alikes. Molecular recognition processes, especially the induced-fit mechanism, are known to involve…