arXiv subjects

Xing Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Xing Hu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards Explainable Vulnerability Detection with Large Language Models

Software vulnerabilities pose significant risks to the security and integrity of software systems. Although prior studies have explored vulnerability detection using deep learning and pre-trained models, these approaches often fail to provide the detailed explanations necessary for developers to understand and remediate vulnerabilities effectively. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has introduced transformative potential due to their advanced generative capabilities and ability to comprehend complex contexts, offering new possibilities for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose LLMVulExp, an automated framework designed to specialize LLMs for the dual tasks of vulnerability detection and explanation. To address the challenges of acquiring high-quality annotated data and injecting domain-specific knowledge, LLMVulExp leverages prompt-based techniques for annotating vulnerability explanations and finetunes LLMs using instruction tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), enabling LLMVulExp to detect vulnerability types in code while generating detailed explanations, including the cause, location, and repair suggestions. Additionally, we employ a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based key code extraction strategy to focus LLMs on analyzing vulnerability-prone code, further enhancing detection accuracy and explanatory depth. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMVulExp achieves over a 90% F1 score on the SeVC dataset, effectively combining high detection accuracy with actionable and coherent explanations. This study highlights the feasibility of utilizing LLMs for real-world vulnerability detection and explanation tasks, providing critical insights into their adaptation and application in software security.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Domain Adaptation for Big Data in Agricultural Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review

With the wide application of computer vision in agriculture, image analysis has become the key to tasks such as crop health monitoring and pest detection. However, the significant domain shifts caused by environmental changes, different crop types, and diverse data acquisition methods seriously hinder the generalization ability of the model in cross-region, cross-season, and complex agricultural scenarios. This paper explores how domain adaptation (DA) techniques can address these challenges to improve cross-domain transferability in agricultural image analysis. DA is considered a promising solution in the case of limited labeled data, insufficient model adaptability, and dynamic changes in the field environment. This paper systematically reviews the latest advances in DA in agricultural images in recent years, focusing on application scenarios such as crop health monitoring, pest and disease detection, and fruit identification, in which DA methods have significantly improved cross-domain performance. We categorize DA methods into shallow learning and deep learning methods, including supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised strategies, and pay special attention to the adversarial learning-based techniques that perform well in complex scenarios. In addition, this paper also reviews the main public datasets of agricultural images, and evaluates their advantages and limitations in DA research. Overall, this study provides a complete framework and some key insights that can be used as a reference for the research and development of domain adaptation methods in future agricultural vision tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

An Empirical Study of Vulnerable Package Dependencies in LLM Repositories

Large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, revolutionizing various fields. Despite their widespread success, LLMs heavily rely on external code dependencies from package management systems, creating a complex and interconnected LLM dependency supply chain. Vulnerabilities in dependencies can expose LLMs to security risks. While existing research predominantly focuses on model-level security threats, vulnerabilities within the LLM dependency supply chain have been overlooked. To fill this gap, we conducted an empirical analysis of 52 open-source LLMs, examining their third-party dependencies and associated vulnerabilities. We then explored activities within the LLM repositories to understand how maintainers manage third-party vulnerabilities in practice. Finally, we compared third-party dependency vulnerabilities in the LLM ecosystem to those in the Python ecosystem. Our results show that half of the vulnerabilities in the LLM ecosystem remain undisclosed for more than 56.2 months, significantly longer than those in the Python ecosystem. Additionally, 75.8% of LLMs include vulnerable dependencies in their configuration files. This study advances the understanding of LLM supply chain risks, provides insights for practitioners, and highlights potential directions for improving the security of the LLM supply chain.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Clean Code, Better Models: Enhancing LLM Performance with Smell-Cleaned Dataset

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in code-related tasks. However, most research focuses on improving the output quality of LLMs (e.g., correctness), and less attention has been paid to the LLM input (e.g., the training code quality). Given that code smells are widely existed in practice and can negatively impact software maintainability and readability, this study takes the first systematic research to assess and improve dataset quality in terms of code smells. In this work, we first conduct a preliminary study to explore the presence of code smells in a popular benchmark dataset (i.e., CodeSearchNet-Python}) and evaluate the output of several popular LLMs (i.e., DeepSeek-Coder, CodeLlama, and MagiCoder), revealing that code smell issues extensively exist in LLM's input (e.g., benchmark dataset) and output (e.g., generated code). We then conduct our systematic research by taking three main steps: Firstly, we propose an LLM-based code smell cleaning tool, named SmellCC, which automatically refactors and removes code smells. To evaluate the correctness of the code refactoring, we construct a test set of 50 repositories sourced from the CodeSearchNet-Python benchmark for functional testing. Then we apply our curated smell-cleaned dataset to fine-tune two LLMs (i.e., DeepSeek-V2 and Qwen-Coder) to explore their potential for generating high-quality code. Thirdly, we investigate the impact of code smells on two downstream tasks: code completion and code search. Lastly, we derive several actionable implications for software engineering researchers and industry practitioners from our findings.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

