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Understanding Privacy Risks in Code Models Through Training Dynamics: A Causal Approach

Yang, Hua, Velasco, Alejandro, Fang, Sen, Xu, Bowen, Poshyvanyk, Denys

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models for code (LLM4Code) have greatly improved developer productivity but also raise privacy concerns due to their reliance on open-source repositories containing abundant personally identifiable information (PII). Prior work shows that commercial models can reproduce sensitive PII, yet existing studies largely treat PII as a single category and overlook the heterogeneous risks among different types. We investigate whether distinct PII types vary in their likelihood of being learned and leaked by LLM4Code, and whether this relationship is causal. Our methodology includes building a dataset with diverse PII types, fine-tuning representative models of different scales, computing training dynamics on real PII data, and formulating a structural causal model to estimate the causal effect of learnability on leakage. Results show that leakage risks differ substantially across PII types and correlate with their training dynamics: easy-to-learn instances such as IP addresses exhibit higher leakage, while harder types such as keys and passwords leak less frequently. Ambiguous types show mixed behaviors. This work provides the first causal evidence that leakage risks are type-dependent and offers guidance for developing type-aware and learnability-aware defenses for LLM4Code.


TopiCLEAR: Topic extraction by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensional Reduction

Fujita, Aoi, Yamamoto, Taichi, Nakayama, Yuri, Kobayashi, Ryota

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Rapid expansion of social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Reddit has enabled large-scale analysis of public perceptions on diverse topics, including social issues, politics, natural disasters, and consumer sentiment. Topic modeling is a widely used approach for uncovering latent themes in text data, typically framed as an unsupervised classification task. However, traditional models, originally designed for longer and more formal documents, struggle with short social media posts due to limited co-occurrence statistics, fragmented semantics, inconsistent spelling, and informal language. To address these challenges, we propose a new method, TopiCLEAR: Topic extraction by CLustering Embeddings with Adaptive dimensional Reduction. Specifically, each text is embedded using Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and provisionally clustered using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The clusters are then refined iteratively using a supervised projection based on linear discriminant analysis, followed by GMM-based clustering until convergence. Notably, our method operates directly on raw text, eliminating the need for preprocessing steps such as stop word removal. We evaluate our approach on four diverse datasets, 20News, AgNewsTitle, Reddit, and TweetTopic, each containing human-labeled topic information. Compared with seven baseline methods, including a recent SBERT-based method and a zero-shot generative AI method, our approach achieves the highest similarity to human-annotated topics, with significant improvements for both social media posts and online news articles. Additionally, qualitative analysis shows that our method produces more interpretable topics, highlighting its potential for applications in social media data and web content analytics.



Taught by the Flawed: How Dataset Insecurity Breeds Vulnerable AI Code

Xia, Catherine, Alalfi, Manar H.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI programming assistants have demonstrated a tendency to generate code containing basic security vulnerabilities. While developers are ultimately responsible for validating and reviewing such outputs, improving the inherent quality of these generated code snippets remains essential. A key contributing factor to insecure outputs is the presence of vulnerabilities in the training datasets used to build large language models (LLMs). To address this issue, we propose curating training data to include only code that is free from detectable vulnerabilities. In this study, we constructed a secure dataset by filtering an existing Python corpus using a static analysis tool to retain only vulnerability-free functions. We then trained two transformer-based models: one on the curated dataset and one on the original, unfiltered dataset. The models were evaluated on both the correctness and security of the code they generated in response to natural language function descriptions. Our results show that the model trained on the curated dataset produced outputs with fewer security issues, while maintaining comparable functional correctness. These findings highlight the importance of secure training data in improving the reliability of AI-based programming assistants, though further enhancements to model architecture and evaluation are needed to reinforce these outcomes.


Using Large Language Models for Abstraction of Planning Domains - Extended Version

Banihashemi, Bita, Patel, Megh, Lespérance, Yves

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generating an abstraction of a dynamic domain that aligns with a given purpose remains a significant challenge given that the choice of such an abstraction can impact an agent's ability to plan, reason, and provide explanations effectively. We model the agent's concrete behaviors in PDDL and investigate the use of in-context learning with large language models (LLMs) for the generation of abstract PDDL domains and problem instances, given an abstraction objective specified in natural language. The benchmark examples we use are new and have not been part of the data any LLMs have been trained on. We consider three categories of abstractions: abstraction of choice of alternative concrete actions, abstraction of sequences of concrete actions, and abstraction of action/predicate parameters, as well as combinations of these. The generated abstract PDDL domains and problem instances are then checked by symbolic validation tools as well as human experts. Our experiments show that GPT -4o can generally synthesize useful planning domain abstractions in simple settings, although it is better at abstracting over actions than over the associated fluents.


