Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT [6] (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) by Devlin et al. and GPT [11] (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) by Radford et al., have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with their exceptional capabilities, setting new standards in performance across various tasks. Due to their superb generative capability, LLMs are widely deployed as the backend for various real-world applications, referred to as LLM-Integrated Applications. For instance, Microsoft utilizes GPT-4 as the service backend for the new Bing Search [1]; OpenAI has developed various applications--such as ChatWithPDF and AskTheCode--that utilize GPT-4 for different tasks such as text processing, code interpretation, and product recommendation [2, 3]; Google deploys the search engine Bard, powered by PaLM 2. In general, to accomplish a task, an LLM-Integrated Application requires an instruction prompt, which aims to instruct the backend LLM to perform the task, and a data prompt, which is the data to be processed by the LLM in the task. The instruction prompt can be provided by a user or the LLM-Integrated Application itself; and the data prompt is often obtained from external resources such as emails and webpages on the Internet. An LLM-Integrated Application queries the backend LLM using the instruction prompt and data prompt to accomplish the task and returns the response from the LLM to the user. Recently, several types of vulnerabilities have been identified in LLMs to deceive models or mislead users. Among these, prompt injection attacks and jailbreak attacks stand out as prevalent vulnerabilities.

Molecules and materials are the foundation for the development of modern advanced industries such as energy storage systems and semiconductor devices. However, traditional trial-and-error methods or theoretical calculations are highly resource-intensive, and extremely long R&D (Research and Development) periods cannot meet the urgent need for molecules/materials in industrial development. Machine learning (ML) methods based on big data are expected to break this dilemma. However, the difficulty in constructing large-scale datasets of new molecules/materials due to the high cost of data acquisition and annotation limits the development of machine learning. The application of transfer learning lowers the data requirements for model training, which makes transfer learning stand out in researches addressing data quality issues. In this review, we summarize recent advances in transfer learning related to molecular and materials science. We focus on the application of transfer learning methods for the discovery of advanced molecules/materials, particularly, the construction of transfer learning frameworks for different systems, and how transfer learning can enhance the performance of models. In addition, the challenges of transfer learning are also discussed.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT and BERT, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing neural language process tasks. Recently, the release of ChatGPT has garnered significant attention due to its ability to analyze, comprehend, and synthesize information from user inputs. Therefore, these LLMs were adopted by researchers in many different domains. In the realm of code analysis, researchers have applied LLMs to tasks like code review and code generation. However, we observed that the strengths and limitations of adopting these LLMs to the code analysis have not been investigated. In this paper, we delve into LLMs' capabilities in security-oriented program analysis, considering perspectives from both attackers and security analysts. We focus on two representative LLMs, ChatGPT and CodeBert, and evaluate their performance in solving typical analytic tasks with varying levels of difficulty. Given the different natures of ChatGPT and CodeBERT, we conduct a qualitative analysis of the model's output for ChatGPT and a quantitative analysis for CodeBERT, respectively. For ChatGPT, we present a case study involving several security-oriented program analysis tasks while deliberately introducing challenges to assess its responses. On the other hand, for CodeBERT, we systematically analyze and classify the features in code, quantitatively evaluating the impact of these features on the model's performance. Our study demonstrates the LLM's efficiency in learning high-level semantics from code, positioning ChatGPT as a potential asset in security-oriented contexts. However, it is essential to acknowledge certain limitations, such as the heavy reliance on well-defined variable and function names, making them unable to learn from anonymized code. We hope that our findings and analysis will offer valuable insights for future researchers in this domain.

The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) were proposed in the natural language process (NLP) and shows promising results. Recently researchers applied the BERT to source-code representation learning and reported some good news on several downstream tasks. However, in this paper, we illustrated that current methods cannot effectively understand the logic of source codes. The representation of source code heavily relies on the programmer-defined variable and function names. We design and implement a set of experiments to demonstrate our conjecture and provide some insights for future works.