arXiv subjects

Ferdian Thung

Publications and source records attributed to Ferdian Thung.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Vul4Py: Benchmarking Automated Vulnerability Repair in Python with Paired Exploit and Functional Oracles

Automated Vulnerability Repair (AVR) has advanced rapidly across program analysis, machine learning, and Large Language Models (LLMs), but a verifiable, head-to-head comparison of AVR approaches on Python is still missing. Python underpins critical web, data, and machine-learning infrastructure, yet existing Python benchmarks accept a patch on the strength of a proof-of-concept exploit alone, or apply a functional test only on the subset of entries whose upstream project happens to ship one. Both therefore miss functional regressions, in which a patch defeats the exploit but breaks unrelated behavior. We present Vul4Py, a Python AVR benchmark in which every entry carries a paired oracle: an exploit oracle that must fail on the vulnerable revision and pass on the fixed one, together with a project-native pytest functional oracle that must pass on both. Vul4Py comprises 100 real vulnerabilities from 60 open-source projects, spanning 60 distinct CWEs and the years 2017 to 2025, each packaged with a pinned, reproducible per-instance environment. Using Vul4Py, we compare six approaches in three categories: a specialized vulnerability repair tool, directly prompted LLMs, and software engineering agents. The agents dominate: OpenHands repairs 41 of 100 vulnerabilities, against 4 for the strongest directly prompted LLM and 2 for the specialized tool, despite all three sharing the same backbone model. The paired oracle is what makes these counts trustworthy: it rejects 15 of the 119 patches that an exploit-only oracle would accept, and 98 of the 104 patches it admits are manually confirmed to be semantically equivalent to the developer's patches

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arXiv2026

Revisiting Vulnerability Patch Identification on Data in the Wild

Attacks can exploit zero-day or one-day vulnerabilities that are not publicly disclosed. To detect these vulnerabilities, security researchers monitor development activities in open-source repositories to identify unreported security patches. The sheer volume of commits makes this task infeasible to accomplish manually. Consequently, security patch detectors commonly trained and evaluated on security patches linked from vulnerability reports in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). In this study, we assess the effectiveness of these detectors when applied in-the-wild. Our results show that models trained on NVD-derived data show substantially decreased performance, with decreases in F1-score of up to 90\% when tested on in-the-wild security patches, rendering them impractical for real-world use. An analysis comparing security patches identified in-the-wild and commits linked from NVD reveals that they can be easily distinguished from each other. Security patches associated with NVD have different distribution of commit messages, vulnerability types, and composition of changes. These differences suggest that NVD may be unsuitable as the \textit{sole} source of data for training models to detect security patches. We find that constructing a dataset that combines security patches from NVD data with a small subset of manually identified security patches can improve model robustness.

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arXiv2025

Bamboo: LLM-Driven Discovery of API-Permission Mappings in the Android Framework

The permission mechanism in the Android Framework is integral to safeguarding the privacy of users by managing users' and processes' access to sensitive resources and operations. As such, developers need to be equipped with an in-depth understanding of API permissions to build robust Android apps. Unfortunately, the official API documentation by Android chronically suffers from imprecision and incompleteness, causing developers to spend significant effort to accurately discern necessary permissions. This potentially leads to incorrect permission declarations in Android app development, potentially resulting in security violations and app failures. Recent efforts in improving permission specification primarily leverage static and dynamic code analyses to uncover API-permission mappings within the Android framework. Yet, these methodologies encounter substantial shortcomings, including poor adaptability to Android SDK and Framework updates, restricted code coverage, and a propensity to overlook essential API-permission mappings in intricate codebases. This paper introduces a pioneering approach utilizing large language models (LLMs) for a systematic examination of API-permission mappings. In addition to employing LLMs, we integrate a dual-role prompting strategy and an API-driven code generation approach into our mapping discovery pipeline, resulting in the development of the corresponding tool, \tool{}. We formulate three research questions to evaluate the efficacy of \tool{} against state-of-the-art baselines, assess the completeness of official SDK documentation, and analyze the evolution of permission-required APIs across different SDK releases. Our experimental results reveal that \tool{} identifies 2,234, 3,552, and 4,576 API-permission mappings in Android versions 6, 7, and 10 respectively, substantially outprforming existing baselines.