Agentic Username Suggestion and Multimodal Gender Detection in Online Platforms: Introducing the PNGT-26K Dataset

Bijary, Farbod, Ebadpour, Mohsen, Tajbakhsh, Amirhosein

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Persian names present unique challenges for natural language processing applications, particularly in gender detection and digital identity creation, due to transliteration inconsistencies and cultural-specific naming patterns. Existing tools exhibit significant performance degradation on Persian names, while the scarcity of comprehensive datasets further compounds these limitations. To address these challenges, the present research introduces PNGT-26K, a comprehensive dataset of Persian names, their commonly associated gender, and their English transliteration, consisting of approximately 26,000 tuples. As a demonstration of how this resource can be utilized, we also introduce two frameworks, namely Open Gender Detection and Nominalist. Open Gender Detection is a production-grade, ready-to-use framework for using existing data from a user, such as profile photo and name, to give a probabilistic guess about the person's gender. Nominalist, the second framework introduced by this paper, utilizes agentic AI to help users choose a username for their social media accounts on any platform. It can be easily integrated into any website to provide a better user experience. The PNGT-26K dataset, Nominalist and Open Gender Detection frameworks are publicly available on Github.


ADL: A Declarative Language for Agent-Based Chatbots

Zeng, Sirui, Yan, Xifeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There are numerous frameworks capable of creating and orchestrating agents to address complex tasks. However, most of them highly coupled Python programming with agent declaration, making it hard for maintenance and runtime optimization. In this work, we introduce ADL, an agent declarative language for customer service chatbots. ADL abstracts away implementation details, offering a declarative way to define agents and their interactions, which could ease maintenance and debugging. It also incorporates natural language programming at its core to simplify the specification and communication of chatbot designs. ADL includes four basic types of agents and supports integration with custom functions, tool use, and third-party agents. MICA, a multi-agent system designed to interpret and execute ADL programs, has been developed and is now available as an open-source project at https://github.com/Mica-labs/MICA. Its documentation can be found at https://mica-labs.github.io/.


SDLog: A Deep Learning Framework for Detecting Sensitive Information in Software Logs

Aghili, Roozbeh, Wu, Xingfang, Khomh, Foutse, Li, Heng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Software logs are messages recorded during the execution of a software system that provide crucial run-time information about events and activities. Although software logs have a critical role in software maintenance and operation tasks, publicly accessible log datasets remain limited, hindering advance in log analysis research and practices. The presence of sensitive information, particularly Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and quasi-identifiers, introduces serious privacy and re-identification risks, discouraging the publishing and sharing of real-world logs. In practice, log anonymization techniques primarily rely on regular expression patterns, which involve manually crafting rules to identify and replace sensitive information. However, these regex-based approaches suffer from significant limitations, such as extensive manual efforts and poor generalizability across diverse log formats and datasets. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce SDLog, a deep learning-based framework designed to identify sensitive information in software logs. Our results show that SDLog overcomes regex limitations and outperforms the best-performing regex patterns in identifying sensitive information. With only 100 fine-tuning samples from the target dataset, SDLog can correctly identify 99.5% of sensitive attributes and achieves an F1-score of 98.4%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep learning alternative to regex-based methods in software log anonymization.


CVE-Bench: A Benchmark for AI Agents' Ability to Exploit Real-World Web Application Vulnerabilities

Zhu, Yuxuan, Kellermann, Antony, Bowman, Dylan, Li, Philip, Gupta, Akul, Danda, Adarsh, Fang, Richard, Jensen, Conner, Ihli, Eric, Benn, Jason, Geronimo, Jet, Dhir, Avi, Rao, Sudhit, Yu, Kaicheng, Stone, Twm, Kang, Daniel

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of autonomously conducting cyberattacks, posing significant threats to existing applications. This growing risk highlights the urgent need for a real-world benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLM agents to exploit web application vulnerabilities. However, existing benchmarks fall short as they are limited to abstracted Capture the Flag competitions or lack comprehensive coverage. Building a benchmark for real-world vulnerabilities involves both specialized expertise to reproduce exploits and a systematic approach to evaluating unpredictable threats. To address this challenge, we introduce CVE-Bench, a real-world cybersecurity benchmark based on critical-severity Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. In CVE-Bench, we design a sandbox framework that enables LLM agents to exploit vulnerable web applications in scenarios that mimic real-world conditions, while also providing effective evaluation of their exploits. Our evaluation shows that the state-of-the-art agent framework can resolve up to 13% of vulnerabilities.


Data Spatial Programming

Mars, Jason

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce a novel programming model, Data Spatial Programming, which extends the semantics of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) by introducing new class-like constructs called archetypes. These archetypes encapsulate spatial relationships between data entities and execution flow in a structured manner, enabling more expressive and semantically rich computations over interconnected data structures. By formalizing the relationships between data elements in space, our approach allows for more intuitive modeling of complex systems where the topology of connections is essential to the underlying computational model. This paradigm addresses limitations in traditional OOP when representing dynamically evolving networks, agent-based systems, and other spatially-oriented computational problems.