MQuant: Unleashing the Inference Potential of Multimodal Large Language Models via Full Static Quantization

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical deployment and application.While quantization is an effective way to reduce model size and inference latency, its application to MLLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose MQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework designed to tackle the unique challenges of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Conventional quantization often struggles with MLLMs because of (a) high inference latency from large visual token counts, (b) distributional disparities between visual and textual tokens, and (c) extreme outliers introduced by Hadamard-based transformations. To address these issues, MQuant introduces: Modality-Specific Static Quantization (MSQ), assigning distinct static scales for visual vs. textual tokens; Attention-Invariant Flexible Switching (AIFS), reordering tokens to preserve casual attention while eliminating expensive token-wise scale computations; Rotation Magnitude Suppression (RMS), mitigating weight outliers arising from online Hadamard rotations. On five mainstream MLLMs (including Qwen-VL, MiniCPM-V, CogVLM2), MQuant under W4A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 30%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ baselines. Our MQuant effectively bridges the gap for efficient and accurate MLLMs inference in resource-constrained devices. Code has been released in https://github.com/StiphyJay/MQuant.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Refactoring Deep Learning Code: A Study of Practices and Unsatisfied Tool Needs

With the rapid development of deep learning, the implementation of intricate algorithms and substantial data processing have become standard elements of deep learning projects. As a result, the code has become progressively complex as the software evolves, which is difficult to maintain and understand. Existing studies have investigated the impact of refactoring on software quality within traditional software. However, the insight of code refactoring in the context of deep learning is still unclear. This study endeavors to fill this knowledge gap by empirically examining the current state of code refactoring in deep learning realm, and practitioners' views on refactoring. We first manually analyzed the commit history of five popular and well-maintained deep learning projects (e.g., PyTorch). We mined 4,921 refactoring practices in historical commits and measured how different types and elements of refactoring operations are distributed and found that refactoring operation types' distribution in deep learning projects is different from it in traditional Java software. We then surveyed 159 practitioners about their views of code refactoring in deep learning projects and their expectations of current refactoring tools. The result of the survey showed that refactoring research and the development of related tools in the field of deep learning are crucial for improving project maintainability and code quality, and that current refactoring tools do not adequately meet the needs of practitioners. Lastly, we provided our perspective on the future advancement of refactoring tools and offered suggestions for developers' development practices.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

RealBench: Benchmarking Verilog Generation Models with Real-World IP Designs

The automatic generation of Verilog code using Large Language Models (LLMs) has garnered significant interest in hardware design automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in Verilog generation fall short in replicating real-world design workflows due to their designs' simplicity, inadequate design specifications, and less rigorous verification environments. To address these limitations, we present RealBench, the first benchmark aiming at real-world IP-level Verilog generation tasks. RealBench features complex, structured, real-world open-source IP designs, multi-modal and formatted design specifications, and rigorous verification environments, including 100% line coverage testbenches and a formal checker. It supports both module-level and system-level tasks, enabling comprehensive assessments of LLM capabilities. Evaluations on various LLMs and agents reveal that even one of the best-performing LLMs, o1-preview, achieves only a 13.3% pass@1 on module-level tasks and 0% on system-level tasks, highlighting the need for stronger Verilog generation models in the future. The benchmark is open-sourced at https://github.com/IPRC-DIP/RealBench.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Information Entropy Guided Height-aware Histogram for Quantization-friendly Pillar Feature Encoder

