arXiv subjects

Karine Even-Mendoza

Publications and source records attributed to Karine Even-Mendoza.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Toward Live Noise Fingerprinting in Quantum Software Engineering

Contemporary quantum computers are inherently noisy, posing significant challenges for the development and testing of quantum software. Simplified or outdated noise assumptions can lead to incorrect assessments of program correctness, obscure debugging, and hinder cross-platform portability, creating a critical quantum software development gap. Providing accurate, practical noise characterisation is challenging as traditional reconstruction methods scale exponentially and rapidly become outdated. In this vision paper, we address this gap via a novel classical shadow tomography-based pipeline, SIMSHADOW, enabling efficient, continuously updatable noise fingerprinting from empirical observations, suitable for integration into quantum software development workflows, including testing and validation. We prototyped the pipeline to investigate fingerprints' ability to capture structured, interpretable noise and cross-platform discrepancies affecting quantum programs' behaviour to support realistic testing and debugging in future tools. Our evaluation with Qiskit and Cirq under widely used hardware-informed profiles, IBM Boston and Quantinuum H2, shows fingerprints exhibit channel-specific structure and yield interpretable heatmaps. We observed systematic cross-platform discrepancies under matched noise configurations, quantified by large Frobenius distances at a fraction of full tomography cost. On 69 MQTBENCH programs, larger fingerprint differences correlate with output distributions divergences, highlighting threats for testing and cross-platform debugging tasks.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Hot Fixing in the Wild

Despite the operational importance of hot fixes, large-scale evidence on how they reshape routine maintenance workflows, particularly in the era of autonomous coding agents, remains limited. We analyse hot fixes present in over 61,000 GitHub repositories from the Hao-Li/AIDev dataset and find consistent patterns of urgency: reduced collaboration (typically a single contributor), smaller and more targeted changes (median 2-3 commits and files, with <10 line modifications), limited review (often fewer than two reviewers), and substantially fewer test file modifications than regular bug fixes, consistent with their urgency-driven character. Leveraging the same urgency contexts, we examine differences between human- and AI-agent-authored hot fixes, revealing over 10 distinct repair behaviours, thus offering insights into future human-automation collaboration for hot fixing. Our study is the first to empirically analyse hot fix code changes at scale using a repository-level operationalisation of urgency. The comparison of human and agentbehaviours delineates their distinct characteristics, providing a foundation for understanding hot fixing in real-world practice

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

GreenMalloc: Allocator Optimisation for Industrial Workloads

We present GreenMalloc, a multi objective search-based framework for automatically configuring memory allocators. Our approach uses NSGA II and rand_malloc as a lightweight proxy benchmarking tool. We efficiently explore allocator parameters from execution traces and transfer the best configurations to gem5, a large system simulator, in a case study on two allocators: the GNU C/CPP compiler's glibc malloc and Google's TCMalloc. Across diverse workloads, our empirical results show up to 4.1 percantage reduction in average heap usage without loss of runtime efficiency; indeed, we get a 0.25 percantage reduction.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

GA4GC: Greener Agent for Greener Code via Multi-Objective Configuration Optimization

Coding agents powered by LLMs face critical sustainability and scalability challenges in industrial deployment, with single runs consuming over 100k tokens and incurring environmental costs that may exceed optimization benefits. This paper introduces GA4GC, the first framework to systematically optimize coding agent runtime (greener agent) and code performance (greener code) trade-offs by discovering Pareto-optimal agent hyperparameters and prompt templates. Evaluation on the SWE-Perf benchmark demonstrates up to 135x hypervolume improvement, reducing agent runtime by 37.7% while improving correctness. Our findings establish temperature as the most critical hyperparameter, and provide actionable strategies to balance agent sustainability with code optimization effectiveness in industrial deployment.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Guided Genetic Improvement: Envisioning Semantic Aware Automated Software Evolution

Genetic Improvement (GI) of software automatically creates alternative software versions that are improved according to certain properties of interests (e.g., running-time). Search-based GI excels at navigating large program spaces, but operates primarily at the syntactic level. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer semantic-aware edits, yet lack goal-directed feedback and control (which is instead a strength of GI). As such, we propose the investigation of a new research line on AI-powered GI aimed at incorporating semantic aware search. We take a first step at it by augmenting GI with the use of automated clustering of LLM edits. We provide initial empirical evidence that our proposal, dubbed PatchCat, allows us to automatically and effectively categorize LLM-suggested patches. PatchCat identified 18 different types of software patches and categorized newly suggested patches with high accuracy. It also enabled detecting NoOp edits in advance and, prospectively, to skip test suite execution to save resources in many cases. These results, coupled with the fact that PatchCat works with small, local LLMs, are a promising step toward interpretable, efficient, and green GI. We outline a rich agenda of future work and call for the community to join our vision of building a principled understanding of LLM-driven mutations, guiding the GI search process with semantic signals.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

ReFuzzer: Feedback-Driven Approach to Enhance Validity of LLM-Generated Test Programs

Existing LLM-based compiler fuzzers often produce syntactically or semantically invalid test programs, limiting their effectiveness in exercising compiler optimizations and backend components. We introduce ReFuzzer, a framework for refining LLM-generated test programs by systematically detecting and correcting compilation and runtime violations (e.g. division by zero or array out-of-bounds accesses). ReFuzzer employs a feedback loop with a local LLM to validate and filter erroneous programs before execution, improving fuzzing effectiveness beyond crash detection and enabling the generation of diverse yet valid test programs. We evaluated ReFuzzer's effectiveness across black-, grey- and white-box fuzzing approaches targeting LLVM/Clang. ReFuzzer improved test programs' validity from 47.0-49.4% to 96.6-97.3%, with an average processing time of 2.9-3.5 s per test program on a dual-GPU machine. Further, refuzzing significantly increased code coverage in critical optimization and IR generation components. For example, vectorization coverage had an absolute improvement of 9.2%, 2.3%, and 7.1% in black-, grey-, and white-box fuzzing, enhancing testing effectiveness.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Accelerating Quantum Eigensolver Algorithms With Machine Learning

In this paper, we explore accelerating Hamiltonian ground state energy calculation on NISQ devices. We suggest using search-based methods together with machine learning to accelerate quantum algorithms, exemplified in the Quantum Eigensolver use case. We trained two small models on classically mined data from systems with up to 16 qubits, using XGBoost's Python regressor. We evaluated our preliminary approach on 20-, 24- and 28-qubit systems by optimising the Eigensolver's hyperparameters. These models predict hyperparameter values, leading to a 0.12% reduction in error when tested on 28-qubit systems. However, due to inconclusive results with 20- and 24-qubit systems, we suggest further examination of the training data based on Hamiltonian characteristics. In future work, we plan to train machine learning models to optimise other aspects or subroutines of quantum algorithm execution beyond its hyperparameters.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Enhancing Genetic Improvement Mutations Using Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to software engineering tasks, including program repair. However, their application in search-based techniques such as Genetic Improvement (GI) is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we evaluate the use of LLMs as mutation operators for GI to improve the search process. We expand the Gin Java GI toolkit to call OpenAI's API to generate edits for the JCodec tool. We randomly sample the space of edits using 5 different edit types. We find that the number of patches passing unit tests is up to 75% higher with LLM-based edits than with standard Insert edits. Further, we observe that the patches found with LLMs are generally less diverse compared to standard edits. We ran GI with local search to find runtime improvements. Although many improving patches are found by LLM-enhanced GI, the best improving patch was found by standard GI.

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