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Michael R. Lyu

Publications and source records attributed to Michael R. Lyu.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Not All Countries Celebrate Thanksgiving: On the Cultural Dominance in Large Language Models

This paper identifies a cultural dominance issue within large language models (LLMs) due to the predominant use of English data in model training (e.g., ChatGPT). LLMs often provide inappropriate English-culture-related answers that are not relevant to the expected culture when users ask in non-English languages. To systematically evaluate the cultural dominance issue, we build a benchmark of concrete (e.g., holidays and songs) and abstract (e.g., values and opinions) cultural objects. Empirical results show that the representative GPT models suffer from the culture dominance problem, where GPT-4 is the most affected while text-davinci-003 suffers the least from this problem. Our study emphasizes the need to critically examine cultural dominance and ethical consideration in their development and deployment. We show that two straightforward methods in model development (i.e., pretraining on more diverse data) and deployment (e.g., culture-aware prompting) can significantly mitigate the cultural dominance issue in LLMs.

cs.CL↗

Who is ChatGPT? Benchmarking LLMs' Psychological Portrayal Using PsychoBench

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased their remarkable capacities, not only in natural language processing tasks but also across diverse domains such as clinical medicine, legal consultation, and education. LLMs become more than mere applications, evolving into assistants capable of addressing diverse user requests. This narrows the distinction between human beings and artificial intelligence agents, raising intriguing questions regarding the potential manifestation of personalities, temperaments, and emotions within LLMs. In this paper, we propose a framework, PsychoBench, for evaluating diverse psychological aspects of LLMs. Comprising thirteen scales commonly used in clinical psychology, PsychoBench further classifies these scales into four distinct categories: personality traits, interpersonal relationships, motivational tests, and emotional abilities. Our study examines five popular models, namely text-davinci-003, gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4, LLaMA-2-7b, and LLaMA-2-13b. Additionally, we employ a jailbreak approach to bypass the safety alignment protocols and test the intrinsic natures of LLMs. We have made PsychoBench openly accessible via https://github.com/CUHK-ARISE/PsychoBench.

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MTAD: Tools and Benchmarks for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential time-series metrics for ensuring the reliability and stability of many software systems. They faithfully record runtime states to facilitate the understanding of anomalous system behaviors and provide informative clues for engineers to pinpoint the root causes. The unprecedented scale and complexity of modern software systems, however, make the volume of KPIs explode. Consequently, many traditional methods of KPI anomaly detection become impractical, which serves as a catalyst for the fast development of machine learning-based solutions in both academia and industry. However, there is currently a lack of rigorous comparison among these KPI anomaly detection methods, and re-implementation demands a non-trivial effort. Moreover, we observe that different works adopt independent evaluation processes with different metrics. Some of them may not fully reveal the capability of a model and some are creating an illusion of progress. To better understand the characteristics of different KPI anomaly detectors and address the evaluation issue, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and evaluation of twelve state-of-the-art methods, and propose a novel metric called salience. Particularly, the selected methods include five traditional machine learning-based methods and seven deep learning-based methods. These methods are evaluated with five multivariate KPI datasets that are publicly available. A unified toolkit with easy-to-use interfaces is also released. We report the benchmark results in terms of accuracy, salience, efficiency, and delay, which are of practical importance for industrial deployment. We believe our work can contribute as a basis for future academic research and industrial application.

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Less is More? An Empirical Study on Configuration Issues in Python PyPI Ecosystem

Python is widely used in the open-source community, largely owing to the extensive support from diverse third-party libraries within the PyPI ecosystem. Nevertheless, the utilization of third-party libraries can potentially lead to conflicts in dependencies, prompting researchers to develop dependency conflict detectors. Moreover, endeavors have been made to automatically infer dependencies. These approaches focus on version-level checks and inference, based on the assumption that configurations of libraries in the PyPI ecosystem are correct. However, our study reveals that this assumption is not universally valid, and relying solely on version-level checks proves inadequate in ensuring compatible run-time environments. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to comprehensively study the configuration issues in the PyPI ecosystem. Specifically, we propose PyConf, a source-level detector, for detecting potential configuration issues. PyConf employs three distinct checks, targeting the setup, packing, and usage stages of libraries, respectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of the current automatic dependency inference approaches, we build a benchmark called VLibs, comprising library releases that pass all three checks of PyConf. We identify 15 kinds of configuration issues and find that 183,864 library releases suffer from potential configuration issues. Remarkably, 68% of these issues can only be detected via the source-level check. Our experiment results show that the most advanced automatic dependency inference approach, PyEGo, can successfully infer dependencies for only 65% of library releases. The primary failures stem from dependency conflicts and the absence of required libraries in the generated configurations. Based on the empirical results, we derive six findings and draw two implications for open-source developers and future research in automatic dependency inference.

