Future direct imaging space telescopes, such as NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), will be the first capable of both detecting and characterizing terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zones (HZ) of nearby Sun-like stars. Since this will require a significant amount of time and resources for even a single system or exoplanet, the likelihood that a system will host detectable life should be considered when prioritizing observations. One method of prioritization is to estimate the likelihood that an exoplanet has remained continuously within the HZ long enough for life to emerge and make a detectable impact on the atmosphere. We utilize a Bayesian method to calculate the likelihood that a given orbital radius around a star is currently in the 2 Gyr continuous habitable zone (CHZ$_2$), the approximate time it took life on Earth to significantly oxygenate the atmosphere. We apply this method to the 164 stars in the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program Mission Star List (EMSL) for HWO, representing a preliminary sample of Sun-like stars with HZs most accessible to a future direct imaging mission. By considering the CHZ$_2$ likelihood at all orbital radii outside a hypothetical in
Flaky tests can make automated software testing unreliable due to their unpredictable behavior. These tests can pass or fail on the same code base on multiple runs. However, flaky tests often do not refer to any fault, even though they can cause the continuous integration (CI) pipeline to fail. A common type of flaky test is the order-dependent (OD) test. The outcome of an OD test depends on the order in which it is run with respect to other test cases. Several studies have explored the detection and repair of OD tests. However, their methods require re-runs of tests multiple times, that are not related to the order dependence. Hence, prioritizing potential OD tests is necessary to reduce the re-runs. In this paper, we propose a method to prioritize potential order-dependent tests. By analyzing shared static fields in test classes, we identify tests that are more likely to be order-dependent. In our experiment on 27 project modules, our method successfully prioritized all OD tests in 23 cases, reducing test executions by an average of 65.92% and unnecessary re-runs by 72.19%. These results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the efficiency of OD test detection by l
Efficient attention mechanisms enable long-context transformers but often miss globally important tokens, degrading modeling quality. We introduce a pre-scoring framework that assigns a query-independent global importance prior to keys before applying hierarchical approximate attention. Using clustering-based or leverage-style scoring, pre-scoring identifies structurally informative keys and restricts computation to this prioritized subset. Integrated with HyperAttention, pre-scoring substantially improves approximation quality on long-context language modeling: on ChatGLM with 131k-token contexts, perplexity decreases from 12.0 to 9.5 under a fixed interaction budget while retaining subquadratic efficiency. Clustering-based scoring consistently outperforms leverage-based selection under identical key budgets. Beyond language, replacing self-attention in Vision Transformers preserves most of the baseline accuracy, showing that the approach generalizes across modalities. We provide structural guarantees under a planted-subspace model, showing that clustering recovers the same heavy-key sets as leverage-based methods. Overall, pre-scoring improves the efficiency-accuracy trade-off of
The number of applications in Google Play has increased dramatically in recent years. On Google Play, users can write detailed reviews and rate apps, with these ratings significantly influencing app success and download numbers. Reviews often include notable information like feature requests, which are valuable for software maintenance. Users can update their reviews and ratings anytime. Studies indicate that apps with ratings below three stars are typically avoided by potential users. Since 2013, Google Play has allowed developers to respond to user reviews, helping resolve issues and potentially boosting overall ratings and download rates. However, responding to reviews is time-consuming, and only 13% to 18% of developers engage in this practice. To address this challenge, we propose a method to prioritize reviews based on response priority. We collected and preprocessed review data, extracted both textual and semantic features, and assessed their impact on the importance of responses. We labelled reviews as requiring a response or not and trained four different machine learning models to prioritize them. We evaluated the models performance using metrics such as F1-Score, Accurac
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various applications, raising critical concerns about fairness and potential biases in their outputs. This paper explores the prioritization of metamorphic relations (MRs) in metamorphic testing as a strategy to efficiently detect fairness issues within LLMs. Given the exponential growth of possible test cases, exhaustive testing is impractical; therefore, prioritizing MRs based on their effectiveness in detecting fairness violations is crucial. We apply a sentence diversity-based approach to compute and rank MRs to optimize fault detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed prioritization approach improves fault detection rates by 22% compared to random prioritization and 12% compared to distance-based prioritization, while reducing the time to the first failure by 15% and 8%, respectively. Furthermore, our approach performs within 5% of fault-based prioritization in effectiveness, while significantly reducing the computational cost associated with fault labeling. These results validate the effectiveness of diversity-based MR prioritization in enhancing fairness testing for LLMs.
