arXiv subjects

Fuman Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Fuman Xie.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Comprehensive Study of Implementation Bugs in Multi-modal Agents

Multi-Modal Agents (M-agents), empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), excel in various complex, open-world scenarios such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, their unique requirements to interact with dynamic and diverse multi-modal environments introduce novel implementation challenges beyond those faced by traditional agents. Outdated perception, untrustworthy planning and inapplicable execution could cause traffic accident and financial loss. Despite growing study on agent issues, there has not been a systematic study focusing on M-agent-specific implementation bugs. To address this gap, we conducted the first systematic study of implementation bugs in M-agents. We collected 34 representative M-agents from diverse sources and, through meticulous filtering,identified 158 M-agent-specific bugs from 1,268 issue reports. Using a top-down strategy, we developed a comprehensive taxonomy that classifies bugs by global symptoms, functionality component-level symptoms, and root causes. We then implemented MATester, an automatic proof-of-concept bug identifier by analyzing runtime inter-component outputs. When applied to 12 extra M-agents, MATester successfully covered 61.4% of known open issues and discovered 31 additional bugs, demonstrating the practical usefulness of our study. Our work provides a comprehensive reference and guideline for classification, prevention and fix of M-agent bugs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Detecting Multi-Parameter Constraint Inconsistencies in Python Data Science Libraries

Modern AI- and Data-intensive software systems rely heavily on data science and machine learning libraries that provide essential algorithmic implementations and computational frameworks. These libraries expose complex APIs whose correct usage has to follow constraints among multiple interdependent parameters. Developers using these APIs are expected to learn about the constraints through the provided documentations and any discrepancy may lead to unexpected behaviors. However, maintaining correct and consistent multi-parameter constraints in API documentations remains a significant challenge for API compatibility and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose MPDetector, for detecting inconsistencies between code and documentation, specifically focusing on multi-parameter constraints. MPDetector identifies these constraints at the code level by exploring execution paths through symbolic execution and further extracts corresponding constraints from documentation using large language models (LLMs). We propose a customized fuzzy constraint logic to reconcile the unpredictability of LLM outputs and detects logical inconsistencies between the code and documentation constraints. We collected and constructed two datasets from four popular data science libraries and evaluated MPDetector on them. The results demonstrate that MPDetector can effectively detect inconsistency issues with the precision of 92.8%. We further reported 14 detected inconsistency issues to the library developers, who have confirmed 11 issues at the time of writing.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Model-Enhanced LLM-Driven VUI Testing of VPA Apps

The flourishing ecosystem centered around voice personal assistants (VPA), such as Amazon Alexa, has led to the booming of VPA apps. The largest app market Amazon skills store, for example, hosts over 200,000 apps. Despite their popularity, the open nature of app release and the easy accessibility of apps also raise significant concerns regarding security, privacy and quality. Consequently, various testing approaches have been proposed to systematically examine VPA app behaviors. To tackle the inherent lack of a visible user interface in the VPA app, two strategies are employed during testing, i.e., chatbot-style testing and model-based testing. The former often lacks effective guidance for expanding its search space, while the latter falls short in interpreting the semantics of conversations to construct precise and comprehensive behavior models for apps. In this work, we introduce Elevate, a model-enhanced large language model (LLM)-driven VUI testing framework. Elevate leverages LLMs' strong capability in natural language processing to compensate for semantic information loss during model-based VUI testing. It operates by prompting LLMs to extract states from VPA apps' outputs and generate context-related inputs. During the automatic interactions with the app, it incrementally constructs the behavior model, which facilitates the LLM in generating inputs that are highly likely to discover new states. Elevate bridges the LLM and the behavior model with innovative techniques such as encoding behavior model into prompts and selecting LLM-generated inputs based on the context relevance. Elevate is benchmarked on 4,000 real-world Alexa skills, against the state-of-the-art tester Vitas. It achieves 15% higher state space coverage compared to Vitas on all types of apps, and exhibits significant advancement in efficiency.

cs.SE↗