Automated testing is essential for evaluating and improving the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the lack of automated oracles for verifying output correctness remains a key challenge. We present LLMORPH, an automated testing tool specifically designed for LLMs performing NLP tasks, which leverages Metamorphic Testing (MT) to uncover faulty behaviors without relying on human-labeled data. MT uses Metamorphic Relations (MRs) to generate follow-up inputs from source test input, enabling detection of inconsistencies in model outputs without the need of expensive labelled data. LLMORPH is aimed at researchers and developers who want to evaluate the robustness of LLM-based NLP systems. In this paper, we detail the design, implementation, and practical usage of LLMORPH, demonstrating how it can be easily extended to any LLM, NLP task, and set of MRs. In our evaluation, we applied 36 MRs across four NLP benchmarks, testing three state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4, LLAMA3, and HERMES 2. This produced over 561,000 test executions. Results demonstrate LLMORPH's effectiveness in automatically exposing inconsistencies.
Automated resume screening systems are now a central part of hiring at scale, yet there is growing evidence that rigid screening logic can exclude qualified candidates before human review. In prior work, we introduced the concept of Artificial Frictional Unemployment to describe labor market inefficiencies arising from automated recruitment systems. This paper extends that framework by focusing on measurement. We present a method for quantifying algorithmic friction in resume screening pipelines by modeling screening as a classification task and defining friction as excess false negative rejection caused by semantic misinterpretation. Using controlled simulations, we compare deterministic keyword-based screening with vector-space semantic matching under identical qualification conditions. The results show that keyword-based screening exhibits high levels of algorithmic friction, while semantic representations substantially reduce false negative rejection without compromising precision. By treating algorithmic friction as a system-level property, this study provides an empirical basis for evaluating how recruitment system design affects matching efficiency in modern labor markets.
This paper explores the application of automated planning to automated theorem proving, which is a branch of automated reasoning concerned with the development of algorithms and computer programs to construct mathematical proofs. In particular, we investigate the use of planning to construct elementary proofs in abstract algebra, which provides a rigorous and axiomatic framework for studying algebraic structures such as groups, rings, fields, and modules. We implement basic implications, equalities, and rules in both deterministic and non-deterministic domains to model commutative rings and deduce elementary results about them. The success of this initial implementation suggests that the well-established techniques seen in automated planning are applicable to the relatively newer field of automated theorem proving. Likewise, automated theorem proving provides a new, challenging domain for automated planning.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate potential in complex legal tasks like argument generation, yet their reliability remains a concern. Building upon pilot work assessing LLM generation of 3-ply legal arguments using human evaluation, this paper introduces an automated pipeline to evaluate LLM performance on this task, specifically focusing on faithfulness (absence of hallucination), factor utilization, and appropriate abstention. We define hallucination as the generation of factors not present in the input case materials and abstention as the model's ability to refrain from generating arguments when instructed and no factual basis exists. Our automated method employs an external LLM to extract factors from generated arguments and compares them against the ground-truth factors provided in the input case triples (current case and two precedent cases). We evaluated eight distinct LLMs on three tests of increasing difficulty: 1) generating a standard 3-ply argument, 2) generating an argument with swapped precedent roles, and 3) recognizing the impossibility of argument generation due to lack of shared factors and abstaining. Our findings indicate that while current LLMs achieve h
Before introducing an Automated Driving System (ADS) on the road at scale, the manufacturer must conduct some sort of safety assurance. To structure and harmonize the safety assurance process, the UNECE WP.29 Working Party on Automated/Autonomous and Connected Vehicles (GRVA) is developing the New Assessment/Test Method (NATM) that indicates what steps need to be taken for safety assessment of an ADS. In this paper, we will show how to practically conduct safety assessment making use of a scenario database, and what additional steps must be taken to fully operationalize the NATM. In addition, we will elaborate on how the use of scenario databases fits with methods developed in the Horizon Europe projects that focus on safety assessment following the NATM approach.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are revolutionizing software engineering (SE) by advancing automation, decision-making, and knowledge processing. Their recent application to SE tasks has already shown promising results. In this paper, we focus on summarization as a key application area. We present Metagente, an LLM-based MAS designed to generate concise and accurate summaries of software documentation. Metagente employs a Teacher-Student architecture where multiple LLM agents collaborate to enhance relevance and precision of produced summaries. An empirical evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates Metagente's effectiveness in streamlining workflows, outperforming the considered baselines. The evaluation provides evidence that Metagente improves summarization for requirements analysis and technical documentation. Our findings underscore the transformative potential of these technologies in SE, while identifying challenges and future research directions for their seamless integration.
