arXiv subjects

Zhenyu Mao

Publications and source records attributed to Zhenyu Mao.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Requirements Engineering for GenAI-Enabled Software: Bridging Responsibility Gaps through Human Oversight Requirements

Context: Responsibility gaps, long-recognized challenges in socio-technical systems where accountability becomes diffuse or ambiguous, have become increasingly pronounced in GenAI-enabled software. This study seeks to establish a coherent perspective for a systematic analysis of responsibility gaps from a human oversight requirements standpoint, encompassing how these responsibility gaps should be conceptualized, identified, and represented throughout the requirements engineering process. Methods: The proposed design methodology is structured across three analytical layers. At the conceptualization layer, it establishes a conceptual framing that defines the key elements of responsibility across the human and system dimensions and explains how potential responsibility gaps emerge from their interactions. At the methodological layer, it introduces a deductive pipeline for identifying responsibility gaps by analyzing interactions between these dimensions and deriving corresponding oversight requirements within established requirements engineering frameworks. At the artifact layer, it formalizes the results in a Deductive Backbone Table, a reusable representation that traces the reasoning path from responsibility gaps identification to human oversight requirements derivation. Results: A user study compared the proposed methodology with a baseline goal-oriented requirements engineering approach. Participant-perception results indicated generally favorable views of the enhanced approach across the evaluated dimensions, while expert ratings of the generated requirement artifacts showed higher mean scores for six of the seven artifact-quality items, with the strongest descriptive improvements observed for consistency and representational traceability.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

SAGE: Semantic-Aware Gray-Box Game Regression Testing with Large Language Models

The rapid iteration cycles of modern live-service games make regression testing indispensable for maintaining quality and stability. However, existing regression testing approaches face critical limitations, especially in common gray-box settings where full source code access is unavailable: they heavily rely on manual effort for test case construction, struggle to maintain growing suites plagued by redundancy, and lack efficient mechanisms for prioritizing relevant tests. These challenges result in excessive testing costs, limited automation, and insufficient bug detection. To address these issues, we propose SAGE, a semanticaware regression testing framework for gray-box game environments. SAGE systematically addresses the core challenges of test generation, maintenance, and selection. It employs LLM-guided reinforcement learning for efficient, goal-oriented exploration to automatically generate a diverse foundational test suite. Subsequently, it applies a semantic-based multi-objective optimization to refine this suite into a compact, high-value subset by balancing cost, coverage, and rarity. Finally, it leverages LLM-based semantic analysis of update logs to prioritize test cases most relevant to version changes, enabling efficient adaptation across iterations. We evaluate SAGE on two representative environments, Overcooked Plus and Minecraft, comparing against both automated baselines and human-recorded test cases. Across all environments, SAGE achieves superior bug detection with significantly lower execution cost, while demonstrating strong adaptability to version updates.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Understanding How Enterprises Adopt the Model Context Protocol for LLM-Driven Software Engineering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in AI-based software engineering, but their limitations in complex task execution and multi-tool coordination have driven growing interest in the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Existing research has mainly focused on MCP's technical design, with limited empirical evidence on how it is adopted and used in enterprise practice, particularly with regard to deployment challenges, operational risks, and practitioner expectations. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 practitioners from eight companies in the Internet and financial sectors. The findings show that MCP is valued for supporting cross-system collaboration, task decoupling, and knowledge reuse in LLM-based workflows, but its adoption remains constrained by ecosystem fragmentation, cross-component coordination difficulties, and unresolved problems in distributed state management and fault diagnosis. Participants also expressed strong demand for better standardization, lower adoption barriers through low-code or plugin-based approaches, and more systematic operational support. These results provide early empirical evidence on enterprise MCP practice and offer practical implications for improving MCP's standardization, usability, and deployment readiness in real-world software engineering environments.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Making Sense of Scams: Understanding Scam Conversations Through Multi-Level Alignment

