Rethinking Software Engineering in the Foundation Model Era: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware

Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models. We refer to software built using FMs as FMware. The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents, and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges. Based on our industrial experience, we identified 10 key SE4FMware challenges that have caused enterprise FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky. In this paper, we discuss these challenges in detail and state the path for innovation that we envision. Next, we present FMArts, which is our long-term effort towards creating a cradle-to-grave platform for the engineering of trustworthy FMware. Finally, we (i) show how the unique properties of FMArts enabled us to design and develop a complex FMware for a large customer in a timely manner and (ii) discuss the lessons that we learned in doing so. We hope that the disclosure of the aforementioned challenges and our associated efforts to tackle them will not only raise awareness but also promote deeper and further discussions, knowledge sharing, and innovative solutions across the software engineering discipline.

Rethinking Software Engineering in the Era of Foundation Models: A Curated Catalogue of Challenges in the Development of Trustworthy FMware

Foundation models (FMs), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have revolutionized software development by enabling new use cases and business models. We refer to software built using FMs as FMware. The unique properties of FMware (e.g., prompts, agents, and the need for orchestration), coupled with the intrinsic limitations of FMs (e.g., hallucination) lead to a completely new set of software engineering challenges. Based on our industrial experience, we identified 10 key SE4FMware challenges that have caused enterprise FMware development to be unproductive, costly, and risky. In this paper, we discuss these challenges in detail and state the path for innovation that we envision. Next, we present FMArts, which is our long-term effort towards creating a cradle-to-grave platform for the engineering of trustworthy FMware. Finally, we (i) show how the unique properties of FMArts enabled us to design and develop a complex FMware for a large customer in a timely manner and (ii) discuss the lessons that we learned in doing so. We hope that the disclosure of the aforementioned challenges and our associated efforts to tackle them will not only raise awareness but also promote deeper and further discussions, knowledge sharing, and innovative solutions across the software engineering discipline.

A First Look at Information Highlighting in Stack Overflow Answers

Context: Navigating the knowledge of Stack Overflow (SO) remains challenging. To make the posts vivid to users, SO allows users to write and edit posts with Markdown or HTML so that users can leverage various formatting styles (e.g., bold, italic, and code) to highlight the important information. Nonetheless, there have been limited studies on the highlighted information. Objective: We carried out the first large-scale exploratory study on the information highlighted in SO answers in our recent study. To extend our previous study, we develop approaches to automatically recommend highlighted content with formatting styles using neural network architectures initially designed for the Named Entity Recognition task. Method: In this paper, we studied 31,169,429 answers of Stack Overflow. For training recommendation models, we choose CNN and BERT models for each type of formatting (i.e., Bold, Italic, Code, and Heading) using the information highlighting dataset we collected from SO answers. Results: Our models based on CNN architecture achieve precision ranging from 0.71 to 0.82. The trained model for automatic code content highlighting achieves a recall of 0.73 and an F1 score of 0.71, outperforming the trained models for other formatting styles. The BERT models have even lower recalls and F1 scores than the CNN models. Our analysis of failure cases indicates that the majority of the failure cases are missing identification (i.e., the model misses the content that is supposed to be highlighted) due to the models tend to learn the frequently highlighted words while struggling to learn less frequent words. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that it is possible to develop recommendation models for highlighting information for answers with different formatting styles on Stack Overflow.

eTOP: Early Termination of Pipelines for Faster Training of AutoML Systems

Recent advancements in software and hardware technologies have enabled the use of AI/ML models in everyday applications has significantly improved the quality of service rendered. However, for a given application, finding the right AI/ML model is a complex and costly process, that involves the generation, training, and evaluation of multiple interlinked steps (called pipelines), such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, selection, and model tuning. These pipelines are complex (in structure) and costly (both in compute resource and time) to execute end-to-end, with a hyper-parameter associated with each step. AutoML systems automate the search of these hyper-parameters but are slow, as they rely on optimizing the pipeline's end output. We propose the eTOP Framework which works on top of any AutoML system and decides whether or not to execute the pipeline to the end or terminate at an intermediate step. Experimental evaluation on 26 benchmark datasets and integration of eTOPwith MLBox4 reduces the training time of the AutoML system upto 40x than baseline MLBox.

Ontology-aware Network for Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval

Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZSSBIR) is an emerging task. The pioneering work focused on the modal gap but ignored inter-class information. Although recent work has begun to consider the triplet-based or contrast-based loss to mine inter-class information, positive and negative samples need to be carefully selected, or the model is prone to lose modality-specific information. To respond to these issues, an Ontology-Aware Network (OAN) is proposed. Specifically, the smooth inter-class independence learning mechanism is put forward to maintain inter-class peculiarity. Meanwhile, distillation-based consistency preservation is utilized to keep modality-specific information. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of our algorithm on two challenging Sketchy and Tu-Berlin datasets.