The advent of 3D printing has revolutionized many industries and has had similar improvements for soft robots. However, many challenges persist for these functional devices. Magnetic soft robots require the addition of magnetic particles that must be correctly oriented. There is a significant gap in the automated fabrication of 3D geometric structures with 3D magnetization direction. A fully automated 3D printer was designed to improve accuracy, speed, and reproducibility. This design was able to achieve a circular spot size (voxels) of 1.6mm in diameter. An updated optical system can improve the resolution to a square spot size of 50$μ$m by 50$μ$m. The new system achieves higher resolution designs as shown through magneto-mechanical simulations. Various microrobots including 'worm', 'gripper' and 'zipper' designs are evaluated with the new spot size.
Understanding driving scenes and communicating automated vehicle decisions are key requirements for trustworthy automated driving. In this article, we introduce the Qualitative Explainable Graph (QXG), which is a unified symbolic and qualitative representation for scene understanding in urban mobility. The QXG enables interpreting an automated vehicle's environment using sensor data and machine learning models. It utilizes spatio-temporal graphs and qualitative constraints to extract scene semantics from raw sensor inputs, such as LiDAR and camera data, offering an interpretable scene model. A QXG can be incrementally constructed in real-time, making it a versatile tool for in-vehicle explanations across various sensor types. Our research showcases the potential of QXG, particularly in the context of automated driving, where it can rationalize decisions by linking the graph with observed actions. These explanations can serve diverse purposes, from informing passengers and alerting vulnerable road users to enabling post-hoc analysis of prior behaviors.
The stakeholders involved in software development are becoming increasingly diverse, with both human contributors from varied backgrounds and AI-powered agents collaborating together in the process. This situation presents unique governance challenges, particularly in Open-Source Software (OSS) projects, where explicit policies are often lacking or unclear. This paper presents the vision and foundational concepts for a novel Domain-Specific Language (DSL) designed to define and enforce rich governance policies in systems involving diverse stakeholders, including agents. This DSL offers a pathway towards more robust, adaptable, and ultimately automated governance, paving the way for more effective collaboration in software projects, especially OSS ones.
The performance of machine learning (ML) models often deteriorates when the underlying data distribution changes over time, a phenomenon known as data distribution drift. When this happens, ML models need to be retrained and redeployed. ML Operations (MLOps) is often manual, i.e., humans trigger the process of model retraining and redeployment. In this work, we present an automated MLOps pipeline designed to address neural network classifier retraining in response to significant data distribution changes. Our MLOps pipeline employs multi-criteria statistical techniques to detect distribution shifts and triggers model updates only when necessary, ensuring computational efficiency and resource optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on several benchmark anomaly detection data sets, showing significant improvements in model accuracy and robustness compared to traditional retraining strategies. Our work provides a foundation for deploying more reliable and adaptive ML systems in dynamic real-world settings, where data distribution changes are common.
