arXiv subjects

Zhenchang Xing

Publications and source records attributed to Zhenchang Xing.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Solution toward Transparent and Practical AI Regulation: Privacy Nutrition Labels for Open-source Generative AI-based Applications

The rapid development and widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence-based (GAI) applications have greatly enriched our daily lives, benefiting people by enhancing creativity, personalizing experiences, improving accessibility, and fostering innovation and efficiency across various domains. However, along with the development of GAI applications, concerns have been raised about transparency in their privacy practices. Traditional privacy policies often fail to effectively communicate essential privacy information due to their complexity and length, and open-source community developers often neglect privacy practices even more. Only 12.2% of examined open-source GAI apps provide a privacy policy. To address this, we propose a regulation-driven GAI Privacy Label and introduce Repo2Label, a novel framework for automatically generating these labels based on code repositories. Our user study indicates a common endorsement of the proposed GAI privacy label format. Additionally, Repo2Label achieves a precision of 0.81, recall of 0.88, and F1-score of 0.84 based on the benchmark dataset, significantly outperforming the developer self-declared privacy notices. We also discuss the common regulatory (in)compliance of open-source GAI apps, comparison with other privacy notices, and broader impacts to different stakeholders. Our findings suggest that Repo2Label could serve as a significant tool for bolstering the privacy transparency of GAI apps and make them more practical and responsible.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Reference Architecture for Designing Foundation Model based Systems

The release of ChatGPT, Gemini, and other large language model has drawn huge interests on foundations models. There is a broad consensus that foundations models will be the fundamental building blocks for future AI systems. However, there is a lack of systematic guidance on the architecture design. Particularly, the the rapidly growing capabilities of foundations models can eventually absorb other components of AI systems, posing challenges of moving boundary and interface evolution in architecture design. Furthermore, incorporating foundations models into AI systems raises significant concerns about responsible and safe AI due to their opaque nature and rapidly advancing intelligence. To address these challenges, the paper first presents an architecture evolution of AI systems in the era of foundation models, transitioning from "foundation-model-as-a-connector" to "foundation-model-as-a-monolithic architecture". The paper then identifies key design decisions and proposes a pattern-oriented reference architecture for designing responsible foundation-model-based systems. The patterns can enable the potential of foundation models while ensuring associated risks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A Large-scale Investigation of Semantically Incompatible APIs behind Compatibility Issues in Android Apps

Application Programming Interface (API) incompatibility is a long-standing issue in Android application development. The rapid evolution of Android APIs results in a significant number of API additions, removals, and changes between adjacent versions. Unfortunately, this high frequency of alterations may lead to compatibility issues, often without adequate notification to developers regarding these changes. Although researchers have proposed some work on detecting compatibility issues caused by changes in API signatures, they often overlook compatibility issues stemming from sophisticated semantic changes. In response to this challenge, we conducted a large-scale discovery of incompatible APIs in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) by leveraging static analysis and pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) across adjacent versions. We systematically formulate the problem and propose a unified framework to detect incompatible APIs, especially for semantic changes. It's worth highlighting that our approach achieves a 0.83 F1-score in identifying semantically incompatible APIs in the Android framework. Ultimately, our approach detects 5,481 incompatible APIs spanning from version 4 to version 33. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in supplementing the state-of-the-art methods in detecting a broader spectrum of compatibility issues (+92.3%) that have been previously overlooked.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Refactoring to Pythonic Idioms: A Hybrid Knowledge-Driven Approach Leveraging Large Language Models