Metropolis Theorem and Its Applications in Single Image Detail Enhancement

Traditional image detail enhancement is local filter-based or global filter-based. In both approaches, the original image is first divided into the base layer and the detail layer, and then the enhanced image is obtained by amplifying the detail layer. Our method is different, and its innovation lies in the special way to get the image detail layer. The detail layer in our method is obtained by updating the residual features, and the updating mechanism is usually based on searching and matching similar patches. However, due to the diversity of image texture features, perfect matching is often not possible. In this paper, the process of searching and matching is treated as a thermodynamic process, where the Metropolis theorem can minimize the internal energy and get the global optimal solution of this task, that is, to find a more suitable feature for a better detail enhancement performance. Extensive experiments have proven that our algorithm can achieve better results in quantitative metrics testing and visual effects evaluation. The source code can be obtained from the link.

CitySpec with Shield: A Secure Intelligent Assistant for Requirement Formalization

An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that the real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policymakers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create CitySpec, we first collect over 1,500 real-world city requirements across different domains (e.g., transportation and energy) from over 100 cities and extract city-specific knowledge to generate a dataset of city vocabulary with 3,061 words. We also build a translation model and enhance it through requirement synthesis and develop a novel online learning framework with shielded validation. The evaluation results on real-world city requirements show that CitySpec increases the sentence-level accuracy of requirement specification from 59.02% to 86.64%, and has strong adaptability to a new city and a new domain (e.g., the F1 score for requirements in Seattle increases from 77.6% to 93.75% with online learning). After the enhancement from the shield function, CitySpec is now immune to most known textual adversarial inputs (e.g., the attack success rate of DeepWordBug after the shield function is reduced to 0% from 82.73%). We test the CitySpec with 18 participants from different domains. CitySpec shows its strong usability and adaptability to different domains, and also its robustness to malicious inputs.

An Intelligent Assistant for Converting City Requirements to Formal Specification

As more and more monitoring systems have been deployed to smart cities, there comes a higher demand for converting new human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications automatically. However, these human-specific requirements are often written in English and bring missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. In this paper, we present CitySpec, an intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. CitySpec not only helps overcome the language differences brought by English requirements and formal specifications, but also offers solutions to those missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how CitySpec works. Specifically, we present three demos: (1) interactive completion of requirements in CitySpec; (2) human-in-the-loop correction while CitySepc encounters exceptions; (3) online learning in CitySpec.

CitySpec: An Intelligent Assistant System for Requirement Specification in Smart Cities

An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policy makers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create CitySpec, we first collect over 1,500 real-world city requirements across different domains from over 100 cities and extract city-specific knowledge to generate a dataset of city vocabulary with 3,061 words. We also build a translation model and enhance it through requirement synthesis and develop a novel online learning framework with validation under uncertainty. The evaluation results on real-world city requirements show that CitySpec increases the sentence-level accuracy of requirement specification from 59.02% to 86.64%, and has strong adaptability to a new city and a new domain (e.g., F1 score for requirements in Seattle increases from 77.6% to 93.75% with online learning).

Mixed Reality Depth Contour Occlusion Using Binocular Similarity Matching and Three-dimensional Contour Optimisation

Mixed reality applications often require virtual objects that are partly occluded by real objects. However, previous research and commercial products have limitations in terms of performance and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel depth contour occlusion (DCO) algorithm. The proposed method is based on the sensitivity of contour occlusion and a binocular stereoscopic vision device. In this method, a depth contour map is combined with a sparse depth map obtained from a two-stage adaptive filter area stereo matching algorithm and the depth contour information of the objects extracted by a digital image stabilisation optical flow method. We also propose a quadratic optimisation model with three constraints to generate an accurate dense map of the depth contour for high-quality real-virtual occlusion. The whole process is accelerated by GPU. To evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, we demonstrate a time con-sumption statistical analysis for each stage of the DCO algorithm execution. To verify the relia-bility of the real-virtual occlusion effect, we conduct an experimental analysis on single-sided, enclosed, and complex occlusions; subsequently, we compare it with the occlusion method without quadratic optimisation. With our GPU implementation for real-time DCO, the evaluation indicates that applying the presented DCO algorithm can enhance the real-time performance and the visual quality of real-virtual occlusion.