arXiv subjects

Tamás Aladics

Publications and source records attributed to Tamás Aladics.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Better Static Code Analysis Reports: Sentence Transformer-based Filtering of Non-Actionable Alerts

Static code analysis (SCA) tools are widely used as effective ways to detect bugs and vulnerabilities in software systems. However, the reports generated by these tools often contain a large number of non-actionable findings, which can overwhelm developers to the point of ignoring them altogether -- this phenomenon is known as "alert fatigue". In this paper, we combat alert fatigue by proposing STAF: Sentence Transformer-based Actionability Filtering. Our approach leverages a transformer based architecture with sentence embeddings to classify findings into actionable and non-actionable categories. Evaluating STAF on a large dataset of reports from Java projects, we demonstrate that our method can effectively reduce the number of non-actionable findings while maintaining a high level of accuracy in identifying actionable issues. The results show that our approach can improve the usability of static analysis tools reaching an F1 score of 89%, outperforming existing methods for SCA warning filtering by at least 11% in a within-project setting and by at least 6% in a cross-project setting. By providing a more focused and relevant set of findings, we aim to enhance the overall effectiveness of static analysis in software development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

A Large-Scale Collection Of (Non-)Actionable Static Code Analysis Reports

Static Code Analysis (SCA) tools, while invaluable for identifying potential coding problems, functional bugs, or vulnerabilities, often generate an overwhelming number of warnings, many of which are non-actionable. This overload of alerts leads to ``alert fatigue'', a phenomenon where developers become desensitized to warnings, potentially overlooking critical issues and ultimately hindering productivity and code quality. Analyzing these warnings and training machine learning models to identify and filter them requires substantial datasets, which are currently scarce, particularly for Java. This scarcity impedes efforts to improve the accuracy and usability of SCA tools and mitigate the effects of alert fatigue. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing a novel methodology for collecting and categorizing SCA warnings, effectively distinguishing actionable from non-actionable ones. We further leverage this methodology to generate a large-scale dataset of over 1 million entries of Java source code warnings, named NASCAR: (Non-)Actionable Static Code Analysis Reports. To facilitate follow-up research in this domain, we make both the dataset and the tools used to generate it publicly available.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

An AST-based Code Change Representation and its Performance in Just-in-time Vulnerability Prediction

The presence of software vulnerabilities is an ever-growing issue in software development. In most cases, it is desirable to detect vulnerabilities as early as possible, preferably in a just-in-time manner, when the vulnerable piece is added to the code base. The industry has a hard time combating this problem as manual inspection is costly and traditional means, such as rule-based bug detection, are not robust enough to follow the pace of the emergence of new vulnerabilities. The actively researched field of machine learning could help in such situations as models can be trained to detect vulnerable patterns. However, machine learning models work well only if the data is appropriately represented. In our work, we propose a novel way of representing changes in source code (i.e. code commits), the Code Change Tree, a form that is designed to keep only the differences between two abstract syntax trees of Java source code. We compared its effectiveness in predicting if a code change introduces a vulnerability against multiple representation types and evaluated them by a number of machine learning models as a baseline. The evaluation is done on a novel dataset that we published as part of our contributions using a 2-phase dataset generator method. Based on our evaluation we concluded that using Code Change Tree is a valid and effective choice to represent source code changes as it improves performance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Bug Prediction Using Source Code Embedding Based on Doc2Vec

Bug prediction is a resource demanding task that is hard to automate using static source code analysis. In many fields of computer science, machine learning has proven to be extremely useful in tasks like this, however, for it to work we need a way to use source code as input. We propose a simple, but meaningful representation for source code based on its abstract syntax tree and the Doc2Vec embedding algorithm. This representation maps the source code to a fixed length vector which can be used for various upstream tasks -- one of which is bug prediction. We measured this approach's validity by itself and its effectiveness compared to bug prediction based solely on code metrics. We also experimented on numerous machine learning approaches to check the connection between different embedding parameters with different machine learning models. Our results show that this representation provides meaningful information as it improves the bug prediction accuracy in most cases, and is always at least as good as only using code metrics as features.

cs.SE↗