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Shahidul Islam

Publications and source records attributed to Shahidul Islam.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

AgriPestDatabase-v1.0: A Structured Insect Dataset for Training Agricultural Large Language Model

Agricultural pest management increasingly relies on timely and accurate access to expert knowledge, yet high quality labeled data and continuous expert support remain limited, particularly for farmers operating in rural regions with unstable/no internet connectivity. At the same time, the rapid growth of AI and LLMs has created new opportunities to deliver practical decision support tools directly to end users in agriculture through compact and deployable systems. This work addresses (i) generating a structured insect information dataset, and (ii) adapting a lightweight LLM model ($\leq$ 7B) by fine tuning it for edge device uses in agricultural pest management. The textual data collection was done by reviewing and collecting information from available pest databases and published manuscripts on nine selected pest species. These structured reports were then reviewed and validated by a domain expert. From these reports, we constructed Q/A pairs to support model training and evaluation. A LoRA-based fine-tuning approach was applied to multiple lightweight LLMs and evaluated. Initial evaluation shows that Mistral 7B achieves an 88.9\% pass rate on the domain-specific Q/A task, substantially outperforming Qwen 2.5 7B (63.9\%), and LLaMA 3.1 8B (58.7\%). Notably, Mistral demonstrates higher semantic alignment (embedding similarity: 0.865) despite lower lexical overlap (BLEU: 0.097), indicating that semantic understanding and robust reasoning are more predictive of task success than surface-level conformity in specialized domains. By combining expert organized data, well-structured Q/A pairs, semantic quality control, and efficient model adaptation, this work contributes towards providing support for farmer facing agricultural decision support tools and demonstrates the feasibility of deploying compact, high-performing language models for practical field-level pest management guidance.

cs.AI

How Do Agentic AI Systems Address Performance Optimizations? A BERTopic-Based Analysis of Pull Requests

LLM-based software engineering is influencing modern software development. In addition to correctness, prior studies have also examined the performance of software artifacts generated by AI agents. However, it is unclear how exactly the agentic AI systems address performance concerns in practice. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance-related pull requests generated by AI agents. Using LLM-assisted detection and BERTopic-based topic modeling, we identified 52 performance-related topics grouped into 10 higher-level categories. Our results show that AI agents apply performance optimizations across diverse layers of the software stack and that the type of optimization significantly affects pull request acceptance rates and review times. We also found that performance optimization by AI agents primarily occurs during the development phase, with less focus on the maintenance phase. Our findings provide empirical evidence that can support the evaluation and improvement of agentic AI systems with respect to their performance optimization behaviors and review outcomes.

cs.SE

The Repeat Offenders: Characterizing and Predicting Extremely Bug-Prone Source Methods

Bug prediction has long been considered the "prince" of empirical software engineering research, and accordingly, a substantial body of work has focused on predicting bugs to enable early preventive actions. However, most existing studies operate at the class or file level, which practitioners have found to be of limited practical value. As a result, method-level bug prediction has gained increasing attention in recent years. Despite this shift, current method-level prediction models typically treat all buggy methods as equally fault-prone, regardless of whether a method has been associated with a bug once or repeatedly. We argue that methods involved in bugs multiple times-hereafter referred to as ExtremelyBuggy methods-are more harmful than methods that are buggy only once. In this study, we investigate the prevalence of ExtremelyBuggy methods, analyze their code quality metrics, and assess whether they can be predicted at the time of their introduction. In addition, we conduct a thematic analysis of 287 ExtremelyBuggy methods to gain deeper insights into their characteristics. Using a dataset of over 1.25 million methods extracted from 98 open-source Java projects, we find that only a small proportion of methods can be classified as ExtremelyBuggy, yet these methods account for a disproportionately large share of bugs within a project. Although we observe statistically significant differences between ExtremelyBuggy and other methods, ExtremelyBuggy methods remain difficult to predict at their inception. Nevertheless, our manual analysis reveals recurring characteristics among these methods. These findings can help practitioners avoid harmful patterns in practice and guide future research toward developing features and models that better capture the unique properties of such methods.

cs.SE

A First Look at the Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Test Code: Taxonomy and Detection

Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) refers to comments in which developers explicitly acknowledge code issues, workarounds, or suboptimal solutions. SATD is known to significantly increase software maintenance effort. While extensive research has examined SATD in source code, its presence and impact in test code have received no focused attention, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of how SATD manifests in testing contexts. This study, the first of its kind, investigates SATD in test code by manually analyzing 50,000 comments randomly sampled from 1.6 million comments across 1,000 open-source Java projects. From this sample, after manual analysis and filtering, we identified 615 SATD comments and classified them into 14 distinct categories, building a taxonomy of test code SATD. To investigate whether test code SATD can be detected automatically, we evaluated existing SATD detection tools, as well as both open-source and proprietary LLMs. Among the existing tools, MAT performed the best, albeit with moderate recall. To our surprise, both open-source and proprietary LLMs exhibited poor detection accuracy, primarily due to low precision. These results indicate that neither existing approaches nor current LLMs can reliably detect SATD in test code. Overall, this work provides the first large-scale analysis of SATD in test code, a nuanced understanding of its types, and the limitations of current SATD detection methods. Our findings lay the groundwork for future research on test code-specific SATD.

cs.SE

HistoryFinder: Advancing Method-Level Source Code History Generation with Accurate Oracles and Enhanced Algorithm

Reconstructing a method's change history efficiently and accurately is critical for many software engineering tasks, including maintenance, refactoring, and comprehension. Despite the availability of method history generation tools such as CodeShovel and CodeTracker, existing evaluations of their effectiveness are limited by inaccuracies in the ground truth oracles used. In this study, we systematically construct two new oracles -- the corrected CodeShovel oracle and a newly developed HistoryFinder oracle -- by combining automated analysis with expert-guided manual validation. We also introduce HistoryFinder, a new method history generation tool designed to improve not only the accuracy and completeness of method change histories but also to offer competitive runtime performance. Through extensive evaluation across 400 methods from 40 open-source repositories, we show that HistoryFinder consistently outperforms CodeShovel, CodeTracker, IntelliJ, and Git-based baselines in terms of precision, recall, and F1 score. Moreover, HistoryFinder achieves competitive runtime performance, offering the lowest mean and median execution times among all the research-based tools. While Git-based tools exhibit the fastest runtimes, this efficiency comes at the cost of significantly lower precision and recall -- leaving HistoryFinder as the best overall choice when both accuracy and efficiency are important. To facilitate adoption, we provide a web interface, CLI, and Java library for flexible usage.

cs.SE

Understanding the Issue Types in Open Source Blockchain-based Software Projects with the Transformer-based BERTopic

Blockchain-based software systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet a systematic understanding of their development challenges remains limited. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of 497,742 issues mined from 1,209 open-source blockchain projects hosted on GitHub. Employing BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, we identify 49 distinct issue topics and organize them hierarchically into 11 major subcategories. Our analysis reveals that both general software development issues and blockchain-specific concerns are nearly equally represented, with Wallet Management and UI Enhancement emerging as the most prominent topics. We further examine the temporal evolution of issue categories and resolution times, finding that Wallet issues not only dominate in frequency but also exhibit the longest resolution time. Conversely, Mechanisms issues are resolved significantly faster. Issue frequency surged after 2016 with the rise of Ethereum and decentralized applications, but started declining after 2022. These findings enhance our understanding of blockchain software maintenance, informing the development of specialized tools and practices to improve robustness and maintainability.

cs.SE