Online scams often unfold gradually through interaction, yet existing detection systems predominantly rely on snapshot-based signals and interruptive warnings, revealing two research gaps in the lack of signals that represent scam risk within conversational dynamics and the underexplored design of non-interruptive interaction. To address these gaps, we introduce multi-level alignment-based hints, informed by the Interactive Alignment Model, as a new detection signal for supporting sensemaking in scam-related conversations. These hints operationalize low-level lexical and syntactic alignments and high-level semantic and situation-model alignments between conversational participants, making conversational dynamics visible to users. We first conduct a preliminary evaluation on real-life scam dialogues, showing that as conversations approach scam attempts, low-level alignment scores remain stable while high-level alignment scores systematically decline, revealing a consistent cross-level pattern indicative of scam progression. Building on this insight, we conduct a user study with thirty participants, indicating that relative to the no-hint baseline, multi-level alignment-based hints increase precision by 0.25, recall by 0.16, and F1 score by 0.21, yielding substantially larger gains than the marginal improvements achieved by keyword-triggered alerts. Statistical analyses reveal that the proposed hints support earlier and more stable confidence formation over time, with ablation results further highlighting the effectiveness of combining alignment hints across levels in achieving these advantages.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

R2Code: A Self-Reflective LLM Framework for Requirements-to-Code Traceability

Accurate requirement-to-code traceability is crucial for software maintenance. However, existing IR- and embedding-based methods are heavily dependent on lexical similarity, often yielding incomplete or inconsistent links across projects and languages and incurring high cost from long-context retrieval and prompting. This paper presents R2Code, an LLM-based semantic traceability framework designed to improve trace link accuracy while reducing inference cost. R2Code integrates three components: 1) a decomposition-enhanced Bidirectional Alignment Network (BAN) that aligns four-layer requirement semantics with corresponding code structures to support cross-level semantic matching; 2) a Self-Reflective Consistency Verification (SRCV) module that conducts explanation-guided consistency checking to calibrate link reliability; and 3) a Dynamic Context-Adaptive Retrieval (DCAR) mechanism that adjusts retrieval granularity and filters contexts using semantic-overlap weighting for efficient context utilization. Experiments on five public datasets spanning multiple domains and two programming languages demonstrate that R2Code consistently outperforms the strongest baselines, achieving an average F1 gain of 7.4%, while reducing token consumption by up to 41.7% through adaptive context control.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

See What I See: An Attention-Guiding eHMI Approach for Autonomous Vehicles

As autonomous vehicles are gradually being deployed in the real world, external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are expected to serve as a critical solution for enhancing vehicle-pedestrian communication. However, existing eHMI designs typically focus solely on the ego vehicle's status, which can inadvertently capture pedestrians' attention or encourage misguided reliance on the AV's signals, leading them to neglect scanning for other surrounding hazards. To address this, we propose the Attention-Guiding eHMI (AGeHMI), a projection-based visualization that employs directional cues and risk-based color coding to actively guide pedestrians' attention toward potential environmental dangers. Evaluation through a virtual reality user study (N = 20) suggests that AGeHMI effectively influences participants' visual attention distribution and significantly reduces potential collision risks with surrounding vehicles, while simultaneously improving subjective confidence and reducing cognitive workload.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

FedLAD: A Modular and Adaptive Testbed for Federated Log Anomaly Detection

Log-based anomaly detection (LAD) is critical for ensuring the reliability of large-scale distributed systems. However, most existing LAD approaches assume centralized training, which is often impractical due to privacy constraints and the decentralized nature of system logs. While federated learning (FL) offers a promising alternative, there is a lack of dedicated testbeds tailored to the needs of LAD in federated settings. To address this, we present FedLAD, a unified platform for training and evaluating LAD models under FL constraints. FedLAD supports plug-and-play integration of diverse LAD models, benchmark datasets, and aggregation strategies, while offering runtime support for validation logging (self-monitoring), parameter tuning (self-configuration), and adaptive strategy control (self-adaptation). By enabling reproducible and scalable experimentation, FedLAD bridges the gap between FL frameworks and LAD requirements, providing a solid foundation for future research. Project code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AA-cityu/FedLAD.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Chart2Code-MoLA: Efficient Multi-Modal Code Generation via Adaptive Expert Routing

