arXiv subjects

Kaicheng Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Kaicheng Wang.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Vulnerable Code Search: Transferable Attack for Code Language Models

Reliable code retrieval is crucial for developer productivity and effective code reuse. However, current neural code language models (CLMs) powering search tools are susceptible to adversarial attacks targeting non-functional textual elements. In this paper, we introduce a programming language-agnostic, transferable, adversarial attack that exploits this CLM vulnerability. Our approach perturbs identifiers within a code snippet without altering the snippet's functionality to artificially align the code with a target query. We demonstrate that our attack, even when computed using smaller code embedding models, such as CodeT5+, is highly effective and transferable to larger, closed-source embedding models, like Voyage-code-3, or LLMs like Gemini-3.1-Pro. Our attack can increase the similarity between the query and arbitrary, irrelevant code snippets, consequently degrading key retrieval metrics such as the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of state-of-the-art models by up to 77%. The experimental results highlight the fragility of current code search methods and underscore the need for more robust, semantic-aware approaches.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Reasoning from Traces: Divergence-Guided Agentic Repair of WebAssembly Discrepancies

WebAssembly (Wasm) promises seamless reuse of C/C++ codebases as portable, fast, sandboxed binaries. In practice, however, this promise often falls short: recent studies show that cross-compiling the same C/C++ source to Wasm and native binaries frequently leads to runtime discrepancies, owing to library implementation differences or compiler bugs. Since the root causes lie in the platform-level runtime and are hidden beneath the source code, even state-of-the-art LLM-based repair agents often fail to fix these discrepancies. In this paper, we present WasmMend, the first system to automatically repair Native-Wasm functional discrepancies. WasmMend converts the undirected exploration to a focused reasoning task in two stages: First, a novel differential trace analysis approach localizes the function where Wasm and native executions initially diverge; guided by this localization, LLM agents then reason about the root causes and generate patches that eliminate the divergent behavior. Experiments on real-world C/C++ projects show that WasmMend achieves a fix rate of 70.0%, compared to 50.2% for the agentic baseline and 54.5\% for the approach augmented with repair-time LLM-based instrumentation, demonstrating the value of divergence-guided reasoning for cross-platform repair.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

CLARC: C/C++ Benchmark for Robust Code Search

Efficient code retrieval is critical for developer productivity, yet existing benchmarks largely focus on Python and rarely stress-test robustness beyond superficial lexical cues. To address the gap, we introduce an automated pipeline for code search datasets and present CLARC, a C/C++ benchmark built from real-world GitHub repositories. CLARC contains 1,245 query-code pairs for evaluation and 5,472 pairs for training. The benchmark incorporates LLM-generated natural language queries validated through rigorous human scoring and hypothesis testing. To analyze contextual requirements effectively, our pipeline starts by ensuring code compilability. It then categorizes code snippets by dependency complexity, distinguishing whether the code relies on custom-defined types or helper functions. The pipeline also enables CLARC to stress-test retrieval robustness by introducing challenging settings, including identifier anonymization and compilation to low-level languages like Assembly and WebAssembly. Under these conditions, our evaluation of six state-of-the-art models reveals sharp drops in retrieval effectiveness. The experimental results highlight the models' persistent reliance on lexical features rather than code semantic understanding. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ClarcTeam/CLARC.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Before Smelling the Video: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Interpretable Video-to-Scent Plans

Olfactory cues can enhance immersion in interactive media, yet smell remains rare because it is difficult to author and synchronize with dynamic video. Prior olfactory interfaces rely on designer triggers and fixed event-to-odor mappings that do not scale to unconstrained content. This work examines whether semantic planning for smell is intelligible to people before physical scent delivery. We present a video-to-scent planning pipeline that separates visual semantic extraction using a vision-language model from semantic-to-olfactory inference using a large language model. Two survey studies compare system-generated scent plans with over-inclusive and naive baselines. Results show consistent preference for plans that prioritize perceptually salient cues and align scent changes with visible actions, supporting semantic planning as a foundation for future olfactory media systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Measuring Risk of Bias in Biomedical Reports: The RoBBR Benchmark