Real-time and high-performance 3D object detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving and robotics. Recent pillar-based 3D object detectors have gained significant attention due to their compact representation and low computational overhead, making them suitable for onboard deployment and quantization. However, existing pillar-based detectors still suffer from information loss along height dimension and large numerical distribution difference during pillar feature encoding (PFE), which severely limits their performance and quantization potential. To address above issue, we first unveil the importance of different input information during PFE and identify the height dimension as a key factor in enhancing 3D detection performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a height-aware pillar feature encoder, called PillarHist. Specifically, PillarHist statistics the discrete distribution of points at different heights within one pillar with the information entropy guidance. This simple yet effective design greatly preserves the information along the height dimension while significantly reducing the computation overhead of the PFE. Meanwhile, PillarHist also constrains the arithmetic distribution of PFE input to a stable range, making it quantization-friendly. Notably, PillarHist operates exclusively within the PFE stage to enhance performance, enabling seamless integration into existing pillar-based methods without introducing complex operations. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of PillarHist in terms of both efficiency and performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

World-Consistent Data Generation for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an agent to navigate through photorealistic environments following natural-language instructions. One main obstacle existing in VLN is data scarcity, leading to poor generalization performance over unseen environments. Though data argumentation is a promising way for scaling up the dataset, how to generate VLN data both diverse and world-consistent remains problematic. To cope with this issue, we propose the world-consistent data generation (WCGEN), an efficacious data-augmentation framework satisfying both diversity and world-consistency, aimed at enhancing the generalization of agents to novel environments. Roughly, our framework consists of two stages, the trajectory stage which leverages a point-cloud based technique to ensure spatial coherency among viewpoints, and the viewpoint stage which adopts a novel angle synthesis method to guarantee spatial and wraparound consistency within the entire observation. By accurately predicting viewpoint changes with 3D knowledge, our approach maintains the world-consistency during the generation procedure. Experiments on a wide range of datasets verify the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating that our data augmentation strategy enables agents to achieve new state-of-the-art results on all navigation tasks, and is capable of enhancing the VLN agents' generalization ability to unseen environments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Re-Evaluating Code LLM Benchmarks Under Semantic Mutation

In the era of large language models (LLMs), code benchmarks have become an important research area in software engineering and are widely used by practitioners. These benchmarks evaluate the performance of LLMs on specific code-related tasks, such as code understanding and generation. A critical step in constructing code benchmarks is the design of prompts. However, as existing code benchmarks typically rely on a single prompt template per task, they are prone to the issue of prompt sensitivity, where minor prompt variations could result in substantial performance variations, leading to unreliable evaluations of model capabilities. While previous studies have explored prompt sensitivity, their experimental designs and findings are limited to traditional natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present an empirical study to investigate prompt sensitivity in code benchmarks. We first propose a general framework that modifies prompt templates in a manner that preserves both their semantics and their structure as much as possible. Based on the framework, we conduct extensive experiments across eight code benchmark tasks on 10 representative open-source LLMs, with each task featuring 100 semantically similar prompt templates. We then analyze the evaluation results using various statistical metrics, focusing on both absolute and relative model performance. Our findings suggest that even slight prompt variations can lead to significant shifts in performance. Additionally, we observe that such variations can introduce inconsistencies in the performance rankings across different models. These insights highlight the need for considering prompt sensitivity when designing future code benchmarks, to ensure more reliable and accurate evaluation of LLM capabilities.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

You can lie but not deny: SWMR registers with signature properties in systems with Byzantine processes

We define and show how to implement SWMR registers that provide properties of unforgeable digital signatures - without actually using such signatures - in systems with Byzantine processes. Intuitively, processes can use these registers to write values as if they are ``signed'', such that these ``signed values'' can be ``verified'' by any process and ``relayed'' to any process. All our register implementations are from SWMR registers, and they work in systems with $n > 3f$ processes, $f$ of which can be Byzantine. We show that these implementations are optimal in the number of Byzantine processes they can tolerate: more precisely, we prove that if $3 \le n \le 3f$, the registers that we propose cannot be implemented from SWMR registers without using signatures. The registers that we introduce in this paper can also be implemented without signatures in message-passing systems with $n > 3f$ processes, $f$ of which can be Byzantine: this is because SWMR registers can be implemented in such systems (Mostéfaoui, Petrolia, Raynal, and Jard 2017).