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arXiv2025

VulCoCo: A Simple Yet Effective Method for Detecting Vulnerable Code Clones

Code reuse is common in modern software development, but it can also spread vulnerabilities when developers unknowingly copy risky code. The code fragments that preserve the logic of known vulnerabilities are known as vulnerable code clones (VCCs). Detecting those VCCs is a critical but challenging task. Existing VCC detection tools often rely on syntactic similarity or produce coarse vulnerability predictions without clear explanations, limiting their practical utility. In this paper, we propose VulCoCo, a lightweight and scalable approach that combines embedding-based retrieval with large language model (LLM) validation. Starting from a set of known vulnerable functions, we retrieve syntactically or semantically similar candidate functions from a large corpus and use an LLM to assess whether the candidates retain the vulnerability. Given that there is a lack of reproducible vulnerable code clone benchmarks, we first construct a synthetic benchmark that spans various clone types. Our experiments on the benchmark show that VulCoCo outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in terms of Precision@k and mean average precision (MAP). In addition, we also demonstrate VulCoCo's effectiveness in real-world projects by submitting 400 pull requests (PRs) to 284 open-source projects. Among them, 75 PRs were merged, and 15 resulted in newly published CVEs. We also provide insights to inspire future work to further improve the precision of vulnerable code clone detection.

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arXiv2025

Shelving it rather than Ditching it: Dynamically Debloating DEX and Native Methods of Android Applications without APK Modification

Today's Android developers tend to include numerous features to accommodate diverse user requirements, which inevitably leads to bloated apps. Yet more often than not, only a fraction of these features are frequently utilized by users, thus a bloated app costs dearly in potential vulnerabilities, expanded attack surfaces, and additional resource consumption. Especially in the event of severe security incidents, users have the need to block vulnerable functionalities immediately. Existing works have proposed various code debloating approaches for identifying and removing features of executable components. However, they typically involve static modification of files (and, for Android apps, repackaging of APKs, too), which lacks user convenience let alone undermining the security model of Android due to the compromising of public key verification and code integrity checks. This paper introduces 3DNDroid, a Dynamic Debloating approach targeting both DEX and Native methods in AnDroid apps. Using an unprivileged management app in tandem with a customized Android OS, 3DNDroid dynamically reduces unnecessary code loading during app execution based on a pre-generated debloating schema from static or dynamic analyses. It intercepts invocations of debloated bytecode methods to prevent their interpretation, compilation, and execution, while zero-filling memory spaces of debloated native methods during code loading. Evaluation demonstrates 3DNDroid's ability to debloat 187 DEX methods and 30 native methods across 55 real-world apps, removing over 10K Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) gadgets. Case studies confirm its effectiveness in mitigating vulnerabilities, and performance assessments highlight its resource-saving advantages over non-debloated apps.

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arXiv2024

CUPID: Leveraging ChatGPT for More Accurate Duplicate Bug Report Detection

Duplicate bug report detection (DBRD) is a long-standing challenge in both academia and industry. Over the past decades, researchers have proposed various approaches to detect duplicate bug reports more accurately. With the recent advancement of deep learning, researchers have also proposed several deep learning-based approaches to address the DBRD task. In the bug repositories with many bug reports, deep learning-based approaches have shown promising performance. However, in the bug repositories with a smaller number of bug reports, i.e., around 10k, the existing deep learning approaches show worse performance than the traditional approaches. Traditional approaches have limitations, too, e.g., they are usually based on the bag-of-words model, which cannot capture the semantics of bug reports. To address these aforementioned challenges, we seek to leverage a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) to improve the performance of the traditional DBRD approach. In this paper, we propose an approach called CUPID, which combines the bestperforming traditional DBRD approach (i.e., REP) with the state-of-the-art LLM (i.e., ChatGPT). We conducted an evaluation by comparing CUPID with three existing approaches on three datasets. The experimental results show that CUPID achieves state-of-theart results, reaching Recall Rate@10 scores ranging from 0.602 to 0.654 across all the datasets analyzed. In particular, CUPID improves over the prior state-ofthe-art approach by 5% - 8% in terms of Recall Rate@10 in the datasets. CUPID also surpassed the state-of-the-art deep learning-based DBRD approach by up to 82%.

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arXiv2024

Representation Learning for Stack Overflow Posts: How Far are We?

