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Junda He

Publications and source records attributed to Junda He.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Software Engineering: Literature Review, Vision and the Road Ahead

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents marks a significant shift in the research landscape by offering cognitive abilities that are competitive with human planning and reasoning. This paper explores the transformative potential of integrating Large Language Models into Multi-Agent (LMA) systems for addressing complex challenges in software engineering (SE). By leveraging the collaborative and specialized abilities of multiple agents, LMA systems enable autonomous problem-solving, improve robustness, and provide scalable solutions for managing the complexity of real-world software projects. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of recent primary studies to map the current landscape of LMA applications across various stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). To illustrate current capabilities and limitations, we perform two case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art LMA frameworks. Additionally, we identify critical research gaps and propose a comprehensive research agenda focused on enhancing individual agent capabilities and optimizing agent synergy. Our work outlines a forward-looking vision for developing fully autonomous, scalable, and trustworthy LMA systems, laying the foundation for the evolution of Software Engineering 2.0.

cs.SE↗

BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions

Task automation has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) via Python code, where the tasks ranging from software engineering development to general-purpose reasoning. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can solve tasks using programs like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks or standalone function calls. Solving challenging and practical tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs.To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical tasks via programs, we introduce BigCodeBench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of BigCodeBench, BigCodeBench-Instruct, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.

cs.SE↗

From Code to Courtroom: LLMs as the New Software Judges

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to automate SE tasks such as code generation and summarization. However, evaluating the quality of LLM-generated software artifacts remains challenging. Human evaluation, while effective, is very costly and time-consuming. Traditional automated metrics like BLEU rely on high-quality references and struggle to capture nuanced aspects of software quality, such as readability and usefulness. In response, the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, which employs LLMs for automated evaluation, has emerged. Given that LLMs are typically trained to align with human judgment and possess strong coding abilities and reasoning skills, they hold promise as cost-effective and scalable surrogates for human evaluators. Nevertheless, LLM-as-a-Judge research in the SE community is still in its early stages, with many breakthroughs needed. This forward-looking SE 2030 paper aims to steer the research community toward advancing LLM-as-a-Judge for evaluating LLMgenerated software artifacts, while also sharing potential research paths to achieve this goal. We provide a literature review of existing SE studies on LLM-as-a-Judge and envision these frameworks as reliable, robust, and scalable human surrogates capable of evaluating software artifacts with consistent, multi-faceted assessments by 2030 and beyond. To validate this vision, we analyze the limitations of current studies, identify key research gaps, and outline a detailed roadmap to guide future developments of LLM-as-a-Judge in software engineering. While not intended to be a definitive guide, our work aims to foster further research and adoption of LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks within the SE community, ultimately improving the effectiveness and scalability of software artifact evaluation methods.

cs.SE↗

LessLeak-Bench: A First Investigation of Data Leakage in LLMs Across 83 Software Engineering Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely utilized in software engineering (SE) tasks, such as code generation and automated program repair. However, their reliance on extensive and often undisclosed pre-training datasets raises significant concerns about data leakage, where the evaluation benchmark data is unintentionally ``seen'' by LLMs during the model's construction phase. The data leakage issue could largely undermine the validity of LLM-based research and evaluations. Despite the increasing use of LLMs in the SE community, there is no comprehensive study that assesses the extent of data leakage in SE benchmarks for LLMs yet. To address this gap, this paper presents the first large-scale analysis of data leakage in 83 SE benchmarks concerning LLMs. Our results show that in general, data leakage in SE benchmarks is minimal, with average leakage ratios of only 4.8\%, 2.8\%, and 0.7\% for Python, Java, and C/C++ benchmarks, respectively. However, some benchmarks exhibit relatively higher leakage ratios, which raises concerns about their bias in evaluation. For instance, QuixBugs and BigCloneBench have leakage ratios of 100.0\% and 55.7\%, respectively. Furthermore, we observe that data leakage has a substantial impact on LLM evaluation. We also identify key causes of high data leakage, such as the direct inclusion of benchmark data in pre-training datasets and the use of coding platforms like LeetCode for benchmark construction. To address the data leakage, we introduce \textbf{LessLeak-Bench}, a new benchmark that removes leaked samples from the 83 SE benchmarks, enabling more reliable LLM evaluations in future research. Our study enhances the understanding of data leakage in SE benchmarks and provides valuable insights for future research involving LLMs in SE.