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Learning in the Wild: Towards Leveraging Unlabeled Data for Effectively Tuning Pre-trained Code Models

Pre-trained code models have recently achieved substantial improvements in many code intelligence tasks. These models are first pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled datasets in a task-agnostic manner using self-supervised learning, and then fine-tuned on labeled datasets in downstream tasks. However, the labeled datasets are usually limited in size (i.e., human intensive efforts), which may hinder the performance of pre-trained code models in specific tasks. To mitigate this, one possible solution is to leverage the large-scale unlabeled data in the tuning stage by pseudo-labeling. However, directly employing the pseudo-labeled data can bring a large amount of noise, i.e., incorrect labels, leading to suboptimal performance. How to effectively leverage the noisy pseudo-labeled data is a challenging yet under-explored problem.In this paper, we propose a novel approach named HINT to improve pre-trained code models with large-scale unlabeled datasets by better utilizing the pseudo-labeled data. HINT includes two main modules: HybrId pseudo-labeled data selection and Noise-tolerant Training. In the hybrid pseudo-data selection module, considering the robustness issue, apart from directly measuring the quality of pseudo labels through training loss, we further propose to employ a retrieval-based method to filter low-quality pseudo-labeled data. The noise-tolerant training module aims to further mitigate the influence of errors in pseudo labels by training the model with a noise-tolerant loss function and by regularizing the consistency of model predictions.The experimental results show that HINT can better leverage those unlabeled data in a task-specific way and provide complementary benefits for pre-trained models, e.g., improving the best baseline model by 15.33%, 16.50%, and 8.98% on code summarization, defect detection, and assertion generation, respectively.

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CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model's capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model's performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs' performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA's efficacy.

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A Roadmap towards Intelligent Operations for Reliable Cloud Computing Systems

The increasing complexity and usage of cloud systems have made it challenging for service providers to ensure reliability. This paper highlights two main challenges, namely internal and external factors, that affect the reliability of cloud microservices. Afterward, we discuss the data-driven approach that can resolve these challenges from four key aspects: ticket management, log management, multimodal analysis, and the microservice resilience testing approach. The experiments conducted show that the proposed data-driven AIOps solution significantly enhances system reliability from multiple angles.

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Log-based Anomaly Detection based on EVT Theory with feedback

System logs play a critical role in maintaining the reliability of software systems. Fruitful studies have explored automatic log-based anomaly detection and achieved notable accuracy on benchmark datasets. However, when applied to large-scale cloud systems, these solutions face limitations due to high resource consumption and lack of adaptability to evolving logs. In this paper, we present an accurate, lightweight, and adaptive log-based anomaly detection framework, referred to as SeaLog. Our method introduces a Trie-based Detection Agent (TDA) that employs a lightweight, dynamically-growing trie structure for real-time anomaly detection. To enhance TDA's accuracy in response to evolving log data, we enable it to receive feedback from experts. Interestingly, our findings suggest that contemporary large language models, such as ChatGPT, can provide feedback with a level of consistency comparable to human experts, which can potentially reduce manual verification efforts. We extensively evaluate SeaLog on two public datasets and an industrial dataset. The results show that SeaLog outperforms all baseline methods in terms of effectiveness, runs 2X to 10X faster and only consumes 5% to 41% of the memory resource.