Pythonic idioms are highly valued and widely used in the Python programming community. However, many Python users find it challenging to use Pythonic idioms. Adopting a rule-based approach or LLM-only approach is not sufficient to overcome three persistent challenges of code idiomatization including code miss, wrong detection and wrong refactoring. Motivated by the determinism of rules and adaptability of LLMs, we propose a hybrid approach consisting of three modules. We not only write prompts to instruct LLMs to complete tasks, but we also invoke Analytic Rule Interfaces (ARIs) to accomplish tasks. The ARIs are Python code generated by prompting LLMs to generate code. We first construct a knowledge module with three elements including ASTscenario, ASTcomponent and Condition, and prompt LLMs to generate Python code for incorporation into an ARI library for subsequent use. After that, for any syntax-error-free Python code, we invoke ARIs from the ARI library to extract ASTcomponent from the ASTscenario, and then filter out ASTcomponent that does not meet the condition. Finally, we design prompts to instruct LLMs to abstract and idiomatize code, and then invoke ARIs from the ARI library to rewrite non-idiomatic code into the idiomatic code. Next, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, RIdiom, and Prompt-LLM on nine established Pythonic idioms in RIdiom. Our approach exhibits superior accuracy, F1-score, and recall, while maintaining precision levels comparable to RIdiom, all of which consistently exceed or come close to 90% for each metric of each idiom. Lastly, we extend our evaluation to encompass four new Pythonic idioms. Our approach consistently outperforms Prompt-LLM, achieving metrics with values consistently exceeding 90% for accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Right to be Forgotten in the Era of Large Language Models: Implications, Challenges, and Solutions

The Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) was first established as the result of the ruling of Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v AEPD, Mario Costeja González, and was later included as the Right to Erasure under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of European Union to allow individuals the right to request personal data be deleted by organizations. Specifically for search engines, individuals can send requests to organizations to exclude their information from the query results. It was a significant emergent right as the result of the evolution of technology. With the recent development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their use in chatbots, LLM-enabled software systems have become popular. But they are not excluded from the RTBF. Compared with the indexing approach used by search engines, LLMs store, and process information in a completely different way. This poses new challenges for compliance with the RTBF. In this paper, we explore these challenges and provide our insights on how to implement technical solutions for the RTBF, including the use of differential privacy, machine unlearning, model editing, and guardrails. With the rapid advancement of AI and the increasing need of regulating this powerful technology, learning from the case of RTBF can provide valuable lessons for technical practitioners, legal experts, organizations, and authorities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

An AI System Evaluation Framework for Advancing AI Safety: Terminology, Taxonomy, Lifecycle Mapping

The advent of advanced AI underscores the urgent need for comprehensive safety evaluations, necessitating collaboration across communities (i.e., AI, software engineering, and governance). However, divergent practices and terminologies across these communities, combined with the complexity of AI systems-of which models are only a part-and environmental affordances (e.g., access to tools), obstruct effective communication and comprehensive evaluation. This paper proposes a framework for AI system evaluation comprising three components: 1) harmonised terminology to facilitate communication across communities involved in AI safety evaluation; 2) a taxonomy identifying essential elements for AI system evaluation; 3) a mapping between AI lifecycle, stakeholders, and requisite evaluations for accountable AI supply chain. This framework catalyses a deeper discourse on AI system evaluation beyond model-centric approaches.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Towards Responsible Generative AI: A Reference Architecture for Designing Foundation Model based Agents

Foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs), have been widely recognised as transformative AI technologies due to their capabilities to understand and generate content, including plans with reasoning capabilities. Foundation model based agents derive their autonomy from the capabilities of foundation models, which enable them to autonomously break down a given goal into a set of manageable tasks and orchestrate task execution to meet the goal. Despite the huge efforts put into building foundation model based agents, the architecture design of the agents has not yet been systematically explored. Also, while there are significant benefits of using agents for planning and execution, there are serious considerations regarding responsible AI related software quality attributes, such as security and accountability. Therefore, this paper presents a pattern-oriented reference architecture that serves as guidance when designing foundation model based agents. We evaluate the completeness and utility of the proposed reference architecture by mapping it to the architecture of two real-world agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

{A New Hope}: Contextual Privacy Policies for Mobile Applications and An Approach Toward Automated Generation

