Large foundation models are fundamentally transforming the software engineering landscape, demonstrating exceptional capabilities across diverse tasks such as code generation, debugging, and testing. Despite this rapid progress, a significant gap remains in how to comprehensively evaluate these models' trustworthiness in real-world software engineering scenarios. Existing benchmarks suffer from limited task scope and fail to incorporate critical evaluation aspects such as the robustness and reliability of models. To bridge this gap, we present an evaluation framework called TREAT (Code LLMs Trustworthiness / Reliability Evaluation And Testing) that provides a holistic assessment of model performance in code intelligence tasks. Our evaluation framework addresses key limitations in existing approaches with four main improvements: (1) Multi-Task Holistic Evaluation that spans diverse software engineering activities rather than limited coding tasks; (2) Multi-Language and Multi-Modality Assessment that extends beyond traditional single-language, text-only benchmarks to include multi-modality coding tasks; (3) Robustness Assessment that evaluates model reliability under semantically-preserving code transformations; and (4) Rigorous Evaluation Methodology that enhances the trustworthiness of evaluation results through diverse evaluation prompts and adaptive solution extraction. Based on this evaluation framework, we assess 26 state-of-the-art models and uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights:(1) Current models show substantial performance variation across programming tasks; (2) Multi-modal language models demonstrate specific performance limitations in UI code generation and edit;

In this work, we focus our attention on developing a benchmark for instruction-following where it is easy to verify both task performance as well as instruction-following capabilities. We adapt existing knowledge benchmarks and augment them with instructions that are a) conditional on correctly answering the knowledge task or b) use the space of candidate options in multiple-choice knowledge-answering tasks. This allows us to study model characteristics, such as their change in performance on the knowledge tasks in the presence of answer-modifying instructions and distractor instructions. In contrast to existing benchmarks for instruction following, we not only measure instruction-following capabilities but also use LLM-free methods to study task performance. We study a series of openly available large language models of varying parameter sizes (1B-405B) and closed source models namely GPT-4o-mini, GPT-4o. We find that even large-scale instruction-tuned LLMs fail to follow simple instructions in zero-shot settings. We release our dataset, the benchmark, code, and results for future work.

Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore, sampling is one of the key elements of MBR decoding, and previous studies reported that the performance varies by sampling methods. From a theoretical standpoint, this performance variation is likely tied to how closely the samples approximate the true distribution of references. However, this approximation has not been the subject of in-depth study. In this study, we propose using anomaly detection to measure the degree of approximation. We first closely examine the performance variation and then show that previous hypotheses about samples do not correlate well with the variation, but our introduced anomaly scores do. The results are the first to empirically support the link between the performance and the core assumption of MBR decoding.

Learning from changing tasks and sequential experience without forgetting the obtained knowledge is a challenging problem for artificial neural networks. In this work, we focus on two challenging problems in the paradigm of Continual Learning (CL) without involving any old data: (i) the accumulation of catastrophic forgetting caused by the gradually fading knowledge space from which the model learns the previous knowledge; (ii) the uncontrolled tug-of-war dynamics to balance the stability and plasticity during the learning of new tasks. In order to tackle these problems, we present Progressive Learning without Forgetting (PLwF) and a credit assignment regime in the optimizer. PLwF densely introduces model functions from previous tasks to construct a knowledge space such that it contains the most reliable knowledge on each task and the distribution information of different tasks, while credit assignment controls the tug-of-war dynamics by removing gradient conflict through projection. Extensive ablative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PLwF and credit assignment. In comparison with other CL methods, we report notably better results even without relying on any raw data.

COVID-19 has been a public health emergency of international concern since early 2020. Reliable forecasting is critical to diminish the impact of this disease. To date, a large number of different forecasting models have been proposed, mainly including statistical models, compartmental models, and deep learning models. However, due to various uncertain factors across different regions such as economics and government policy, no forecasting model appears to be the best for all scenarios. In this paper, we perform quantitative analysis of COVID-19 forecasting of confirmed cases and deaths across different regions in the United States with different forecasting horizons, and evaluate the relative impacts of the following three dimensions on the predictive performance (improvement and variation) through different evaluation metrics: model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and the length of time series required for training. We find that if a dimension brings about higher performance gains, if not well-tuned, it may also lead to harsher performance penalties. Furthermore, model selection is the dominant factor in determining the predictive performance. It is responsible for both the largest improvement and the largest variation in performance in all prediction tasks across different regions. While practitioners may perform more complicated time series analysis in practice, they should be able to achieve reasonable results if they have adequate insight into key decisions like model selection.

Multiple organ failure (MOF) is a life-threatening condition. Due to its urgency and high mortality rate, early detection is critical for clinicians to provide appropriate treatment. In this paper, we perform quantitative analysis on early MOF prediction with comprehensive machine learning (ML) configurations, including data preprocessing (missing value treatment, label balancing, feature scaling), feature selection, classifier choice, and hyperparameter tuning. Results show that classifier choice impacts both the performance improvement and variation most among all the configurations. In general, complex classifiers including ensemble methods can provide better performance than simple classifiers. However, blindly pursuing complex classifiers is unwise as it also brings the risk of greater performance variation.