An oracle determines whether the output of a program for executed test cases is correct. For machine learning programs, such an oracle is often unavailable or impractical to apply. Metamorphic testing addresses this by using metamorphic relations (MRs), which are essential properties of the software under test, to verify program correctness. Prioritizing MRs enhances fault detection effectiveness and improves testing efficiency. However, fault-based MR prioritization is costly, and code coverage-based approaches often yield inaccurate results. To address these challenges, we propose a statement centrality-based prioritization approach that leverages diversity in the execution profiles of source and follow-up test cases. Our approach improves fault detection effectiveness by up to 31% compared to code coverage-based methods and reduces fault detection time by 29% compared to random MR execution. Overall, it increases the average fault detection rate, reduces fault detection time, and enhances testing efficiency.
In this dissertation, we propose a systemic framework that prioritizes informative features and examples to enhance each stage of the development process. Specifically, we prioritize informative features and examples and improve the performance of feature learning, data labeling, and data selection. We first propose an approach to extract only informative features that are inherent to solving a target task by using auxiliary out-of-distribution data. We deactivate the noise features in the target distribution by using that in the out-of-distribution data. Next, we introduce an approach that prioritizes informative examples from unlabeled noisy data in order to reduce the labeling cost of active learning. In order to solve the purity-information dilemma, where an attempt to select informative examples induces the selection of many noisy examples, we propose a meta-model that finds the best balance between purity and informativeness. Lastly, we suggest an approach that prioritizes informative examples from labeled noisy data to preserve the performance of data selection. For labeled image noise data, we propose a data selection method that considers the confidence of neighboring samp
With the wide adoption of automated speech recognition (ASR) systems, it is increasingly important to test and improve ASR systems. However, collecting and executing speech test cases is usually expensive and time-consuming, motivating us to strategically prioritize speech test cases. A key question is: how to determine the ideal order of collecting and executing speech test cases to uncover more errors as early as possible? Each speech test case consists of a piece of audio and the corresponding reference text. In this work, we propose PROPHET (PRiOritizing sPeecH tEsT), a tool that predicts potential error-uncovering speech test cases only based on their reference texts. Thus, PROPHET analyzes test cases and prioritizes them without running the ASR system, which can analyze speech test cases at a large scale. We evaluate 6 different prioritization methods on 3 ASR systems and 12 datasets. Given the same testing budget, we find that our approach uncovers 12.63% more wrongly recognized words than the state-of-the-art method. We select test cases from the prioritized list to fine-tune ASR systems and analyze how our approach can improve the ASR system performance. Statistical tests
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing Software Engineering (SE) by introducing innovative methods for tasks such as collecting requirements, designing software, generating code, and creating test cases, among others. This article focuses on requirements engineering, typically seen as the initial phase of software development that involves multiple system stakeholders. Despite its key role, the challenge of identifying requirements and satisfying all stakeholders within time and budget constraints remains significant. To address the challenges in requirements engineering, this study introduces a web-based software tool utilizing AI agents and prompt engineering to automate task prioritization and apply diverse prioritization techniques, aimed at enhancing project management within the agile framework. This approach seeks to transform the prioritization of agile requirements, tackling the substantial challenge of meeting stakeholder needs within set time and budget limits. Furthermore, the source code of our developed prototype is available on GitHub, allowing for further experimentation and prioritization of requirements, facilitating research and practical application.