Privacy policies have emerged as the predominant approach to conveying privacy notices to mobile application users. In an effort to enhance both readability and user engagement, the concept of contextual privacy policies (CPPs) has been proposed by researchers. The aim of CPPs is to fragment privacy policies into concise snippets, displaying them only within the corresponding contexts within the application's graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper, we first formulate CPP in mobile application scenario, and then present a novel multimodal framework, named SeePrivacy, specifically designed to automatically generate CPPs for mobile applications. This method uniquely integrates vision-based GUI understanding with privacy policy analysis, achieving 0.88 precision and 0.90 recall to detect contexts, as well as 0.98 precision and 0.96 recall in extracting corresponding policy segments. A human evaluation shows that 77% of the extracted privacy policy segments were perceived as well-aligned with the detected contexts. These findings suggest that SeePrivacy could serve as a significant tool for bolstering user interaction with, and understanding of, privacy policies. Furthermore, our solution has the potential to make privacy notices more accessible and inclusive, thus appealing to a broader demographic. A demonstration of our work can be accessed at https://cpp4app.github.io/SeePrivacy/

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Taxonomy of Foundation Model based Systems through the Lens of Software Architecture

The recent release of large language model (LLM) based chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has attracted huge interest in foundation models. It is widely believed that foundation models will serve as the fundamental building blocks for future AI systems. As foundation models are in their early stages, the design of foundation model based systems has not yet been systematically explored. There is limited understanding about the impact of introducing foundation models in software architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy of foundation model based systems, which classifies and compares the characteristics of foundation models and design options of foundation model based systems. Our taxonomy comprises three categories: the pretraining and adaptation of foundation models, the architecture design of foundation model based systems, and responsible-AI-by-design. This taxonomy can serve as concrete guidance for making major architectural design decisions when designing foundation model based systems and highlights trade-offs arising from design decisions.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Trust in Software Supply Chains: Blockchain-Enabled SBOM and the AIBOM Future

The robustness of critical infrastructure systems is contingent upon the integrity and transparency of their software supply chains. A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is pivotal in this regard, offering an exhaustive inventory of components and dependencies crucial to software development. However, prevalent challenges in SBOM sharing, such as data tampering risks and vendors' reluctance to fully disclose sensitive information, significantly hinder its effective implementation. These challenges pose a notable threat to the security of critical infrastructure and systems where transparency and trust are paramount, underscoring the need for a more secure and flexible mechanism for SBOM sharing. To bridge the gap, this study introduces a blockchain-empowered architecture for SBOM sharing, leveraging verifiable credentials to allow for selective disclosure. This strategy not only heightens security but also offers flexibility. Furthermore, this paper broadens the remit of SBOM to encompass AI systems, thereby coining the term AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM). The advent of AI and its application in critical infrastructure necessitates a nuanced understanding of AI software components, including their origins and interdependencies. The evaluation of our solution indicates the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed SBOM sharing mechanism, positing a solution for safeguarding (AI) software supply chains, which is essential for the resilience and reliability of modern critical infrastructure systems.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Towards a Responsible AI Metrics Catalogue: A Collection of Metrics for AI Accountability

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly through the advent of large-scale generative AI (GenAI) models such as Large Language Models (LLMs), has become a transformative element in contemporary technology. While these models have unlocked new possibilities, they simultaneously present significant challenges, such as concerns over data privacy and the propensity to generate misleading or fabricated content. Current frameworks for Responsible AI (RAI) often fall short in providing the granular guidance necessary for tangible application, especially for Accountability-a principle that is pivotal for ensuring transparent and auditable decision-making, bolstering public trust, and meeting increasing regulatory expectations. This study bridges the accountability gap by introducing our effort towards a comprehensive metrics catalogue, formulated through a systematic multivocal literature review (MLR) that integrates findings from both academic and grey literature. Our catalogue delineates process metrics that underpin procedural integrity, resource metrics that provide necessary tools and frameworks, and product metrics that reflect the outputs of AI systems. This tripartite framework is designed to operationalize Accountability in AI, with a special emphasis on addressing the intricacies of GenAI.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