Chart-to-code generation is a critical task in automated data visualization, translating complex chart structures into executable programs. While recent Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) improve chart representation, existing approaches still struggle to achieve cross-type generalization, memory efficiency, and modular design. To address these challenges, this paper proposes C2C-MoLA, a multimodal framework that synergizes Mixture of Experts (MoE) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The MoE component uses a complexity-aware routing mechanism with domain-specialized experts and load-balanced sparse gating, dynamically allocating inputs based on learnable structural metrics like element count and chart complexity. LoRA enables parameter-efficient updates for resource-conscious tuning, further supported by a tailored training strategy that aligns routing stability with semantic accuracy. Experiments on Chart2Code-160k show that the proposed model improves generation accuracy by up to 17%, reduces peak GPU memory by 18%, and accelerates convergence by 20%, when compared to standard fine-tuning and LoRA-only baselines, particularly on complex charts. Ablation studies validate optimal designs, such as 8 experts and rank-8 LoRA, and confirm scalability for real-world multimodal code generation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Towards Engineering Multi-Agent LLMs: A Protocol-Driven Approach

The increasing demand for software development has driven interest in automating software engineering (SE) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent efforts extend LLMs into multi-agent systems (MAS) that emulate collaborative development workflows, but these systems often fail due to three core deficiencies: under-specification, coordination misalignment, and inappropriate verification, arising from the absence of foundational SE structuring principles. This paper introduces Software Engineering Multi-Agent Protocol (SEMAP), a protocol-layer methodology that instantiates three core SE design principles for multi-agent LLMs: (1) explicit behavioral contract modeling, (2) structured messaging, and (3) lifecycle-guided execution with verification, and is implemented atop Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) infrastructure. Empirical evaluation using the Multi-Agent System Failure Taxonomy (MAST) framework demonstrates that SEMAP effectively reduces failures across different SE tasks. In code development, it achieves up to a 69.6% reduction in total failures for function-level development and 56.7% for deployment-level development. For vulnerability detection, SEMAP reduces failure counts by up to 47.4% on Python tasks and 28.2% on C/C++ tasks.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Hybrid Privacy Policy-Code Consistency Check using Knowledge Graphs and LLMs

The increasing concern in user privacy misuse has accelerated research into checking consistencies between smartphone apps' declared privacy policies and their actual behaviors. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced promising techniques for semantic comparison, but these methods often suffer from low accuracies and expensive computational costs. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel hybrid approach that integrates 1) knowledge graph-based deterministic checking to ensure higher accuracy, and 2) LLMs exclusively used for preliminary semantic analysis to save computational costs. Preliminary evaluation indicates this hybrid approach not only achieves 37.63% increase in precision and 23.13% increase F1-score but also consumes 93.5% less tokens and 87.3% shorter time.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Strategy Enhanced COA for Path Planning in Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous navigation is reshaping various domains in people's life by enabling efficient and safe movement in complex environments. Reliable navigation requires algorithmic approaches that compute optimal or near-optimal trajectories while satisfying task-specific constraints and ensuring obstacle avoidance. However, existing methods struggle with slow convergence and suboptimal solutions, particularly in complex environments, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these limitations, this paper presents the Multi-Strategy Enhanced Crayfish Optimization Algorithm (MCOA), a novel approach integrating three key strategies: 1) Refractive Opposition Learning, enhancing population diversity and global exploration, 2) Stochastic Centroid-Guided Exploration, balancing global and local search to prevent premature convergence, and 3) Adaptive Competition-Based Selection, dynamically adjusting selection pressure for faster convergence and improved solution quality. Empirical evaluations underscore the remarkable planning speed and the amazing solution quality of MCOA in both 3D Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and 2D mobile robot path planning. Against 11 baseline algorithms, MCOA achieved a 69.2% reduction in computational time and a 16.7% improvement in minimizing overall path cost in 3D UAV scenarios. Furthermore, in 2D path planning, MCOA outperformed baseline approaches by 44% on average, with an impressive 75.6% advantage in the largest 60*60 grid setting. These findings validate MCOA as a powerful tool for optimizing autonomous navigation in complex environments. The source code is available at: https://github.com/coedv-hub/MCOA.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Optimal Brain Iterative Merging: Mitigating Interference in LLM Merging