The tremendous success of Stack Overflow has accumulated an extensive corpus of software engineering knowledge, thus motivating researchers to propose various solutions for analyzing its content.The performance of such solutions hinges significantly on the selection of representation model for Stack Overflow posts. As the volume of literature on Stack Overflow continues to burgeon, it highlights the need for a powerful Stack Overflow post representation model and drives researchers' interest in developing specialized representation models that can adeptly capture the intricacies of Stack Overflow posts. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) Stack Overflow post representation models are Post2Vec and BERTOverflow, which are built upon trendy neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer architecture (e.g., BERT). Despite their promising results, these representation methods have not been evaluated in the same experimental setting. To fill the research gap, we first empirically compare the performance of the representation models designed specifically for Stack Overflow posts (Post2Vec and BERTOverflow) in a wide range of related tasks, i.e., tag recommendation, relatedness prediction, and API recommendation. To find more suitable representation models for the posts, we further explore a diverse set of BERT-based models, including (1) general domain language models (RoBERTa and Longformer) and (2) language models built with software engineering-related textual artifacts (CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, and seBERT). However, it also illustrates the ``No Silver Bullet'' concept, as none of the models consistently wins against all the others. Inspired by the findings, we propose SOBERT, which employs a simple-yet-effective strategy to improve the best-performing model by continuing the pre-training phase with the textual artifact from Stack Overflow.

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arXiv2024

BugsInPy: A Database of Existing Bugs in Python Programs to Enable Controlled Testing and Debugging Studies

The 2019 edition of Stack Overflow developer survey highlights that, for the first time, Python outperformed Java in terms of popularity. The gap between Python and Java further widened in the 2020 edition of the survey. Unfortunately, despite the rapid increase in Python's popularity, there are not many testing and debugging tools that are designed for Python. This is in stark contrast with the abundance of testing and debugging tools for Java. Thus, there is a need to push research on tools that can help Python developers. One factor that contributed to the rapid growth of Java testing and debugging tools is the availability of benchmarks. A popular benchmark is the Defects4J benchmark; its initial version contained 357 real bugs from 5 real-world Java programs. Each bug comes with a test suite that can expose the bug. Defects4J has been used by hundreds of testing and debugging studies and has helped to push the frontier of research in these directions. In this project, inspired by Defects4J, we create another benchmark database and tool that contain 493 real bugs from 17 real-world Python programs. We hope our benchmark can help catalyze future work on testing and debugging tools that work on Python programs.

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arXiv2023

Evaluating Pre-trained Language Models for Repairing API Misuses

API misuses often lead to software bugs, crashes, and vulnerabilities. While several API misuse detectors have been proposed, there are no automatic repair tools specifically designed for this purpose. In a recent study, test-suite-based automatic program repair (APR) tools were found to be ineffective in repairing API misuses. Still, since the study focused on non-learning-aided APR tools, it remains unknown whether learning-aided APR tools are capable of fixing API misuses. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded greatly in many natural language processing tasks. There is a rising interest in applying PLMs to APR. However, there has not been any study that investigates the effectiveness of PLMs in repairing API misuse. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on 11 learning-aided APR tools, which include 9 of the state-of-the-art general-purpose PLMs and two APR tools. We evaluate these models with an API-misuse repair dataset, consisting of two variants. Our results show that PLMs perform better than the studied APR tools in repairing API misuses. Among the 9 pre-trained models tested, CodeT5 is the best performer in the exact match. We also offer insights and potential exploration directions for future research.

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arXiv2023

Revisiting Sentiment Analysis for Software Engineering in the Era of Large Language Models

Software development involves collaborative interactions where stakeholders express opinions across various platforms. Recognizing the sentiments conveyed in these interactions is crucial for the effective development and ongoing maintenance of software systems. For software products, analyzing the sentiment of user feedback, e.g., reviews, comments, and forum posts can provide valuable insights into user satisfaction and areas for improvement. This can guide the development of future updates and features. However, accurately identifying sentiments in software engineering datasets remains challenging. This study investigates bigger large language models (bLLMs) in addressing the labeled data shortage that hampers fine-tuned smaller large language models (sLLMs) in software engineering tasks. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study using five established datasets to assess three open-source bLLMs in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Additionally, we compare them with fine-tuned sLLMs, using sLLMs to learn contextual embeddings of text from software platforms. Our experimental findings demonstrate that bLLMs exhibit state-of-the-art performance on datasets marked by limited training data and imbalanced distributions. bLLMs can also achieve excellent performance under a zero-shot setting. However, when ample training data is available or the dataset exhibits a more balanced distribution, fine-tuned sLLMs can still achieve superior results.