cs.SE↗

A Functional Software Reference Architecture for LLM-Integrated Systems

The integration of large language models into software systems is transforming capabilities such as natural language understanding, decision-making, and autonomous task execution. However, the absence of a commonly accepted software reference architecture hinders systematic reasoning about their design and quality attributes. This gap makes it challenging to address critical concerns like privacy, security, modularity, and interoperability, which are increasingly important as these systems grow in complexity and societal impact. In this paper, we describe our \textit{emerging} results for a preliminary functional reference architecture as a conceptual framework to address these challenges and guide the design, evaluation, and evolution of large language model-integrated systems. We identify key architectural concerns for these systems, informed by current research and practice. We then evaluate how the architecture addresses these concerns and validate its applicability using three open-source large language model-integrated systems in computer vision, text processing, and coding.

cs.SE↗

Finding Safety Violations of AI-Enabled Control Systems through the Lens of Synthesized Proxy Programs

Given the increasing adoption of modern AI-enabled control systems, ensuring their safety and reliability has become a critical task in software testing. One prevalent approach to testing control systems is falsification, which aims to find an input signal that causes the control system to violate a formal safety specification using optimization algorithms. However, applying falsification to AI-enabled control systems poses two significant challenges: (1)~it requires the system to execute numerous candidate test inputs, which can be time-consuming, particularly for systems with AI models that have many parameters, and (2)~multiple safety requirements are typically defined as a conjunctive specification, which is difficult for existing falsification approaches to comprehensively cover. This paper introduces Synthify, a falsification framework tailored for AI-enabled control systems. Our approach performs falsification in a two-phase process. At the start, Synthify synthesizes a program that implements one or a few linear controllers to serve as a proxy for the AI controller. This proxy program mimics the AI controller's functionality but is computationally more efficient. Then, Synthify employs the $ε$-greedy strategy to sample a promising sub-specification from the conjunctive safety specification. It then uses a Simulated Annealing-based falsification algorithm to find violations of the sampled sub-specification for the control system. To evaluate Synthify, we compare it to PSY-TaLiRo, a state-of-the-art and industrial-strength falsification tool, on 8 publicly available control systems. On average, Synthify achieves a 83.5% higher success rate in falsification compared to PSY-TaLiRo with the same budget of falsification trials. The safety violations found by Synthify are also more diverse than those found by PSY-TaLiRo, covering 137.7% more sub-specifications.

cs.SE↗

PTM4Tag+: Tag Recommendation of Stack Overflow Posts with Pre-trained Models

Stack Overflow is one of the most influential Software Question & Answer (SQA) websites, hosting millions of programming-related questions and answers. Tags play a critical role in efficiently organizing the contents in Stack Overflow and are vital to support a range of site operations, e.g., querying relevant content. Poorly selected tags often raise problems like tag ambiguity and tag explosion. Thus, a precise and accurate automated tag recommendation technique is demanded. Inspired by the recent success of pre-trained models (PTMs) in natural language processing (NLP), we present PTM4Tag+, a tag recommendation framework for Stack Overflow posts that utilizes PTMs in language modeling. PTM4Tag+ is implemented with a triplet architecture, which considers three key components of a post, i.e., Title, Description, and Code, with independent PTMs. We utilize a number of popular pre-trained models, including the BERT-based models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, CodeBERT, BERTOverflow, and ALBERT), and encoder-decoder models (e.g., PLBART, CoTexT, and CodeT5). Our results show that leveraging CodeT5 under the PTM4Tag+ framework achieves the best performance among the eight considered PTMs and outperforms the state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network-based approach by a substantial margin in terms of average P recision@k, Recall@k, and F1-score@k (k ranges from 1 to 5). Specifically, CodeT5 improves the performance of F1-score@1-5 by 8.8%, 12.4%, 15.3%, 16.4%, and 16.6%. Moreover, to address the concern with inference latency, we experiment PTM4Tag+ with smaller PTM models (i.e., DistilBERT, DistilRoBERTa, CodeBERT-small, and CodeT5-small). We find that although smaller PTMs cannot outperform larger PTMs, they still maintain over 93.96% of the performance on average, meanwhile shortening the mean inference time by more than 47.2%

cs.SE↗

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.

