Regression testing aims to prevent code changes from breaking existing features. Flaky tests negatively affect regression testing because they result in test failures that are not necessarily caused by code changes, thus providing an ambiguous signal. Test timeouts are one contributing factor to such flaky test failures. With the goal of reducing test flakiness in SAP HANA, we empirically study the impact of test timeouts on flakiness in system tests. We evaluate different approaches to automatically adjust timeout values, assessing their suitability for reducing execution time costs and improving build turnaround times. We collect metadata on SAP HANA's test executions by repeatedly executing tests on the same code revision over a period of six months. We analyze the test flakiness rate, investigate the evolution of test timeout values, and evaluate different approaches for optimizing timeout values. The test flakiness rate ranges from 49% to 70%, depending on the number of repeated test executions. Test timeouts account for 70% of flaky test failures. Developers typically react to flaky timeouts by manually increasing timeout values or splitting long-running tests. However, manually adjusting timeout values is a tedious task. Our approach for timeout optimization reduces timeout-related flaky failures by 80% and reduces the overall median timeout value by 25%, i.e., blocked tests are identified faster. Test timeouts are a major contributing factor to flakiness in system tests. It is challenging for developers to effectively mitigate this problem manually. Our technique for optimizing timeout values reduces flaky failures while minimizing test costs. Practitioners working on large-scale industrial software systems can use our findings to increase the effectiveness of their system tests while reducing the burden on developers to manually maintain appropriate timeout values.
Model merging has recently emerged as a cost-efficient paradigm for multi-task learning. Among current approaches, task arithmetic stands out for its simplicity and effectiveness. In this paper, we motivate the effectiveness of task vectors by linking them to multi-task gradients. We show that in a single-epoch scenario, task vectors are mathematically equivalent to the gradients obtained via gradient descent in a multi-task setting, and still approximate these gradients in subsequent epochs. Furthermore, we show that task vectors perform optimally when equality is maintained, and their effectiveness is largely driven by the first epoch's gradient. Building on this insight, we propose viewing model merging as a single step in an iterative process that Alternates between Tuning and Merging (ATM). This method acts as a bridge between model merging and multi-task gradient descent, achieving state-of-the-art results with the same data and computational requirements. We extensively evaluate ATM across diverse settings, achieving up to 20% higher accuracy in computer vision and NLP tasks, compared to the best baselines. Finally, we provide both empirical and theoretical support for its effectiveness, demonstrating increased orthogonality between task vectors and proving that ATM minimizes an upper bound on the loss obtained by jointly finetuning all tasks.
Recent advancements in Generative AI offer promising capabilities for spatial analysis. Despite their potential, the integration of generative AI with established GIS platforms remains underexplored. In this study, we propose a framework for integrating LLMs directly into existing GIS platforms, using QGIS as an example. Our approach leverages the reasoning and programming capabilities of LLMs to autonomously generate spatial analysis workflows and code through an informed agent that has comprehensive documentation of key GIS tools and parameters. The implementation of this framework resulted in the development of a "GIS Copilot" that allows GIS users to interact with QGIS using natural language commands for spatial analysis. The GIS Copilot was evaluated based on three complexity levels: basic tasks that require one GIS tool and typically involve one data layer to perform simple operations; intermediate tasks involving multi-step processes with multiple tools, guided by user instructions; and advanced tasks which involve multi-step processes that require multiple tools but not guided by user instructions, necessitating the agent to independently decide on and executes the necessary steps. The evaluation reveals that the GIS Copilot demonstrates strong potential in automating foundational GIS operations, with a high success rate in tool selection and code generation for basic and intermediate tasks, while challenges remain in achieving full autonomy for more complex tasks. This study contributes to the emerging vision of Autonomous GIS, providing a pathway for non-experts to engage with geospatial analysis with minimal prior expertise. While full autonomy is yet to be achieved, the GIS Copilot demonstrates significant potential for simplifying GIS workflows and enhancing decision-making processes.
In group testing, the task is to identify defective items by testing groups of them together using as few tests as possible. We consider the setting where each item is defective with a constant probability $\alpha$, independent of all other items. In the (over-)idealized noiseless setting, tests are positive exactly if any of the tested items are defective. We study a more realistic model in which observed test results are subject to noise, i.e., tests can display false positive or false negative results with constant positive probabilities. We determine precise constants $c$ such that $cn\log n$ tests are required to recover the infection status of every individual for both adaptive and non-adaptive group testing: in the former, the selection of groups to test can depend on previously observed test results, whereas it cannot in the latter. Additionally, for both settings, we provide efficient algorithms that identify all defective items with the optimal amount of tests with high probability. Thus, we completely solve the problem of binary noisy group testing in the studied setting.
Subjective speech quality assessment (SSQA) is critical for evaluating speech samples as perceived by human listeners. While model-based SSQA has enjoyed great success thanks to the development of deep neural networks (DNNs), generalization remains a key challenge, especially for unseen, out-of-domain data. To benchmark the generalization abilities of SSQA models, we present MOS-Bench, a diverse collection of datasets. In addition, we also introduce SHEET, an open-source toolkit containing complete recipes to conduct SSQA experiments. We provided benchmark results for MOS-Bench, and we also explored multi-dataset training to enhance generalization. Additionally, we proposed a new performance metric, best score difference/ratio, and used latent space visualizations to explain model behavior, offering valuable insights for future research.
We present the TRIAGE Benchmark, a novel machine ethics (ME) benchmark that tests LLMs' ability to make ethical decisions during mass casualty incidents. It uses real-world ethical dilemmas with clear solutions designed by medical professionals, offering a more realistic alternative to annotation-based benchmarks. TRIAGE incorporates various prompting styles to evaluate model performance across different contexts. Most models consistently outperformed random guessing, suggesting LLMs may support decision-making in triage scenarios. Neutral or factual scenario formulations led to the best performance, unlike other ME benchmarks where ethical reminders improved outcomes. Adversarial prompts reduced performance but not to random guessing levels. Open-source models made more morally serious errors, and general capability overall predicted better performance.
As human-agent teaming (HAT) research continues to grow, computational methods for modeling HAT behaviors and measuring HAT effectiveness also continue to develop. One rising method involves the use of human digital twins (HDT) to approximate human behaviors and socio-emotional-cognitive reactions to AI-driven agent team members. In this paper, we address three research questions relating to the use of digital twins for modeling trust in HATs. First, to address the question of how we can appropriately model and operationalize HAT trust through HDT HAT experiments, we conducted causal analytics of team communication data to understand the impact of empathy, socio-cognitive, and emotional constructs on trust formation. Additionally, we reflect on the current state of the HAT trust science to discuss characteristics of HAT trust that must be replicable by a HDT such as individual differences in trust tendencies, emergent trust patterns, and appropriate measurement of these characteristics over time. Second, to address the question of how valid measures of HDT trust are for approximating human trust in HATs, we discuss the properties of HDT trust: self-report measures, interaction-based measures, and compliance type behavioral measures. Additionally, we share results of preliminary simulations comparing different LLM models for generating HDT communications and analyze their ability to replicate human-like trust dynamics. Third, to address how HAT experimental manipulations will extend to human digital twin studies, we share experimental design focusing on propensity to trust for HDTs vs. transparency and competency-based trust for AI agents.
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.