To Be Forgotten or To Be Fair: Unveiling Fairness Implications of Machine Unlearning Methods

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is motivated by the desire of people not to be perpetually disadvantaged by their past deeds. For this, data deletion needs to be deep and permanent, and should be removed from machine learning models. Researchers have proposed machine unlearning algorithms which aim to erase specific data from trained models more efficiently. However, these methods modify how data is fed into the model and how training is done, which may subsequently compromise AI ethics from the fairness perspective. To help software engineers make responsible decisions when adopting these unlearning methods, we present the first study on machine unlearning methods to reveal their fairness implications. We designed and conducted experiments on two typical machine unlearning methods (SISA and AmnesiacML) along with a retraining method (ORTR) as baseline using three fairness datasets under three different deletion strategies. Experimental results show that under non-uniform data deletion, SISA leads to better fairness compared with ORTR and AmnesiacML, while initial training and uniform data deletion do not necessarily affect the fairness of all three methods. These findings have exposed an important research problem in software engineering, and can help practitioners better understand the potential trade-offs on fairness when considering solutions for RTBF.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Prompt Sapper: A LLM-Empowered Production Tool for Building AI Chains

The emergence of foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) GPT-4 and text-to-image models DALL-E, has opened up numerous possibilities across various domains. People can now use natural language (i.e. prompts) to communicate with AI to perform tasks. While people can use foundation models through chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT), chat, regardless of the capabilities of the underlying models, is not a production tool for building reusable AI services. APIs like LangChain allow for LLM-based application development but require substantial programming knowledge, thus posing a barrier. To mitigate this, we propose the concept of AI chain and introduce the best principles and practices that have been accumulated in software engineering for decades into AI chain engineering, to systematise AI chain engineering methodology. We also develop a no-code integrated development environment, Prompt Sapper, which embodies these AI chain engineering principles and patterns naturally in the process of building AI chains, thereby improving the performance and quality of AI chains. With Prompt Sapper, AI chain engineers can compose prompt-based AI services on top of foundation models through chat-based requirement analysis and visual programming. Our user study evaluated and demonstrated the efficiency and correctness of Prompt Sapper.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Designing with Language: Wireframing UI Design Intent with Generative Large Language Models

Wireframing is a critical step in the UI design process. Mid-fidelity wireframes offer more impactful and engaging visuals compared to low-fidelity versions. However, their creation can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, requiring the addition of actual content and semantic icons. In this paper, we introduce a novel solution WireGen, to automatically generate mid-fidelity wireframes with just a brief design intent description using the generative Large Language Models (LLMs). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of WireGen in producing 77.5% significantly better wireframes, outperforming two widely-used in-context learning baselines. A user study with 5 designers further validates its real-world usefulness, highlighting its potential value to enhance UI design process.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Source Code Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey

The increasingly popular adoption of deep learning models in many critical source code tasks motivates the development of data augmentation (DA) techniques to enhance training data and improve various capabilities (e.g., robustness and generalizability) of these models. Although a series of DA methods have been proposed and tailored for source code models, there lacks a comprehensive survey and examination to understand their effectiveness and implications. This paper fills this gap by conducting a comprehensive and integrative survey of data augmentation for source code, wherein we systematically compile and encapsulate existing literature to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. We start with an introduction of data augmentation in source code and then provide a discussion on major representative approaches. Next, we highlight the general strategies and techniques to optimize the DA quality. Subsequently, we underscore techniques useful in real-world source code scenarios and downstream tasks. Finally, we outline the prevailing challenges and potential opportunities for future research. In essence, we aim to demystify the corpus of existing literature on source code DA for deep learning, and foster further exploration in this sphere. Complementing this, we present a continually updated GitHub repository that hosts a list of update-to-date papers on DA for source code modeling, accessible at \url{https://github.com/terryyz/DataAug4Code}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Tag Your Fish in the Broken Net: A Responsible Web Framework for Protecting Online Privacy and Copyright

