This study investigates the impact of integrating DevSecOps and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) on software delivery performance within technology firms. Utilizing a qualitative research methodology, the research involved semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners and analysis of case studies from organizations that have successfully implemented these methodologies. The findings reveal significant enhancements in research and development (R&D) efficiency, improved source code management, and heightened software quality and security. The integration of GAI facilitated automation of coding tasks and predictive analytics, while DevSecOps ensured that security measures were embedded throughout the development lifecycle. Despite the promising results, the study identifies gaps related to the generalizability of the findings due to the limited sample size and the qualitative nature of the research. This paper contributes valuable insights into the practical implementation of DevSecOps and GAI, highlighting their potential to transform software delivery processes in technology firms. Future research directions include quantitative assessments of the impact on specific business outcomes and comparative studies across different industries.
Nowadays, most DL frameworks (DLFs) use multilingual programming of Python and C/C++, facilitating the flexibility and performance of the DLF. However, inappropriate interlanguage interaction may introduce design smells involving multiple programming languages (PLs), i.e., Inter-Language Design Smells (ILDS). Despite the negative impact of ILDS on multi-language DLFs, there is a lack of an automated approach for detecting ILDS in multi-language DLFs and a comprehensive understanding on ILDS in such DLFs. This work automatically detects ILDS in multi-language DLFs written in the combination of Python and C/C++, and to obtain a understanding on such ILDS in DLFs. We first developed an approach to automatically detecting ILDS in the multi-language DLFs written in the combination of Python and C/C++, including a number of ILDS and their detection rules defined based on inter-language communication mechanisms and code analysis. We then developed the CPSMELL tool that implements detection rules for automatically detecting such ILDS, and manually validated the accuracy of the tool. Finally, we performed a study to evaluate the ILDS in multi-language DLFs. We proposed seven ILDS and achieved an accuracy of 98.17% in the manual validation of CPSMELL in 5 popular multi-language DLFs. The study results revealed that among the 5 DLFs, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and PaddlePaddle exhibit relatively high prevalence of ILDS; each smelly file contains around 5 ILDS instances on average, with ILDS Long Lambda Function For Inter-language Binding and Unused Native Entity being relatively prominent; throughout the evolution process of the 5 DLFs, some ILDS were resolved to a certain extent, but the overall count of ILDS instances shows an upward trend. The automated detection of the proposed ILDS achieved a high accuracy, and the study provides a comprehensive understanding on ILDS in the multi-language DLFs.
This research provides a comprehensive overview of adversarial attacks on AI and ML models, exploring various attack types, techniques, and their potential harms. We also delve into the business implications, mitigation strategies, and future research directions. To gain practical insights, we employ the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox (ART) [1] library to simulate these attacks on real-world use cases, such as self-driving cars. Our goal is to inform practitioners and researchers about the challenges and opportunities in defending AI systems against adversarial threats. By providing a comprehensive comparison of different attack methods, we aim to contribute to the development of more robust and secure AI systems.
With the increased popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), increases also the need for tools to assist developers in the DNN implementation, testing and debugging process. Several approaches have been proposed that automatically analyse and localise potential faults in DNNs under test. In this work, we evaluate and compare existing state-of-the-art fault localisation techniques, which operate based on both dynamic and static analysis of the DNN. The evaluation is performed on a benchmark consisting of both real faults obtained from bug reporting platforms and faulty models produced by a mutation tool. Our findings indicate that the usage of a single, specific ground truth (e.g., the human defined one) for the evaluation of DNN fault localisation tools results in pretty low performance (maximum average recall of 0.31 and precision of 0.23). However, such figures increase when considering alternative, equivalent patches that exist for a given faulty DNN. Results indicate that \dfd is the most effective tool, achieving an average recall of 0.61 and precision of 0.41 on our benchmark.
As one of the most popular software applications, a web application is a program, accessible through the web, to dynamically generate content based on user interactions or contextual data, for example, online shopping platforms, social networking sites, and financial services. Web applications operate in diverse environments and leverage web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax, often incorporating features like asynchronous operations to enhance user experience. Due to the increasing user and popularity of web applications, approaches to their quality have become increasingly important. Web Application Testing (WAT) plays a vital role in ensuring web applications' functionality, security, and reliability. Given the speed with which web technologies are evolving, WAT is especially important. Over the last decade, various WAT approaches have been developed. The diversity of approaches reflects the many aspects of web applications, such as dynamic content, asynchronous operations, and diverse user environments. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the main achievements during the past decade: It examines the main steps involved in WAT, including test-case generation and execution, and evaluation and assessment. The currently available tools for WAT are also examined. The paper also discusses some open research challenges and potential future WAT work.
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) stands as a critical research frontier, seeking to comprehensively unravel human emotions by amalgamating text, audio, and visual data. Yet, discerning subtle emotional nuances within audio and video expressions poses a formidable challenge, particularly when emotional polarities across various segments appear similar. In this paper, our objective is to spotlight emotion-relevant attributes of audio and visual modalities to facilitate multimodal fusion in the context of nuanced emotional shifts in visual-audio scenarios. To this end, we introduce DEVA, a progressive fusion framework founded on textual sentiment descriptions aimed at accentuating emotional features of visual-audio content. DEVA employs an Emotional Description Generator (EDG) to transmute raw audio and visual data into textualized sentiment descriptions, thereby amplifying their emotional characteristics. These descriptions are then integrated with the source data to yield richer, enhanced features. Furthermore, DEVA incorporates the Text-guided Progressive Fusion Module (TPF), leveraging varying levels of text as a core modality guide. This module progressively fuses visual-audio minor modalities to alleviate disparities between text and visual-audio modalities. Experimental results on widely used sentiment analysis benchmark datasets, including MOSI, MOSEI, and CH-SIMS, underscore significant enhancements compared to state-of-the-art models. Moreover, fine-grained emotion experiments corroborate the robust sensitivity of DEVA to subtle emotional variations.
The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
We study the problem of incorporating prior knowledge into a deep Transformer-based model,i.e.,Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to enhance its performance on semantic textual matching tasks. By probing and analyzing what BERT has already known when solving this task, we obtain better understanding of what task-specific knowledge BERT needs the most and where it is most needed. The analysis further motivates us to take a different approach than most existing works. Instead of using prior knowledge to create a new training task for fine-tuning BERT, we directly inject knowledge into BERT's multi-head attention mechanism. This leads us to a simple yet effective approach that enjoys fast training stage as it saves the model from training on additional data or tasks other than the main task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed knowledge-enhanced BERT is able to consistently improve semantic textual matching performance over the original BERT model, and the performance benefit is most salient when training data is scarce.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.