cs.SE↗

PatchZero: Zero-Shot Automatic Patch Correctness Assessment

Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have shown more and more promising results in fixing real-world bugs. Despite the effectiveness, APR techniques still face an overfitting problem: a generated patch can be incorrect although it passes all tests. It is time-consuming to manually evaluate the correctness of generated patches that can pass all tests. To address this problem, many approaches have been proposed to automatically assess the correctness of patches generated by APR techniques. These approaches are mainly evaluated within the cross-validation setting. However, for patches generated by a new or unseen APR tool, users are implicitly required to manually label a significant portion of these patches in the cross-validation setting before inferring the remaining patches. To mitigate the issue, in this study, we propose \toolname, the patch correctness assessment by adopting a large language model for code. Specifically, for patches generated by a new or unseen APR tool, \toolname does not need labeled patches of this new or unseen APR tool for training but directly queries the large language model for code to get predictions on the correctness labels without training. In this way, \toolname can reduce the manual labeling effort when building a model to automatically assess the correctness of generated patches of new APR tools. \toolname prioritizes labeled patches from existing APR tools that exhibit semantic similarity to those generated by new APR tools, enhancing the accuracy achieved by \toolname for patches from new APR tools. Our experimental results showed that \toolname can achieve an accuracy of 84.4% and an F1-score of 86.5% on average although no labeled patch of the new or unseen APR tool is available. In addition, our proposed technique outperformed the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin.

cs.SE↗

BAFFLE: Hiding Backdoors in Offline Reinforcement Learning Datasets

Reinforcement learning (RL) makes an agent learn from trial-and-error experiences gathered during the interaction with the environment. Recently, offline RL has become a popular RL paradigm because it saves the interactions with environments. In offline RL, data providers share large pre-collected datasets, and others can train high-quality agents without interacting with the environments. This paradigm has demonstrated effectiveness in critical tasks like robot control, autonomous driving, etc. However, less attention is paid to investigating the security threats to the offline RL system. This paper focuses on backdoor attacks, where some perturbations are added to the data (observations) such that given normal observations, the agent takes high-rewards actions, and low-reward actions on observations injected with triggers. In this paper, we propose Baffle (Backdoor Attack for Offline Reinforcement Learning), an approach that automatically implants backdoors to RL agents by poisoning the offline RL dataset, and evaluate how different offline RL algorithms react to this attack. Our experiments conducted on four tasks and four offline RL algorithms expose a disquieting fact: none of the existing offline RL algorithms is immune to such a backdoor attack. More specifically, Baffle modifies 10\% of the datasets for four tasks (3 robotic controls and 1 autonomous driving). Agents trained on the poisoned datasets perform well in normal settings. However, when triggers are presented, the agents' performance decreases drastically by 63.2\%, 53.9\%, 64.7\%, and 47.4\% in the four tasks on average. The backdoor still persists after fine-tuning poisoned agents on clean datasets. We further show that the inserted backdoor is also hard to be detected by a popular defensive method. This paper calls attention to developing more effective protection for the open-source offline RL dataset.

cs.LG↗

Greening Large Language Models of Code

Large language models of code have shown remarkable effectiveness across various software engineering tasks. Despite the availability of many cloud services built upon these powerful models, there remain several scenarios where developers cannot take full advantage of them, stemming from factors such as restricted or unreliable internet access, institutional privacy policies that prohibit external transmission of code to third-party vendors, and more. Therefore, developing a compact, efficient, and yet energy-saving model for deployment on developers' devices becomes essential. To this aim, we propose Avatar, a novel approach that crafts a deployable model from a large language model of code by optimizing it in terms of model size, inference latency, energy consumption, and carbon footprint while maintaining a comparable level of effectiveness. The key idea of Avatar is to formulate the optimization of language models as a multi-objective configuration tuning problem and solve it with the help of a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver and a tailored optimization algorithm. The SMT solver is used to form an appropriate configuration space, while the optimization algorithm identifies the Pareto-optimal set of configurations for training the optimized models using knowledge distillation. We evaluate Avatar with two popular language models of code, i.e., CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT, on two popular tasks, i.e., vulnerability prediction and clone detection. We use Avatar to produce optimized models with a small size (3 MB), which is 160$\times$ smaller than the original large models. On the two tasks, the optimized models significantly reduce the energy consumption (up to 184$\times$ less), carbon footprint (up to 157$\times$ less), and inference latency (up to 76$\times$ faster), with only a negligible loss in effectiveness (1.67\% on average).