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arXiv2023

APISENS- Sentiment Scoring Tool for APIs with Crowd-Knowledge

Utilizing pre-existing software artifacts, such as libraries and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), is crucial for software development efficiency. However, the abundance of artifacts that provide similar functionality can lead to confusion among developers, resulting in a challenge for proper selection and implementation. Through our preliminary investigation, we found that utilizing the collective knowledge of a crowd can greatly assist developers in acquiring a thorough and complete understanding of the complexities involved in the software development process. Especially as emotions are an inseparable part of human nature, it influences developers' activities. In this regard, we attempt to build a tool that can retrieve sentiment information for software APIs so that developers can determine APIs to utilize for their tasks. We employ the dataset from the most popular platforms (i.e., Twitter and YouTube) to build our research prototype. The source code, tool, and demo video are available on GitHub at \url{https://github.com/FalconLK/APISens}.

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arXiv2023

APIHarvest: Harvesting API Information from Various Online Sources

Using APIs to develop software applications is the norm. APIs help developers to build applications faster as they do not need to reinvent the wheel. It is therefore important for developers to understand the APIs that they plan to use. Developers should also make themselves aware of relevant information updates about APIs. In order to do so, developers need to find and keep track of relevant information about the APIs that they are concerned with. Yet, the API information is scattered across various online sources, which makes it difficult to track by hand. Moreover, identifying content that is related to an API is not trivial. Motivated by these challenges, in this work, we introduce a tool named \tool that aims to ease the process of finding API information from various online sources. \tool is built on works that link APIs or libraries to various online sources. It supports finding API information on GitHub repositories, Stack Overflow's posts, tweets, YouTube videos, and common vulnerability and exposure (CVE) entries; and is extensible to support other sources.

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arXiv2023

PICASO: Enhancing API Recommendations with Relevant Stack Overflow Posts

While having options could be liberating, too many options could lead to the sub-optimal solution being chosen. This is not an exception in the software engineering domain. Nowadays, API has become imperative in making software developers' life easier. APIs help developers implement a function faster and more efficiently. However, given the large number of open-source libraries to choose from, choosing the right APIs is not a simple task. Previous studies on API recommendation leverage natural language (query) to identify which API would be suitable for the given task. However, these studies only consider one source of input, i.e., GitHub or Stack Overflow, independently. There are no existing approaches that utilize Stack Overflow to help generate better API sequence recommendations from queries obtained from GitHub. Therefore, in this study, we aim to provide a framework that could improve the result of the API sequence recommendation by leveraging information from Stack Overflow. In this work, we propose PICASO, which leverages a bi-encoder to do contrastive learning and a cross-encoder to build a classification model in order to find a semantically similar Stack Overflow post given an annotation (i.e., code comment). Subsequently, PICASO then uses the Stack Overflow's title as a query expansion. PICASO then uses the extended queries to fine-tune a CodeBERT, resulting in an API sequence generation model. Based on our experiments, we found that incorporating the Stack Overflow information into CodeBERT would improve the performance of API sequence generation's BLEU-4 score by 10.8%.

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arXiv2023

NICHE: A Curated Dataset of Engineered Machine Learning Projects in Python

Machine learning (ML) has gained much attention and been incorporated into our daily lives. While there are numerous publicly available ML projects on open source platforms such as GitHub, there have been limited attempts in filtering those projects to curate ML projects of high quality. The limited availability of such a high-quality dataset poses an obstacle in understanding ML projects. To help clear this obstacle, we present NICHE, a manually labelled dataset consisting of 572 ML projects. Based on evidences of good software engineering practices, we label 441 of these projects as engineered and 131 as non-engineered. This dataset can help researchers understand the practices that are followed in high-quality ML projects. It can also be used as a benchmark for classifiers designed to identify engineered ML projects.

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arXiv2022

Duplicate Bug Report Detection: How Far Are We?

Many Duplicate Bug Report Detection (DBRD) techniques have been proposed in the research literature. The industry uses some other techniques. Unfortunately, there is insufficient comparison among them, and it is unclear how far we have been. This work fills this gap by comparing the aforementioned techniques. To compare them, we first need a benchmark that can estimate how a tool would perform if applied in a realistic setting today. Thus, we first investigated potential biases that affect the fair comparison of the accuracy of DBRD techniques. Our experiments suggest that data age and issue tracking system choice cause a significant difference. Based on these findings, we prepared a new benchmark. We then used it to evaluate DBRD techniques to estimate better how far we have been. Surprisingly, a simpler technique outperforms recently proposed sophisticated techniques on most projects in our benchmark. In addition, we compared the DBRD techniques proposed in research with those used in Mozilla and VSCode. Surprisingly, we observe that a simple technique already adopted in practice can achieve comparable results as a recently proposed research tool. Our study gives reflections on the current state of DBRD, and we share our insights to benefit future DBRD research.

