Graph generation generally aims to create new graphs that closely align with a specific graph distribution. Existing works often implicitly capture this distribution through the optimization of generators, potentially overlooking the intricacies of the distribution itself. Furthermore, these approaches generally neglect the insights offered by the learned distribution for graph generation. In contrast, in this work, we propose a novel self-conditioned graph generation framework designed to explicitly model graph distributions and employ these distributions to guide the generation process. We first perform self-conditioned modeling to capture the graph distributions by transforming each graph sample into a low-dimensional representation and optimizing a representation generator to create new representations reflective of the learned distribution. Subsequently, we leverage these bootstrapped representations as self-conditioned guidance for the generation process, thereby facilitating the generation of graphs that more accurately reflect the learned distributions. We conduct extensive experiments on generic and molecular graph datasets across various fields. Our framework demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art graph generation methods in terms of graph quality and fidelity to training data.

Multi-view multi-human association and tracking (MvMHAT), is a new but important problem for multi-person scene video surveillance, aiming to track a group of people over time in each view, as well as to identify the same person across different views at the same time, which is different from previous MOT and multi-camera MOT tasks only considering the over-time human tracking. This way, the videos for MvMHAT require more complex annotations while containing more information for self learning. In this work, we tackle this problem with a self-supervised learning aware end-to-end network. Specifically, we propose to take advantage of the spatial-temporal self-consistency rationale by considering three properties of reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity. Besides the reflexivity property that naturally holds, we design the self-supervised learning losses based on the properties of symmetry and transitivity, for both appearance feature learning and assignment matrix optimization, to associate the multiple humans over time and across views. Furthermore, to promote the research on MvMHAT, we build two new large-scale benchmarks for the network training and testing of different algorithms. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our method. We have released the benchmark and code to the public.

Abstract-- The execution failure of cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous driving systems, unmanned aerial systems, and robotic systems) could result in the loss of life, severe injuries, large-scale environmental damage, property destruction, and major economic loss. Hence, such systems usually require a strong justification that they will effectively support critical requirements (e.g., safety, security, and reliability) for which they were designed. Thus, it is often mandatory to develop compelling assurance cases to support that justification and allow regulatory bodies to certify such systems. In such contexts, detecting assurance deficits, relying on patterns to improve the structure of assurance cases, improving existing assurance case notations, and (semi-)automating the generation of assurance cases are key to develop compelling assurance cases and foster consumer acceptance. We therefore explore challenges related to such assurance enablers and outline some potential directions that could be explored to tackle them.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed both the academic and industrial landscapes due to their remarkable capacity to understand, analyze, and generate texts based on their vast knowledge and reasoning ability. Nevertheless, one major drawback of LLMs is their substantial computational cost for pre-training due to their unprecedented amounts of parameters. The disadvantage is exacerbated when new knowledge frequently needs to be introduced into the pre-trained model. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective and efficient techniques to update pre-trained LLMs. Traditional methods encode new knowledge in pre-trained LLMs through direct fine-tuning. However, naively re-training LLMs can be computationally intensive and risks degenerating valuable pre-trained knowledge irrelevant to the update in the model. Recently, Knowledge-based Model Editing (KME) has attracted increasing attention, which aims to precisely modify the LLMs to incorporate specific knowledge, without negatively influencing other irrelevant knowledge. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive and in-depth overview of recent advances in the field of KME. We first introduce a general formulation of KME to encompass different KME strategies. Afterward, we provide an innovative taxonomy of KME techniques based on how the new knowledge is introduced into pre-trained LLMs, and investigate existing KME strategies while analyzing key insights, advantages, and limitations of methods from each category. Moreover, representative metrics, datasets, and applications of KME are introduced accordingly. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis regarding the practicality and remaining challenges of KME and suggest promising research directions for further advancement in this field.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made significant strides in various natural language processing tasks. However, the lack of interpretability due to their ``black-box'' nature poses challenges for responsible implementation. Although previous studies have attempted to improve interpretability by using, e.g., attention weights in self-attention layers, these weights often lack clarity, readability, and intuitiveness. In this research, we propose a novel approach to interpreting PLMs by employing high-level, meaningful concepts that are easily understandable for humans. For example, we learn the concept of ``Food'' and investigate how it influences the prediction of a model's sentiment towards a restaurant review. We introduce C$^3$M, which combines human-annotated and machine-generated concepts to extract hidden neurons designed to encapsulate semantically meaningful and task-specific concepts. Through empirical evaluations on real-world datasets, we manifest that our approach offers valuable insights to interpret PLM behavior, helps diagnose model failures, and enhances model robustness amidst noisy concept labels.

Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are often noisy due to the complex annotation process, making it essential to develop strategies for fine-tuning PLMs with such noisy labels. To this end, we introduce an innovative approach for fine-tuning PLMs using noisy labels, which incorporates the guidance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This guidance assists in accurately distinguishing between clean and noisy samples and provides supplementary information beyond the noisy labels, thereby boosting the learning process during fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets further demonstrate the superior advantages of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines.

In this work, we revisit existing oracle generation studies plus ChatGPT to empirically investigate the current standing of their performance in both NLG-based and test adequacy metrics. Specifically, we train and run four state-of-the-art test oracle generation models on five NLG-based and two test adequacy metrics for our analysis. We apply two different correlation analyses between these two different sets of metrics. Surprisingly, we found no significant correlation between the NLG-based metrics and test adequacy metrics. For instance, oracles generated from ChatGPT on the project activemq-artemis had the highest performance on all the NLG-based metrics among the studied NOGs, however, it had the most number of projects with a decrease in test adequacy metrics compared to all the studied NOGs. We further conduct a qualitative analysis to explore the reasons behind our observations, we found that oracles with high NLG-based metrics but low test adequacy metrics tend to have complex or multiple chained method invocations within the oracle's parameters, making it hard for the model to generate completely, affecting the test adequacy metrics. On the other hand, oracles with low NLG-based metrics but high test adequacy metrics tend to have to call different assertion types or a different method that functions similarly to the ones in the ground truth. Overall, this work complements prior studies on test oracle generation with an extensive performance evaluation with both NLG and test adequacy metrics and provides guidelines for better assessment of deep learning applications in software test generation in the future.

State-of-the-art automated test generation techniques, such as search-based testing, are usually ignorant about what a developer would create as a test case. Therefore, they typically create tests that are not human-readable and may not necessarily detect all types of complex bugs developer-written tests would do. In this study, we leverage Transformer-based code models to generate unit tests that can complement search-based test generation. Specifically, we use CodeT5, i.e., a state-of-the-art large code model, and fine-tune it on the test generation downstream task. For our analysis, we use the Methods2test dataset for fine-tuning CodeT5 and Defects4j for project-level domain adaptation and evaluation. The main contribution of this study is proposing a fully automated testing framework that leverages developer-written tests and available code models to generate compilable, human-readable unit tests. Results show that our approach can generate new test cases that cover lines that were not covered by developer-written tests. Using domain adaptation, we can also increase line coverage of the model-generated unit tests by 49.9% and 54% in terms of mean and median (compared to the model without domain adaptation). We can also use our framework as a complementary solution alongside common search-based methods to increase the overall coverage with mean and median of 25.3% and 6.3%. It can also increase the mutation score of search-based methods by killing extra mutants (up to 64 new mutants were killed per project in our experiments).

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a machine learning model without exchanging their own local data. In this way, the server can exploit the computational power of all clients and train the model on a larger set of data samples among all clients. Although such a mechanism is proven to be effective in various fields, existing works generally assume that each client preserves sufficient data for training. In practice, however, certain clients may only contain a limited number of samples (i.e., few-shot samples). For example, the available photo data taken by a specific user with a new mobile device is relatively rare. In this scenario, existing FL efforts typically encounter a significant performance drop on these clients. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a few-shot model that can generalize to clients with limited data under the FL scenario. In this paper, we refer to this novel problem as federated few-shot learning. Nevertheless, the problem remains challenging due to two major reasons: the global data variance among clients (i.e., the difference in data distributions among clients) and the local data insufficiency in each client (i.e., the lack of adequate local data for training). To overcome these two challenges, we propose a novel federated few-shot learning framework with two separately updated models and dedicated training strategies to reduce the adverse impact of global data variance and local data insufficiency. Extensive experiments on four prevalent datasets that cover news articles and images validate the effectiveness of our framework compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/F2L.

Few-shot node classification, which aims to predict labels for nodes on graphs with only limited labeled nodes as references, is of great significance in real-world graph mining tasks. Particularly, in this paper, we refer to the task of classifying nodes in classes with a few labeled nodes as the few-shot node classification problem. To tackle such a label shortage issue, existing works generally leverage the meta-learning framework, which utilizes a number of episodes to extract transferable knowledge from classes with abundant labeled nodes and generalizes the knowledge to other classes with limited labeled nodes. In essence, the primary aim of few-shot node classification is to learn node embeddings that are generalizable across different classes. To accomplish this, the GNN encoder must be able to distinguish node embeddings between different classes, while also aligning embeddings for nodes in the same class. Thus, in this work, we propose to consider both the intra-class and inter-class generalizability of the model. We create a novel contrastive meta-learning framework on graphs, named COSMIC, with two key designs. First, we propose to enhance the intra-class generalizability by involving a contrastive two-step optimization in each episode to explicitly align node embeddings in the same classes. Second, we strengthen the inter-class generalizability by generating hard node classes via a novel similarity-sensitive mix-up strategy. Extensive experiments on few-shot node classification datasets verify the superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/COSMIC.