The World Wide Web, a ubiquitous source of information, serves as a primary resource for countless individuals, amassing a vast amount of data from global internet users. However, this online data, when scraped, indexed, and utilized for activities like web crawling, search engine indexing, and, notably, AI model training, often diverges from the original intent of its contributors. The ascent of Generative AI has accentuated concerns surrounding data privacy and copyright infringement. Regrettably, the web's current framework falls short in facilitating pivotal actions like consent withdrawal or data copyright claims. While some companies offer voluntary measures, such as crawler access restrictions, these often remain inaccessible to individual users. To empower online users to exercise their rights and enable companies to adhere to regulations, this paper introduces a user-controlled consent tagging framework for online data. It leverages the extensibility of HTTP and HTML in conjunction with the decentralized nature of distributed ledger technology. With this framework, users have the ability to tag their online data at the time of transmission, and subsequently, they can track and request the withdrawal of consent for their data from the data holders. A proof-of-concept system is implemented, demonstrating the feasibility of the framework. This work holds significant potential for contributing to the reinforcement of user consent, privacy, and copyright on the modern internet and lays the groundwork for future insights into creating a more responsible and user-centric web ecosystem.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2023

Let's Discover More API Relations: A Large Language Model-based AI Chain for Unsupervised API Relation Inference

APIs have intricate relations that can be described in text and represented as knowledge graphs to aid software engineering tasks. Existing relation extraction methods have limitations, such as limited API text corpus and affected by the characteristics of the input text.To address these limitations, we propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3.5) as a neural knowledge base for API relation inference. This approach leverages the entire Web used to pre-train LLMs as a knowledge base and is insensitive to the context and complexity of input texts. To ensure accurate inference, we design our analytic flow as an AI Chain with three AI modules: API FQN Parser, API Knowledge Extractor, and API Relation Decider. The accuracy of the API FQN parser and API Relation Decider module are 0.81 and 0.83, respectively. Using the generative capacity of the LLM and our approach's inference capability, we achieve an average F1 value of 0.76 under the three datasets, significantly higher than the state-of-the-art method's average F1 value of 0.40. Compared to CoT-based method, our AI Chain design improves the inference reliability by 67%, and the AI-crowd-intelligence strategy enhances the robustness of our approach by 26%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Let's Chat to Find the APIs: Connecting Human, LLM and Knowledge Graph through AI Chain

API recommendation methods have evolved from literal and semantic keyword matching to query expansion and query clarification. The latest query clarification method is knowledge graph (KG)-based, but limitations include out-of-vocabulary (OOV) failures and rigid question templates. To address these limitations, we propose a novel knowledge-guided query clarification approach for API recommendation that leverages a large language model (LLM) guided by KG. We utilize the LLM as a neural knowledge base to overcome OOV failures, generating fluent and appropriate clarification questions and options. We also leverage the structured API knowledge and entity relationships stored in the KG to filter out noise, and transfer the optimal clarification path from KG to the LLM, increasing the efficiency of the clarification process. Our approach is designed as an AI chain that consists of five steps, each handled by a separate LLM call, to improve accuracy, efficiency, and fluency for query clarification in API recommendation. We verify the usefulness of each unit in our AI chain, which all received high scores close to a perfect 5. When compared to the baselines, our approach shows a significant improvement in MRR, with a maximum increase of 63.9% higher when the query statement is covered in KG and 37.2% when it is not. Ablation experiments reveal that the guidance of knowledge in the KG and the knowledge-guided pathfinding strategy are crucial for our approach's performance, resulting in a 19.0% and 22.2% increase in MAP, respectively. Our approach demonstrates a way to bridge the gap between KG and LLM, effectively compensating for the strengths and weaknesses of both.

cs.SE↗