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Revealing Performance Issues in Server-side WebAssembly Runtimes via Differential Testing

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a bytecode format originally serving as a compilation target for Web applications. It has recently been used increasingly on the server side, e.g., providing a safer, faster, and more portable alternative to Linux containers. With the popularity of server-side Wasm applications, it is essential to study performance issues (i.e., abnormal latency) in Wasm runtimes, as they may cause a significant impact on server-side applications. However, there is still a lack of attention to performance issues in server-side Wasm runtimes. In this paper, we design a novel differential testing approach WarpDiff to identify performance issues in server-side Wasm runtimes. The key insight is that in normal cases, the execution time of the same test case on different Wasm runtimes should follow an oracle ratio. We identify abnormal cases where the execution time ratio significantly deviates from the oracle ratio and subsequently locate the Wasm runtimes that cause the performance issues. We apply WarpDiff to test five popular server-side Wasm runtimes using 123 test cases from the LLVM test suite and demonstrate the top 10 abnormal cases we identified. We further conduct an in-depth analysis of these abnormal cases and summarize seven performance issues, all of which have been confirmed by the developers. We hope our work can inspire future investigation on improving Wasm runtime implementation and thus promoting the development of server-side Wasm applications.

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Ditto: An Elastic and Adaptive Memory-Disaggregated Caching System

In-memory caching systems are fundamental building blocks in cloud services. However, due to the coupled CPU and memory on monolithic servers, existing caching systems cannot elastically adjust resources in a resource-efficient and agile manner. To achieve better elasticity, we propose to port in-memory caching systems to the disaggregated memory (DM) architecture, where compute and memory resources are decoupled and can be allocated flexibly. However, constructing an elastic caching system on DM is challenging since accessing cached objects with CPU-bypass remote memory accesses hinders the execution of caching algorithms. Moreover, the elastic changes of compute and memory resources on DM affect the access patterns of cached data, compromising the hit rates of caching algorithms. We design Ditto, the first caching system on DM, to address these challenges. Ditto first proposes a client-centric caching framework to efficiently execute various caching algorithms in the compute pool of DM, relying only on remote memory accesses. Then, Ditto employs a distributed adaptive caching scheme that adaptively switches to the best-fit caching algorithm in real-time based on the performance of multiple caching algorithms to improve cache hit rates. Our experiments show that Ditto effectively adapts to the changing resources on DM and outperforms the state-of-the-art caching systems by up to 3.6x in real-world workloads and 9x in YCSB

cs.DC↗

REEF: A Framework for Collecting Real-World Vulnerabilities and Fixes

Software plays a crucial role in our daily lives, and therefore the quality and security of software systems have become increasingly important. However, vulnerabilities in software still pose a significant threat, as they can have serious consequences. Recent advances in automated program repair have sought to automatically detect and fix bugs using data-driven techniques. Sophisticated deep learning methods have been applied to this area and have achieved promising results. However, existing benchmarks for training and evaluating these techniques remain limited, as they tend to focus on a single programming language and have relatively small datasets. Moreover, many benchmarks tend to be outdated and lack diversity, focusing on a specific codebase. Worse still, the quality of bug explanations in existing datasets is low, as they typically use imprecise and uninformative commit messages as explanations. To address these issues, we propose an automated collecting framework REEF to collect REal-world vulnErabilities and Fixes from open-source repositories. We develop a multi-language crawler to collect vulnerabilities and their fixes, and design metrics to filter for high-quality vulnerability-fix pairs. Furthermore, we propose a neural language model-based approach to generate high-quality vulnerability explanations, which is key to producing informative fix messages. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can collect high-quality vulnerability-fix pairs and generate strong explanations. The dataset we collect contains 4,466 CVEs with 30,987 patches (including 236 CWE) across 7 programming languages with detailed related information, which is superior to existing benchmarks in scale, coverage, and quality. Evaluations by human experts further confirm that our framework produces high-quality vulnerability explanations.

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Loghub: A Large Collection of System Log Datasets for AI-driven Log Analytics

Logs have been widely adopted in software system development and maintenance because of the rich runtime information they record. In recent years, the increase of software size and complexity leads to the rapid growth of the volume of logs. To handle these large volumes of logs efficiently and effectively, a line of research focuses on developing intelligent and automated log analysis techniques. However, only a few of these techniques have reached successful deployments in industry due to the lack of public log datasets and open benchmarking upon them. To fill this significant gap and facilitate more research on AI-driven log analytics, we have collected and released loghub, a large collection of system log datasets. In particular, loghub provides 19 real-world log datasets collected from a wide range of software systems, including distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. In this paper, we summarize the statistics of these datasets, introduce some practical usage scenarios of the loghub datasets, and present our benchmarking results on loghub to benefit the researchers and practitioners in this field. Up to the time of this paper writing, the loghub datasets have been downloaded for roughly 90,000 times in total by hundreds of organizations from both industry and academia. The loghub datasets are available at https://github.com/logpai/loghub.