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

FicGCN: Unveiling the Homomorphic Encryption Efficiency from Irregular Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) have gained widespread popularity in various fields like personal healthcare and financial systems, due to their remarkable performance. Despite the growing demand for cloud-based GCN services, privacy concerns over sensitive graph data remain significant. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) facilitates Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) by allowing computations to be performed on encrypted data. However, HE introduces substantial computational overhead, particularly for GCN operations that require rotations and multiplications in matrix products. The sparsity of GCNs offers significant performance potential, but their irregularity introduces additional operations that reduce practical gains. In this paper, we propose FicGCN, a HE-based framework specifically designed to harness the sparse characteristics of GCNs and strike a globally optimal balance between aggregation and combination operations. FicGCN employs a latency-aware packing scheme, a Sparse Intra-Ciphertext Aggregation (SpIntra-CA) method to minimize rotation overhead, and a region-based data reordering driven by local adjacency structure. We evaluated FicGCN on several popular datasets, and the results show that FicGCN achieved the best performance across all tested datasets, with up to a 4.10x improvement over the latest design.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Towards Understanding Bugs in Distributed Training and Inference Frameworks for Large Language Models

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), distributed training and inference frameworks like DeepSpeed have become essential for scaling model training and inference across multiple GPUs or nodes. However, the increasing complexity of these frameworks brings non-trivial software bugs, which may degrade training performance, cause unexpected failures, and result in significant resource waste. Understanding framework bugs' characteristics is fundamental for quality assurance, allowing the design of more effective debugging and repair methods. Thus, our paper conducts the first large-scale empirical analysis of 308 fixed bugs across three popular distributed training/inference frameworks: DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, and Colossal-AI. We examine bug symptoms, root causes, bug identification and fixing efforts, and common low-effort fixing strategies. Additionally, the distributed nature of these frameworks introduces unique bug root causes, such as allocation strategy error and distributed communication error. Diagnosing and fixing complex bugs remains challenging due to factors like the disconnect between symptoms and root causes, high bug reproduction costs, and low-level or cross-component interactions. Interestingly, we observe that 48% of bug fixes require minimal code changes (<=10 LOC) and follow simple strategies such as conditional logic optimization, parameter handling enhancement, or version compatibility handling, indicating potential for automation. Based on these insights, we offer several implications for improving the reliability of both distributed training and inference frameworks and their dependent LLM projects, while also identifying opportunities to leverage LLM-based tools for automated debugging and repair.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

QiMeng: Fully Automated Hardware and Software Design for Processor Chip

Processor chip design technology serves as a key frontier driving breakthroughs in computer science and related fields. With the rapid advancement of information technology, conventional design paradigms face three major challenges: the physical constraints of fabrication technologies, the escalating demands for design resources, and the increasing diversity of ecosystems. Automated processor chip design has emerged as a transformative solution to address these challenges. While recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) techniques, have opened new possibilities for fully automated processor chip design, substantial challenges remain in establishing domain-specific LLMs for processor chip design. In this paper, we propose QiMeng, a novel system for fully automated hardware and software design of processor chips. QiMeng comprises three hierarchical layers. In the bottom-layer, we construct a domain-specific Large Processor Chip Model (LPCM) that introduces novel designs in architecture, training, and inference, to address key challenges such as knowledge representation gap, data scarcity, correctness assurance, and enormous solution space. In the middle-layer, leveraging the LPCM's knowledge representation and inference capabilities, we develop the Hardware Design Agent and the Software Design Agent to automate the design of hardware and software for processor chips. Currently, several components of QiMeng have been completed and successfully applied in various top-layer applications, demonstrating significant advantages and providing a feasible solution for efficient, fully automated hardware/software design of processor chips. Future research will focus on integrating all components and performing iterative top-down and bottom-up design processes to establish a comprehensive QiMeng system.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2025

CODE-DITING: A Reasoning-Based Metric for Functional Alignment in Code Evaluation

Trustworthy evaluation methods for code snippets play a crucial role in neural code generation. Traditional methods, which either rely on reference solutions or require executable test cases, have inherent limitation in flexibility and scalability. The recent LLM-as-Judge methodology offers a promising alternative by directly evaluating functional consistency between the problem description and the generated code. To systematically understand the landscape of these LLM-as-Judge methods, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across three diverse datasets. Our investigation reveals the pros and cons of two categories of LLM-as-Judge methods: the methods based on general foundation models can achieve good performance but require complex prompts and lack explainability, while the methods based on reasoning foundation models provide better explainability with simpler prompts but demand substantial computational resources due to their large parameter sizes. To address these limitations, we propose CODE-DITING, a novel code evaluation method that balances accuracy, efficiency and explainability. We develop a data distillation framework that effectively transfers reasoning capabilities from DeepSeek-R1671B to our CODE-DITING 1.5B and 7B models, significantly enhancing evaluation explainability and reducing the computational cost. With the majority vote strategy in the inference process, CODE-DITING 1.5B outperforms all models with the same magnitude of parameters and achieves performance which would normally exhibit in a model with 5 times of parameter scale. CODE-DITING 7B surpasses GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 671B, even though it only uses 1% of the parameter volume of these large models. Further experiments show that CODEDITING is robust to preference leakage and can serve as a promising alternative for code evaluation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

