A Survey of Deep Learning Models for Structural Code Understanding

In recent years, the rise of deep learning and automation requirements in the software industry has elevated Intelligent Software Engineering to new heights. The number of approaches and applications in code understanding is growing, with deep learning techniques being used in many of them to better capture the information in code data. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the structures formed from code data. We categorize the models for understanding code in recent years into two groups: sequence-based and graph-based models, further make a summary and comparison of them. We also introduce metrics, datasets and the downstream tasks. Finally, we make some suggestions for future research in structural code understanding field.

Neighboring Backdoor Attacks on Graph Convolutional Network

Backdoor attacks have been widely studied to hide the misclassification rules in the normal models, which are only activated when the model is aware of the specific inputs (i.e., the trigger). However, despite their success in the conventional Euclidean space, there are few studies of backdoor attacks on graph structured data. In this paper, we propose a new type of backdoor which is specific to graph data, called neighboring backdoor. Considering the discreteness of graph data, how to effectively design the triggers while retaining the model accuracy on the original task is the major challenge. To address such a challenge, we set the trigger as a single node, and the backdoor is activated when the trigger node is connected to the target node. To preserve the model accuracy, the model parameters are not allowed to be modified. Thus, when the trigger node is not connected, the model performs normally. Under these settings, in this work, we focus on generating the features of the trigger node. Two types of backdoors are proposed: (1) Linear Graph Convolution Backdoor which finds an approximation solution for the feature generation (can be viewed as an integer programming problem) by looking at the linear part of GCNs. (2) Variants of existing graph attacks. We extend current gradient-based attack methods to our backdoor attack scenario. Extensive experiments on two social networks and two citation networks datasets demonstrate that all proposed backdoors can achieve an almost 100\% attack success rate while having no impact on predictive accuracy.

Understanding Structural Vulnerability in Graph Convolutional Networks

Recent studies have shown that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the graph structure. Although multiple works have been proposed to improve their robustness against such structural adversarial attacks, the reasons for the success of the attacks remain unclear. In this work, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that structural adversarial examples can be attributed to the non-robust aggregation scheme (i.e., the weighted mean) of GCNs. Specifically, our analysis takes advantage of the breakdown point which can quantitatively measure the robustness of aggregation schemes. The key insight is that weighted mean, as the basic design of GCNs, has a low breakdown point and its output can be dramatically changed by injecting a single edge. We show that adopting the aggregation scheme with a high breakdown point (e.g., median or trimmed mean) could significantly enhance the robustness of GCNs against structural attacks. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that such a simple but effective method achieves the best robustness performance compared to state-of-the-art models.