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Practical Anomaly Detection over Multivariate Monitoring Metrics for Online Services

As modern software systems continue to grow in terms of complexity and volume, anomaly detection on multivariate monitoring metrics, which profile systems' health status, becomes more and more critical and challenging. In particular, the dependency between different metrics and their historical patterns plays a critical role in pursuing prompt and accurate anomaly detection. Existing approaches fall short of industrial needs for being unable to capture such information efficiently. To fill this significant gap, in this paper, we propose CMAnomaly, an anomaly detection framework on multivariate monitoring metrics based on collaborative machine. The proposed collaborative machine is a mechanism to capture the pairwise interactions along with feature and temporal dimensions with linear time complexity. Cost-effective models can then be employed to leverage both the dependency between monitoring metrics and their historical patterns for anomaly detection. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated with both public data and industrial data collected from a large-scale online service system of Huawei Cloud. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art baseline models, CMAnomaly achieves an average F1 score of 0.9494, outperforming baselines by 6.77% to 10.68%, and runs 10X to 20X faster. Furthermore, we also share our experience of deploying CMAnomaly in Huawei Cloud.

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AutoLog: A Log Sequence Synthesis Framework for Anomaly Detection

The rapid progress of modern computing systems has led to a growing interest in informative run-time logs. Various log-based anomaly detection techniques have been proposed to ensure software reliability. However, their implementation in the industry has been limited due to the lack of high-quality public log resources as training datasets. While some log datasets are available for anomaly detection, they suffer from limitations in (1) comprehensiveness of log events; (2) scalability over diverse systems; and (3) flexibility of log utility. To address these limitations, we propose AutoLog, the first automated log generation methodology for anomaly detection. AutoLog uses program analysis to generate run-time log sequences without actually running the system. AutoLog starts with probing comprehensive logging statements associated with the call graphs of an application. Then, it constructs execution graphs for each method after pruning the call graphs to find log-related execution paths in a scalable manner. Finally, AutoLog propagates the anomaly label to each acquired execution path based on human knowledge. It generates flexible log sequences by walking along the log execution paths with controllable parameters. Experiments on 50 popular Java projects show that AutoLog acquires significantly more (9x-58x) log events than existing log datasets from the same system, and generates log messages much faster (15x) with a single machine than existing passive data collection approaches. We hope AutoLog can facilitate the benchmarking and adoption of automated log analysis techniques.

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VL-PET: Vision-and-Language Parameter-Efficient Tuning via Granularity Control

As the model size of pre-trained language models (PLMs) grows rapidly, full fine-tuning becomes prohibitively expensive for model training and storage. In vision-and-language (VL), parameter-efficient tuning (PET) techniques are proposed to integrate modular modifications (e.g., Adapter and LoRA) into encoder-decoder PLMs. By tuning a small set of trainable parameters, these techniques perform on par with full fine-tuning. However, excessive modular modifications and neglecting the functionality gap between the encoders and decoders can lead to performance degradation, while existing PET techniques (e.g., VL-Adapter) overlook these critical issues. In this paper, we propose a Vision-and-Language Parameter-Efficient Tuning (VL-PET) framework to impose effective control over modular modifications via a novel granularity-controlled mechanism. Considering different granularity-controlled matrices generated by this mechanism, a variety of model-agnostic VL-PET modules can be instantiated from our framework for better efficiency and effectiveness trade-offs. We further propose lightweight PET module designs to enhance VL alignment and modeling for the encoders and maintain text generation for the decoders. Extensive experiments conducted on four image-text tasks and four video-text tasks demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness and transferability of our VL-PET framework. In particular, our VL-PET-large with lightweight PET module designs significantly outperforms VL-Adapter by 2.92% (3.41%) and LoRA by 3.37% (7.03%) with BART-base (T5-base) on image-text tasks. Furthermore, we validate the enhanced effect of employing our VL-PET designs on existing PET techniques, enabling them to achieve significant performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryHZY/VL-PET.

