软件工程

Smart contract decompilation aims to recover high-level source code from bytecode, but evaluating decompilers remains difficult because existing studies use narrow datasets, inconsistent metrics, and limited semantic consistency checks.…

Coding agents increasingly act as codebase-scale collaborators that can assist with codebase conversion, but this progress has exposed a critical weakness: agents often over-trust their own local validation routines and declare success on…

Software product line (SPL) engineering has been successfully applied to software development by obtaining software systems as compositions of modular features. Existing approaches to SPL engineering, however, are typically bound to a…

Large Language Models(LLMs) have been actively integrated into modern software systems as critical components. LLM-in-the-loop vulnerabilities, where vulnerabilities are introduced by LLMs and their dependent downstream components, such as…

CI failure logs are large (median 5k lines, max 200k in this corpus) and noisy. Coding agents that try to debug them depend on an upstream tool to reduce the log to a manageable context, but the field has had no public empirical comparison…

Here is the updated abstract: Evaluation of software engineering (SWE) agents is dominated by a binary signal: whether the final patch passes the tests. This outcome-only view treats a principled solution and a chaotic trial-and-error…

Automated regression testing is a cornerstone of modern software development, often contributing directly to code review and Continuous Integration (CI). Yet some tests suffer from flakiness, where their outcomes vary non-deterministically.…

Repository-level automated program repair (APR) requires long-horizon reasoning over interdependent decisions. However, most LLM-based approaches reconstruct repair reasoning independently for each issue, failing to reuse successful…

Advanced LLMs have achieved near-ceiling instruction-following accuracy on benchmarks such as IFEval. However, these impressive scores do not necessarily translate to reliable services in real-world use, where users often vary their…

The most recent Linux kernels have a new feature for securing applications: Landlock. Like Seccomp before it, Landlock makes it possible for a running process to give up access to resources. For applications running as Science Gateways,…

With the rapid advancement of powerful large language models (LLMs) in recent years, a wide range of software engineering tasks can now be addressed using LLMs, significantly enhancing productivity and scalability. Numerous benchmark…

Software misconfiguration has consistently been a major reason for software failures. Over the past two decades, much work has been done to detect and diagnose software misconfigurations. However, there is still a gap between real-world…

This paper reports a deliberately small executable proof for a DAG-TOML contract: six "Hello, world!" implementations in Rust, Go, C, Java, TypeScript, and AWK are linked to one observable-output contract, one implementation DAG, one…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an integral part of software development, especially with the advent of agentic capabilities. Yet, many frontier LLMs are affiliated with specific providers. This raises the question of whether…

Large language models (LLMs) for code completion and generation are increasingly used in software development, yet they may reproduce training examples verbatim and without authorship attribution, raising legal and ethical concerns around…

Causal Inference offers a fundamental approach for advancing empirical software engineering (ESE) beyond traditional statistical association, enabling researchers to rigorously identify and quantify causal relationships in software…

As REST APIs become an increasingly significant part of software systems, their validation is becoming more critical. Hence, testing and uncovering underlying issues are of utmost importance for improving software quality. However, testing…

Generating a game is not the same as making one that can be played. Despite advances in code generation, existing approaches treat game generation as one-shot translation from prompt to artifact, leaving interaction-level failures…

The rapid development of LLMs coupled with the introduction of Model Context Protocol (MCP) has revolutionized how intelligent agents interact with APIs through deterministic and structured methods \cite{ModelContextProtocolIntro2025}.…

Large language model agents are increasingly expected to perform operational work: calling APIs, manipulating files, assembling workflows, and acting inside enterprise systems. Yet the tool layer on which this execution depends is still…