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their high computational costs pose challenges for customization. Model merging offers a cost-effective alternative, yet existing methods suffer from interference among parameters, leading to performance degradation. In this work, we propose Optimal Brain Iterative Merging (OBIM), a novel method designed to mitigate both intra-model and inter-model interference. OBIM consists of two key components: (1) A saliency measurement mechanism that evaluates parameter importance based on loss changes induced by individual weight alterations, reducing intra-model interference by preserving only high-saliency parameters. (2) A mutually exclusive iterative merging framework, which incrementally integrates models using a binary mask to avoid direct parameter averaging, thereby mitigating inter-model interference. We validate OBIM through experiments on both Supervised Fine-Tuned (SFT) models and post-pretrained checkpoints. The results show that OBIM significantly outperforms existing merging techniques. Overall, OBIM provides an effective and practical solution for enhancing LLM merging.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SDA: Simple Discrete Augmentation for Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning

Contrastive learning has recently achieved compelling performance in unsupervised sentence representation. As an essential element, data augmentation protocols, however, have not been well explored. The pioneering work SimCSE resorting to a simple dropout mechanism (viewed as continuous augmentation) surprisingly dominates discrete augmentations such as cropping, word deletion, and synonym replacement as reported. To understand the underlying rationales, we revisit existing approaches and attempt to hypothesize the desiderata of reasonable data augmentation methods: balance of semantic consistency and expression diversity. We then develop three simple yet effective discrete sentence augmentation schemes: punctuation insertion, modal verbs, and double negation. They act as minimal noises at lexical level to produce diverse forms of sentences. Furthermore, standard negation is capitalized on to generate negative samples for alleviating feature suppression involved in contrastive learning. We experimented extensively with semantic textual similarity on diverse datasets. The results support the superiority of the proposed methods consistently. Our key code is available at https://github.com/Zhudongsheng75/SDA

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Multi-role Consensus through LLMs Discussions for Vulnerability Detection

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the potential for vulnerability detection, a crucial component of software quality assurance. Despite this progress, most studies have been limited to the perspective of a single role, usually testers, lacking diverse viewpoints from different roles in a typical software development life-cycle, including both developers and testers. To this end, this paper introduces a multi-role approach to employ LLMs to act as different roles simulating a real-life code review process and engaging in discussions toward a consensus on the existence and classification of vulnerabilities in the code. Preliminary evaluation of this approach indicates a 13.48% increase in the precision rate, an 18.25% increase in the recall rate, and a 16.13% increase in the F1 score.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Jointly Contrastive Representation Learning on Road Network and Trajectory

Road network and trajectory representation learning are essential for traffic systems since the learned representation can be directly used in various downstream tasks (e.g., traffic speed inference, and travel time estimation). However, most existing methods only contrast within the same scale, i.e., treating road network and trajectory separately, which ignores valuable inter-relations. In this paper, we aim to propose a unified framework that jointly learns the road network and trajectory representations end-to-end. We design domain-specific augmentations for road-road contrast and trajectory-trajectory contrast separately, i.e., road segment with its contextual neighbors and trajectory with its detour replaced and dropped alternatives, respectively. On top of that, we further introduce the road-trajectory cross-scale contrast to bridge the two scales by maximizing the total mutual information. Unlike the existing cross-scale contrastive learning methods on graphs that only contrast a graph and its belonging nodes, the contrast between road segment and trajectory is elaborately tailored via novel positive sampling and adaptive weighting strategies. We conduct prudent experiments based on two real-world datasets with four downstream tasks, demonstrating improved performance and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/mzy94/JCLRNT.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Counting independent sets and colorings on random regular bipartite graphs

We give a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) to count the number of independent sets on almost every $Δ$-regular bipartite graph if $Δ\ge 53$. In the weighted case, for all sufficiently large integers $Δ$ and weight parameters $λ=\tildeΩ\left(\frac{1}Δ\right)$, we also obtain an FPTAS on almost every $Δ$-regular bipartite graph. Our technique is based on the recent work of Jenssen, Keevash and Perkins (SODA, 2019) and we also apply it to confirm an open question raised there: For all $q\ge 3$ and sufficiently large integers $Δ=Δ(q)$, there is an FPTAS to count the number of $q$-colorings on almost every $Δ$-regular bipartite graph.

cs.DS↗