cs.CV↗

An Image is Worth a Thousand Toxic Words: A Metamorphic Testing Framework for Content Moderation Software

The exponential growth of social media platforms has brought about a revolution in communication and content dissemination in human society. Nevertheless, these platforms are being increasingly misused to spread toxic content, including hate speech, malicious advertising, and pornography, leading to severe negative consequences such as harm to teenagers' mental health. Despite tremendous efforts in developing and deploying textual and image content moderation methods, malicious users can evade moderation by embedding texts into images, such as screenshots of the text, usually with some interference. We find that modern content moderation software's performance against such malicious inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we propose OASIS, a metamorphic testing framework for content moderation software. OASIS employs 21 transform rules summarized from our pilot study on 5,000 real-world toxic contents collected from 4 popular social media applications, including Twitter, Instagram, Sina Weibo, and Baidu Tieba. Given toxic textual contents, OASIS can generate image test cases, which preserve the toxicity yet are likely to bypass moderation. In the evaluation, we employ OASIS to test five commercial textual content moderation software from famous companies (i.e., Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud), as well as a state-of-the-art moderation research model. The results show that OASIS achieves up to 100% error finding rates. Moreover, through retraining the models with the test cases generated by OASIS, the robustness of the moderation model can be improved without performance degradation.

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EvLog: Identifying Anomalous Logs over Software Evolution

Software logs record system activities, aiding maintainers in identifying the underlying causes for failures and enabling prompt mitigation actions. However, maintainers need to inspect a large volume of daily logs to identify the anomalous logs that reveal failure details for further diagnosis. Thus, how to automatically distinguish these anomalous logs from normal logs becomes a critical problem. Existing approaches alleviate the burden on software maintainers, but they are built upon an improper yet critical assumption: logging statements in the software remain unchanged. While software keeps evolving, our empirical study finds that evolving software brings three challenges: log parsing errors, evolving log events, and unstable log sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach named Evolving Log analyzer (EvLog) to mitigate these challenges. We first build a multi-level representation extractor to process logs without parsing to prevent errors from the parser. The multi-level representations preserve the essential semantics of logs while leaving out insignificant changes in evolving events. EvLog then implements an anomaly discriminator with an attention mechanism to identify the anomalous logs and avoid the issue brought by the unstable sequence. EvLog has shown effectiveness in two real-world system evolution log datasets with an average F1 score of 0.955 and 0.847 in the intra-version setting and inter-version setting, respectively, which outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches by a wide margin. To our best knowledge, this is the first study on localizing anomalous logs over software evolution. We believe our work sheds new light on the impact of software evolution with the corresponding solutions for the log analysis community.

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Prism: Revealing Hidden Functional Clusters from Massive Instances in Cloud Systems

Ensuring the reliability of cloud systems is critical for both cloud vendors and customers. Cloud systems often rely on virtualization techniques to create instances of hardware resources, such as virtual machines. However, virtualization hinders the observability of cloud systems, making it challenging to diagnose platform-level issues. To improve system observability, we propose to infer functional clusters of instances, i.e., groups of instances having similar functionalities. We first conduct a pilot study on a large-scale cloud system, i.e., Huawei Cloud, demonstrating that instances having similar functionalities share similar communication and resource usage patterns. Motivated by these findings, we formulate the identification of functional clusters as a clustering problem and propose a non-intrusive solution called Prism. Prism adopts a coarse-to-fine clustering strategy. It first partitions instances into coarse-grained chunks based on communication patterns. Within each chunk, Prism further groups instances with similar resource usage patterns to produce fine-grained functional clusters. Such a design reduces noises in the data and allows Prism to process massive instances efficiently. We evaluate Prism on two datasets collected from the real-world production environment of Huawei Cloud. Our experiments show that Prism achieves a v-measure of ~0.95, surpassing existing state-of-the-art solutions. Additionally, we illustrate the integration of Prism within monitoring systems for enhanced cloud reliability through two real-world use cases.

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