Systems that answer questions by reviewing the scientific literature are becoming increasingly feasible. To draw reliable conclusions, these systems should take into account the quality of available evidence from different studies, placing more weight on studies that use a valid methodology. We present a benchmark for measuring the methodological strength of biomedical papers, drawing on the risk-of-bias framework used for systematic reviews. Derived from over 500 biomedical studies, the three benchmark tasks encompass expert reviewers' judgments of studies' research methodologies, including the assessments of risk of bias within these studies. The benchmark contains a human-validated annotation pipeline for fine-grained alignment of reviewers' judgments with research paper sentences. Our analyses show that large language models' reasoning and retrieval capabilities impact their effectiveness with risk-of-bias assessment. The dataset is available at https://github.com/RoBBR-Benchmark/RoBBR.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

EvidenceBench: A Benchmark for Extracting Evidence from Biomedical Papers

We study the task of automatically finding evidence relevant to hypotheses in biomedical papers. Finding relevant evidence is an important step when researchers investigate scientific hypotheses. We introduce EvidenceBench to measure models performance on this task, which is created by a novel pipeline that consists of hypothesis generation and sentence-by-sentence annotation of biomedical papers for relevant evidence, completely guided by and faithfully following existing human experts judgment. We demonstrate the pipeline's validity and accuracy with multiple sets of human-expert annotations. We evaluated a diverse set of language models and retrieval systems on the benchmark and found that model performances still fall significantly short of the expert level on this task. To show the scalability of our proposed pipeline, we create a larger EvidenceBench-100k with 107,461 fully annotated papers with hypotheses to facilitate model training and development. Both datasets are available at https://github.com/EvidenceBench/EvidenceBench

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

IR2: Information Regularization for Information Retrieval

Effective information retrieval (IR) in settings with limited training data, particularly for complex queries, remains a challenging task. This paper introduces IR2, Information Regularization for Information Retrieval, a technique for reducing overfitting during synthetic data generation. This approach, representing a novel application of regularization techniques in synthetic data creation for IR, is tested on three recent IR tasks characterized by complex queries: DORIS-MAE, ArguAna, and WhatsThatBook. Experimental results indicate that our regularization techniques not only outperform previous synthetic query generation methods on the tasks considered but also reduce cost by up to 50%. Furthermore, this paper categorizes and explores three regularization methods at different stages of the query synthesis pipeline-input, prompt, and output-each offering varying degrees of performance improvement compared to models where no regularization is applied. This provides a systematic approach for optimizing synthetic data generation in data-limited, complex-query IR scenarios. All code, prompts and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/Info-Regularization/Information-Regularization.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

BIRCO: A Benchmark of Information Retrieval Tasks with Complex Objectives

We present the Benchmark of Information Retrieval (IR) tasks with Complex Objectives (BIRCO). BIRCO evaluates the ability of IR systems to retrieve documents given multi-faceted user objectives. The benchmark's complexity and compact size make it suitable for evaluating large language model (LLM)-based information retrieval systems. We present a modular framework for investigating factors that may influence LLM performance on retrieval tasks, and identify a simple baseline model which matches or outperforms existing approaches and more complex alternatives. No approach achieves satisfactory performance on all benchmark tasks, suggesting that stronger models and new retrieval protocols are necessary to address complex user needs.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

DORIS-MAE: Scientific Document Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based Queries

In scientific research, the ability to effectively retrieve relevant documents based on complex, multifaceted queries is critical. Existing evaluation datasets for this task are limited, primarily due to the high cost and effort required to annotate resources that effectively represent complex queries. To address this, we propose a novel task, Scientific DOcument Retrieval using Multi-level Aspect-based quEries (DORIS-MAE), which is designed to handle the complex nature of user queries in scientific research. We developed a benchmark dataset within the field of computer science, consisting of 100 human-authored complex query cases. For each complex query, we assembled a collection of 100 relevant documents and produced annotated relevance scores for ranking them. Recognizing the significant labor of expert annotation, we also introduce Anno-GPT, a scalable framework for validating the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on expert-level dataset annotation tasks. LLM annotation of the DORIS-MAE dataset resulted in a 500x reduction in cost, without compromising quality. Furthermore, due to the multi-tiered structure of these complex queries, the DORIS-MAE dataset can be extended to over 4,000 sub-query test cases without requiring additional annotation. We evaluated 17 recent retrieval methods on DORIS-MAE, observing notable performance drops compared to traditional datasets. This highlights the need for better approaches to handle complex, multifaceted queries in scientific research. Our dataset and codebase are available at https://github.com/Real-Doris-Mae/Doris-Mae-Dataset.

cs.IR↗