Unit testing is an essential but resource-intensive step in software development, ensuring individual code units function correctly. This paper introduces AgoneTest, an automated evaluation framework for Large Language Model-generated (LLM) unit tests in Java. AgoneTest does not aim to propose a novel test generation algorithm; rather, it supports researchers and developers in comparing different LLMs and prompting strategies through a standardized end-to-end evaluation pipeline under realistic conditions. We introduce the Classes2Test dataset, which maps Java classes under test to their corresponding test classes, and a framework that integrates advanced evaluation metrics, such as mutation score and test smells, for a comprehensive assessment. Experimental results show that, for the subset of tests that compile, LLM-generated tests can match or exceed human-written tests in terms of coverage and defect detection. Our findings also demonstrate that enhanced prompting strategies contribute to test quality. AgoneTest clarifies the potential of LLMs in software testing and offers insights for future improvements in model design, prompt engineering, and testing practices.
The increasing complexity of software has led to the steady growth of vulnerabilities. Vulnerability repair investigates how to fix software vulnerabilities. Manual vulnerability repair is labor-intensive and time-consuming because it relies on human experts, highlighting the importance of Automated Vulnerability Repair (AVR). In this SoK, we present the systematization of AVR methods through the three steps of AVR workflow: vulnerability analysis, patch generation, and patch validation. We assess AVR tools for C/C++ and Java programs as they have been widely studied by the community. Since existing AVR tools for C/C++ programs are evaluated with different datasets, which often consist of a few vulnerabilities, we construct the first C/C++ vulnerability repair benchmark dataset, dubbed Vul4C, which contains 144 vulnerabilities as well as their exploits and patches. We use Vul4C to evaluate seven AVR tools for C/C++ programs and use the third-party Vul4J dataset to evaluate two AVR tools for Java programs. We also discuss future research directions.
This survey provides an analysis of current methodologies integrating legal and logical specifications into the perception, prediction, and planning modules of automated driving systems. We systematically explore techniques ranging from logic-based frameworks to computational legal reasoning approaches, emphasizing their capability to ensure regulatory compliance and interpretability in dynamic and uncertain driving environments. A central finding is that significant challenges arise at the intersection of perceptual reliability, legal compliance, and decision-making justifiability. To systematically analyze these challenges, we introduce a taxonomy categorizing existing approaches by their theoretical foundations, architectural implementations, and validation strategies. We particularly focus on methods that address perceptual uncertainty and incorporate explicit legal norms, facilitating decisions that are both technically robust and legally defensible. The review covers neural-symbolic integration methods for perception, logic-driven rule representation, and norm-aware prediction strategies, all contributing toward transparent and accountable autonomous vehicle operation. We hig
Telescope bibliographies record the pulse of astronomy research by capturing publication statistics and citation metrics for telescope facilities. Robust and scalable bibliographies ensure that we can measure the scientific impact of our facilities and archives. However, the growing rate of publications threatens to outpace our ability to manually label astronomical literature. We therefore present the Automated Mission Classifier (amc), a tool that uses large language models (LLMs) to identify and categorize telescope references by processing large quantities of paper text. A modified version of amc performs well on the TRACS Kaggle challenge, achieving a macro $F_1$ score of 0.84 on the held-out test set. amc is valuable for other telescopes beyond TRACS; we developed the initial software for identifying papers that featured scientific results by NASA missions. Additionally, we investigate how amc can also be used to interrogate historical datasets and surface potential label errors. Our work demonstrates that LLM-based applications offer powerful and scalable assistance for library sciences.