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arXiv2022

Answer Summarization for Technical Queries: Benchmark and New Approach

Prior studies have demonstrated that approaches to generate an answer summary for a given technical query in Software Question and Answer (SQA) sites are desired. We find that existing approaches are assessed solely through user studies. There is a need for a benchmark with ground truth summaries to complement assessment through user studies. Unfortunately, such a benchmark is non-existent for answer summarization for technical queries from SQA sites. To fill the gap, we manually construct a high-quality benchmark to enable automatic evaluation of answer summarization for technical queries for SQA sites. Using the benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate the performance of existing approaches and find that there is still a big room for improvement. Motivated by the results, we propose a new approach TechSumBot with three key modules:1) Usefulness Ranking module, 2) Centrality Estimation module, and 3) Redundancy Removal module. We evaluate TechSumBot in both automatic (i.e., using our benchmark) and manual (i.e., via a user study) manners. The results from both evaluations consistently demonstrate that TechSumBot outperforms the best performing baseline approaches from both SE and NLP domains by a large margin, i.e., 10.83%-14.90%, 32.75%-36.59%, and 12.61%-17.54%, in terms of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L on automatic evaluation, and 5.79%-9.23% and 17.03%-17.68%, in terms of average usefulness and diversity score on human evaluation. This highlights that the automatic evaluation of our benchmark can uncover findings similar to the ones found through user studies. More importantly, automatic evaluation has a much lower cost, especially when it is used to assess a new approach. Additionally, we also conducted an ablation study, which demonstrates that each module in TechSumBot contributes to boosting the overall performance of TechSumBot.

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arXiv2022

iTiger: An Automatic Issue Title Generation Tool

In both commercial and open-source software, bug reports or issues are used to track bugs or feature requests. However, the quality of issues can differ a lot. Prior research has found that bug reports with good quality tend to gain more attention than the ones with poor quality. As an essential component of an issue, title quality is an important aspect of issue quality. Moreover, issues are usually presented in a list view, where only the issue title and some metadata are present. In this case, a concise and accurate title is crucial for readers to grasp the general concept of the issue and facilitate the issue triaging. Previous work formulated the issue title generation task as a one-sentence summarization task. A sequence-to-sequence model was employed to solve this task. However, it requires a large amount of domain-specific training data to attain good performance in issue title generation. Recently, pre-trained models, which learned knowledge from large-scale general corpora, have shown much success in software engineering tasks. In this work, we make the first attempt to fine-tune BART, which has been pre-trained using English corpora, to generate issue titles. We implemented the fine-tuned BART as a web tool named iTiger, which can suggest an issue title based on the issue description. iTiger is fine-tuned on 267,094 GitHub issues. We compared iTiger with the state-of-the-art method, i.e., iTAPE, on 33,438 issues. The automatic evaluation shows that iTiger outperforms iTAPE by 29.7%, 50.8%, and 34.1%, in terms of ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L F1-scores. The manual evaluation also demonstrates the titles generated by BART are preferred by evaluators over the titles generated by iTAPE in 72.7% of cases. Besides, the evaluators deem our tool as useful and easy-to-use. They are also interested to use our tool in the future.

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arXiv2022

AutoPRTitle: A Tool for Automatic Pull Request Title Generation

With the rise of the pull request mechanism in software development, the quality of pull requests has gained more attention. Prior works focus on improving the quality of pull request descriptions and several approaches have been proposed to automatically generate pull request descriptions. As an essential component of a pull request, pull request titles have not received a similar level of attention. To further facilitate automation in software development and to help developers in drafting high-quality pull request titles, we introduce AutoPRTitle. AutoPRTitle is specifically designed to automatically generate pull request titles. AutoPRTitle can generate a precise and succinct pull request title based on the pull request description, commit messages, and the associated issue titles. AutoPRTitle is built upon a state-of-the-art text summarization model, BART, which has been pre-trained on large-scale English corpora. We further fine-tuned BART in a pull request dataset containing high-quality pull request titles. We implemented AutoPRTitle as a stand-alone web application. We conducted two sets of evaluations: one concerning the model accuracy and the other concerning the tool usability. For model accuracy, BART outperforms the best baseline by 24.6%, 40.5%, and 23.3%, respectively. For tool usability, the evaluators consider our tool as easy-to-use and useful when creating a pull request title of good quality. Source code: https://github.com/soarsmu/Auto-PR-Title Video demo: https://tinyurl.com/AutoPRTitle

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