cs.SE↗

APIDocBooster: An Extract-Then-Abstract Framework Leveraging Large Language Models for Augmenting API Documentation

API documentation is often the most trusted resource for programming. Many approaches have been proposed to augment API documentation by summarizing complementary information from external resources such as Stack Overflow. Existing extractive-based summarization approaches excel in producing faithful summaries that accurately represent the source content without input length restrictions. Nevertheless, they suffer from inherent readability limitations. On the other hand, our empirical study on the abstractive-based summarization method, i.e., GPT-4, reveals that GPT-4 can generate coherent and concise summaries but presents limitations in terms of informativeness and faithfulness. We introduce APIDocBooster, an extract-then-abstract framework that seamlessly fuses the advantages of both extractive (i.e., enabling faithful summaries without length limitation) and abstractive summarization (i.e., producing coherent and concise summaries). APIDocBooster consists of two stages: (1) \textbf{C}ontext-aware \textbf{S}entence \textbf{S}ection \textbf{C}lassification (CSSC) and (2) \textbf{UP}date \textbf{SUM}marization (UPSUM). CSSC classifies API-relevant information collected from multiple sources into API documentation sections. UPSUM first generates extractive summaries distinct from the original API documentation and then generates abstractive summaries guided by extractive summaries through in-context learning. To enable automatic evaluation of APIDocBooster, we construct the first dataset for API document augmentation. Our automatic evaluation results reveal that each stage in APIDocBooster outperforms its baselines by a large margin. Our human evaluation also demonstrates the superiority of APIDocBooster over GPT-4 and shows that it improves informativeness, relevance, and faithfulness by 13.89\%, 15.15\%, and 30.56\%, respectively.

cs.SE↗

CCBERT: Self-Supervised Code Change Representation Learning

Numerous code changes are made by developers in their daily work, and a superior representation of code changes is desired for effective code change analysis. Recently, Hoang et al. proposed CC2Vec, a neural network-based approach that learns a distributed representation of code changes to capture the semantic intent of the changes. Despite demonstrated effectiveness in multiple tasks, CC2Vec has several limitations: 1) it considers only coarse-grained information about code changes, and 2) it relies on log messages rather than the self-contained content of the code changes. In this work, we propose CCBERT (\underline{C}ode \underline{C}hange \underline{BERT}), a new Transformer-based pre-trained model that learns a generic representation of code changes based on a large-scale dataset containing massive unlabeled code changes. CCBERT is pre-trained on four proposed self-supervised objectives that are specialized for learning code change representations based on the contents of code changes. CCBERT perceives fine-grained code changes at the token level by learning from the old and new versions of the content, along with the edit actions. Our experiments demonstrate that CCBERT significantly outperforms CC2Vec or the state-of-the-art approaches of the downstream tasks by 7.7\%--14.0\% in terms of different metrics and tasks. CCBERT consistently outperforms large pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT, while requiring 6--10$\times$ less training time, 5--30$\times$ less inference time, and 7.9$\times$ less GPU memory.

cs.SE↗

Stealthy Backdoor Attack for Code Models

Code models, such as CodeBERT and CodeT5, offer general-purpose representations of code and play a vital role in supporting downstream automated software engineering tasks. Most recently, code models were revealed to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. A code model that is backdoor-attacked can behave normally on clean examples but will produce pre-defined malicious outputs on examples injected with triggers that activate the backdoors. Existing backdoor attacks on code models use unstealthy and easy-to-detect triggers. This paper aims to investigate the vulnerability of code models with stealthy backdoor attacks. To this end, we propose AFRAIDOOR (Adversarial Feature as Adaptive Backdoor). AFRAIDOOR achieves stealthiness by leveraging adversarial perturbations to inject adaptive triggers into different inputs. We evaluate AFRAIDOOR on three widely adopted code models (CodeBERT, PLBART and CodeT5) and two downstream tasks (code summarization and method name prediction). We find that around 85% of adaptive triggers in AFRAIDOOR bypass the detection in the defense process. By contrast, only less than 12% of the triggers from previous work bypass the defense. When the defense method is not applied, both AFRAIDOOR and baselines have almost perfect attack success rates. However, once a defense is applied, the success rates of baselines decrease dramatically to 10.47% and 12.06%, while the success rate of AFRAIDOOR are 77.05% and 92.98% on the two tasks. Our finding exposes security weaknesses in code models under stealthy backdoor attacks and shows that the state-of-the-art defense method cannot provide sufficient protection. We call for more research efforts in understanding security threats to code models and developing more effective countermeasures.

cs.CR↗

Generation-based Code Review Automation: How Far Are We?