The development of safety validation methods is essential for the safe deployment and operation of Automated Driving Systems (ADSs). One of the goals of safety validation is to prospectively evaluate the risk of an ADS dealing with real-world traffic. Scenario-based assessment is a widely-used approach, where test cases are derived from real-world driving data. To allow for a quantitative analysis of the system performance, the exposure of the scenarios must be accurately estimated. The exposure of scenarios at parameter level is expressed using a Probability Density Function (PDF). However, assumptions about the PDF, such as parameter independence, can introduce errors, while avoiding assumptions often leads to oversimplified models with limited parameters to mitigate the curse of dimensionality. This paper considers the use of Normalizing Flows (NF) for estimating the PDF of the parameters. NF are a class of generative models that transform a simple base distribution into a complex one using a sequence of invertible and differentiable mappings, enabling flexible, high-dimensional density estimation without restrictive assumptions on the PDF's shape. We demonstrate the effectivene
Feature transformation methods aim to find an optimal mathematical feature-feature crossing process that generates high-value features and improves the performance of downstream machine learning tasks. Existing frameworks, though designed to mitigate manual costs, often treat feature transformations as isolated operations, ignoring dynamic dependencies between transformation steps. To address the limitations, we propose TCTO, a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that automates feature engineering through graph-driven path optimization. The framework's core innovation lies in an evolving interaction graph that models features as nodes and transformations as edges. Through graph pruning and backtracking, it dynamically eliminates low-impact edges, reduces redundant operations, and enhances exploration stability. This graph also provides full traceability to empower TCTO to reuse high-utility subgraphs from historical transformations. To demonstrate the efficacy and adaptability of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments and case studies, which show superior performance across a range of datasets.
Assuring safety for ``AI-based'' systems is one of the current challenges in safety engineering. For automated driving systems, in particular, further assurance challenges result from the open context that the systems need to operate in after deployment. The current standardization and regulation landscape for ``AI-based'' systems is becoming ever more complex, as standards and regulations are being released at high frequencies. This position paper seeks to provide guidance for making qualified arguments which standards should meaningfully be applied to (``AI-based'') automated driving systems. Furthermore, we argue for clearly differentiating sources of risk between AI-specific and general uncertainties related to the open context. In our view, a clear conceptual separation can help to exploit commonalities that can close the gap between system-level and AI-specific safety analyses, while ensuring the required rigor for engineering safe ``AI-based'' systems.
In this technical report, we describe our submission to DCASE2024 Challenge Task6 (Automated Audio Captioning) and Task8 (Language-based Audio Retrieval). We develop our approach building upon the EnCLAP audio captioning framework and optimizing it for Task6 of the challenge. Notably, we outline the changes in the underlying components and the incorporation of the reranking process. Additionally, we submit a supplementary retriever model, a byproduct of our modified framework, to Task8. Our proposed systems achieve FENSE score of 0.542 on Task6 and mAP@10 score of 0.386 on Task8, significantly outperforming the baseline models.
Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) have the potential to make mobility services available and safe for all. A multi-pillar Safety Assessment Framework (SAF) has been proposed for the type-approval process of ADSs. The SAF requires that the test scenarios for the ADS adequately covers the Operational Design Domain (ODD) of the ADS. A common method for generating test scenarios involves basing them on scenarios identified and characterized from driving data. This work addresses two questions when collecting scenarios from driving data. First, do the collected scenarios cover all relevant aspects of the ADS' ODD? Second, do the collected scenarios cover all relevant aspects that are in the driving data, such that no potentially important situations are missed? This work proposes coverage metrics that provide a quantitative answer to these questions. The proposed coverage metrics are illustrated by means of an experiment in which over 200000 scenarios from 10 different scenario categories are collected from the HighD data set. The experiment demonstrates that a coverage of 100 % can be achieved under certain conditions, and it also identifies which data and scenarios could be added to en
Modern software development relies on the reuse of code via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Such reuse relieves developers from learning and developing established algorithms and data structures anew, enabling them to focus on their problem at hand. However, there is also the risk of misusing an API due to a lack of understanding or proper documentation. While many techniques target API misuse detection, only limited efforts have been put into automatically repairing API misuses. In this paper, we present our advances on our technique API-Specific Automated Program Repair (ASAP-Repair). ASAP-Repair is intended to fix API misuses based on API Usage Graphs (AUGs) by leveraging API usage templates of state-of-the-art API misuse detectors. We demonstrate that ASAP-Repair is in principle applicable on an established API misuse dataset. Moreover, we discuss next steps and challenges to evolve ASAP-Repair towards a full-fledged Automatic Program Repair (APR) technique.