CodeV: Empowering LLMs with HDL Generation through Multi-Level Summarization

The design flow of processors, particularly in hardware description languages (HDL) like Verilog and Chisel, is complex and costly. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved coding tasks in software languages such as Python, their application in HDL generation remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality HDL data. Traditional methods of adapting LLMs for hardware design rely on synthetic HDL datasets, which often suffer from low quality because even advanced LLMs like GPT perform poorly in the HDL domain. Moreover, these methods focus solely on chat tasks and the Verilog language, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we observe that: (1) HDL code collected from the real world is of higher quality than code generated by LLMs. (2) LLMs like GPT-3.5 excel in summarizing HDL code rather than generating it. (3) An explicit language tag can help LLMs better adapt to the target language when there is insufficient data. Based on these observations, we propose an efficient LLM fine-tuning pipeline for HDL generation that integrates a multi-level summarization data synthesis process with a novel Chat-FIM-Tag supervised fine-tuning method. The pipeline enhances the generation of HDL code from natural language descriptions and enables the handling of various tasks such as chat and infilling incomplete code. Utilizing this pipeline, we introduce CodeV, a series of HDL generation LLMs. Among them, CodeV-All not only possesses a more diverse range of language abilities, i.e. Verilog and Chisel, and a broader scope of tasks, i.e. Chat and fill-in-middle (FIM), but it also achieves performance on VerilogEval that is comparable to or even surpasses that of CodeV-Verilog fine-tuned on Verilog only, making them the first series of open-source LLMs designed for multi-scenario HDL generation.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2025

ActRef: Enhancing the Understanding of Python Code Refactoring with Action-Based Analysis

Refactoring, the process of improving the code structure of a software system without altering its behavior, is crucial for managing code evolution in software development. Identifying refactoring actions in source code is essential for understanding software evolution and guiding developers in maintaining and improving the code quality. This study presents an action-based Refactoring Analysis Framework named ActRef, a novel algorithm designed to advance the detection and understanding of Python refactorings through a unique code change action-based analysis of code changes. ActRef mining multiple refactoring types (e.g., move, rename, extract, and inline operations) based on diff actions, covering multiple granularity levels including variable, method, class, and module levels. By focusing on the code change actions, ActRef provides a Python-adaptive solution to detect intricate refactoring patterns. Our evaluation, conducted on 1,914 manually validated refactoring instances from 136 open-source Python projects. The evaluation results show that ActRef achieves high precision(0.80) and recall(0.92), effectively identifying multiple refactoring types. Compared with leading baselines, including PyRef, PyRef with MLRefScanner, DeepSeek-R1 and ChatGPT-4, ActRef consistently demonstrates superior performance in detecting Python refactorings across various types. While matching PyRef in runtime efficiency, ActRef supports a broader spectrum of refactoring types and more refactoring mining levels. ActRef shows an effective and scalable approach for mining refactorings in dynamic Python codebases and introduces a new perspective on understanding code.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

QiMeng-CPU-v2: Automated Superscalar Processor Design by Learning Data Dependencies

Automated processor design, which can significantly reduce human efforts and accelerate design cycles, has received considerable attention. While recent advancements have automatically designed single-cycle processors that execute one instruction per cycle, their performance cannot compete with modern superscalar processors that execute multiple instructions per cycle. Previous methods fail on superscalar processor design because they cannot address inter-instruction data dependencies, leading to inefficient sequential instruction execution. This paper proposes a novel approach to automatically designing superscalar processors using a hardware-friendly model called the Stateful Binary Speculation Diagram (State-BSD). We observe that processor parallelism can be enhanced through on-the-fly inter-instruction dependent data predictors, reusing the processor's internal states to learn the data dependency. To meet the challenge of both hardware-resource limitation and design functional correctness, State-BSD consists of two components: 1) a lightweight state-selector trained by the simulated annealing method to detect the most reusable processor states and store them in a small buffer; and 2) a highly precise state-speculator trained by the BSD expansion method to predict the inter-instruction dependent data using the selected states. It is the first work to achieve the automated superscalar processor design, i.e. QiMeng-CPU-v2, which improves the performance by about $380\times$ than the state-of-the-art automated design and is comparable to human-designed superscalar processors such as ARM Cortex A53.

cs.AR↗