Code review is an effective software quality assurance activity; however, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Thus, a number of generation-based automatic code review (ACR) approaches have been proposed recently, which leverage deep learning techniques to automate various activities in the code review process (e.g., code revision generation and review comment generation). We find the previous works carry three main limitations. First, the ACR approaches have been shown to be beneficial in each work, but those methods are not comprehensively compared with each other to show their superiority over their peer ACR approaches. Second, general-purpose pre-trained models such as CodeT5 are proven to be effective in a wide range of Software Engineering (SE) tasks. However, no prior work has investigated the effectiveness of these models in ACR tasks yet. Third, prior works heavily rely on the Exact Match (EM) metric which only focuses on the perfect predictions and ignores the positive progress made by incomplete answers. To fill such a research gap, we conduct a comprehensive study by comparing the effectiveness of recent ACR tools as well as the general-purpose pre-trained models. The results show that a general-purpose pre-trained model CodeT5 can outperform other models in most cases. Specifically, CodeT5 outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by 13.4\%--38.9\% in two code revision generation tasks. In addition, we introduce a new metric namely Edit Progress (EP) to quantify the partial progress made by ACR tools. The results show that the rankings of models for each task could be changed according to whether EM or EP is being utilized. Lastly, we derive several insightful lessons from the experimental results and reveal future research directions for generation-based code review automation.

cs.SE↗

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.

cs.SE↗

PTM4Tag: Sharpening Tag Recommendation of Stack Overflow Posts with Pre-trained Models

Stack Overflow is often viewed as the most influential Software Question Answer (SQA) website with millions of programming-related questions and answers. Tags play a critical role in efficiently structuring the contents in Stack Overflow and are vital to support a range of site operations, e.g., querying relevant contents. Poorly selected tags often introduce extra noise and redundancy, which leads to tag synonym and tag explosion problems. Thus, an automated tag recommendation technique that can accurately recommend high-quality tags is desired to alleviate the problems mentioned above. Inspired by the recent success of pre-trained language models (PTMs) in natural language processing (NLP), we present PTM4Tag, a tag recommendation framework for Stack Overflow posts that utilize PTMs with a triplet architecture, which models the components of a post, i.e., Title, Description, and Code with independent language models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that leverages PTMs in the tag recommendation task of SQA sites. We comparatively evaluate the performance of PTM4Tag based on five popular pre-trained models: BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, CodeBERT, and BERTOverflow. Our results show that leveraging the software engineering (SE) domain-specific PTM CodeBERT in PTM4Tag achieves the best performance among the five considered PTMs and outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning (Convolutional Neural Network-based) approach by a large margin in terms of average $Precision@k$, $Recall@k$, and $F1$-$score@k$. We conduct an ablation study to quantify the contribution of a post's constituent components (Title, Description, and Code Snippets) to the performance of PTM4Tag. Our results show that Title is the most important in predicting the most relevant tags, and utilizing all the components achieves the best performance.

cs.SE↗

Consensus formation on heterogeneous networks

Reaching consensus -- a macroscopic state where the system constituents display the same microscopic state -- is a necessity in multiple complex socio-technical and techno-economic systems: their correct functioning ultimately depends on it. In many distributed systems -- of which blockchain-based applications are a paradigmatic example -- the process of consensus formation is crucial not only for the emergence of a leading majority but for the very functioning of the system. We build a minimalistic network model of consensus formation on blockchain systems for quantifying how central nodes -- with respect to their average distance to others -- can leverage on their position to obtain competitive advantage in the consensus process. We show that in a wide range of network topologies, the probability of forming a majority can significantly increase depending on the centrality of nodes that initiate the spreading. Further, we study the role that network topology plays on the consensus process: we show that central nodes in scale-free networks can win consensus in the network even if they broadcast states significantly later than peripheral ones.

cs.SI↗