In this work, we study the challenge of providing human-understandable descriptions for failure modes in trained image classification models. Existing works address this problem by first identifying clusters (or directions) of incorrectly classified samples in a latent space and then aiming to provide human-understandable text descriptions for them. We observe that in some cases, describing text does not match well with identified failure modes, partially owing to the fact that shared interpretable attributes of failure modes may not be captured using clustering in the feature space. To improve on these shortcomings, we propose a novel approach that prioritizes interpretability in this problem: we start by obtaining human-understandable concepts (tags) of images in the dataset and then analyze the model's behavior based on the presence or absence of combinations of these tags. Our method also ensures that the tags describing a failure mode form a minimal set, avoiding redundant and noisy descriptions. Through several experiments on different datasets, we show that our method successfully identifies failure modes and generates high-quality text descriptions associated with them. The
The overwhelming amount and rate of information update in online social media is making it increasingly difficult for users to allocate their attention to their topics of interest, thus there is a strong need for prioritizing news feeds. The attractiveness of a post to a user depends on many complex contextual and temporal features of the post. For instance, the contents of the post, the responsiveness of a third user, and the age of the post may all have impact. So far, these static and dynamic features has not been incorporated in a unified framework to tackle the post prioritization problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for prioritizing posts based on a feature modulated multi-dimensional point process. Our model is able to simultaneously capture textual and sentiment features, and temporal features such as self-excitation, mutual-excitation and bursty nature of social interaction. As an evaluation, we also curated a real-world conversational benchmark dataset crawled from Facebook. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm is able to achieve the-state-of-the-art performance in terms of analyzing, predicting, and prioritizing events. In terms of interpr
Volume of content and misinformation on social media is rapidly increasing. There is a need for systems that can support fact checkers by prioritizing content that needs to be fact checked. Prior research on prioritizing content for fact-checking has focused on news media articles, predominantly in English language. Increasingly, misinformation is found in user-generated content. In this paper we present a novel dataset that can be used to prioritize check-worthy posts from multi-media content in Hindi. It is unique in its 1) focus on user generated content, 2) language and 3) accommodation of multi-modality in social media posts. In addition, we also provide metadata for each post such as number of shares and likes of the post on ShareChat, a popular Indian social media platform, that allows for correlative analysis around virality and misinformation. The data is accessible on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4032629) under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0).
Most reinforcement learning algorithms take advantage of an experience replay buffer to repeatedly train on samples the agent has observed in the past. Not all samples carry the same amount of significance and simply assigning equal importance to each of the samples is a naïve strategy. In this paper, we propose a method to prioritize samples based on how much we can learn from a sample. We define the learn-ability of a sample as the steady decrease of the training loss associated with this sample over time. We develop an algorithm to prioritize samples with high learn-ability, while assigning lower priority to those that are hard-to-learn, typically caused by noise or stochasticity. We empirically show that our method is more robust than random sampling and also better than just prioritizing with respect to the training loss, i.e. the temporal difference loss, which is used in prioritized experience replay.
Prioritizing service tickets in IT Service Management (ITSM) is critical for operational efficiency but remains challenging due to noisy textual inputs, subjective writing styles, and pronounced class imbalance. We evaluate two families of approaches for ticket prioritization: embedding-based pipelines that combine dimensionality reduction, clustering, and classical classifiers, and a fine-tuned multilingual transformer that processes both textual and numerical features. Embedding-based methods exhibit limited generalization across a wide range of thirty configurations, with clustering failing to uncover meaningful structures and supervised models highly sensitive to embedding quality. In contrast, the proposed transformer model achieves substantially higher performance, with an average F1-score of 78.5% and weighted Cohen's kappa values of nearly 0.80, indicating strong alignment with true labels. These results highlight the limitations of generic embeddings for ITSM data and demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-adapted transformer architectures for operational ticket prioritization.
This paper discusses a popular UX research activity, feature prioritization, using the User Experience Research Point of View (UXR PoV) Playbook framework. We describe an application of multinomial logistic regression, frequently marketed as MaxDiff, for prioritizing product features in consumer product development. It addresses challenges of traditional surveying techniques. We propose a solution using MaxDiff to generate a reliable preference list with a reasonable sample size. We also adapt the MaxDiff method to reduce the number of survey responses in half, making it less tedious from the survey takers' perspective. We present a case study using the adapted MaxDiff method for tablet feature prioritization research involving users with disabilities.
Self-Admitted Technical Debt, or SATD, is a self-admission of technical debt present in a software system. To effectively manage SATD, developers need to estimate its priority and assess the effort required to fix the described technical debt. About a quarter of descriptions of SATD in software systems express some form of negativity or negative emotions when describing technical debt. In this paper, we report on an experiment conducted with 59 respondents to study whether negativity expressed in the description of SATD \textbf{actually} affects the prioritization of SATD. The respondents are a mix of professional developers and students, and in the experiment, we asked participants to prioritize four vignettes: two expressing negativity and two expressing neutral sentiment. To ensure realism, vignettes were based on existing SATD. We find that negativity causes between one-third and half of developers to prioritize SATD, in which negativity is expressed as having more priority. Developers affected by negativity when prioritizing SATD are twice as likely to increase their estimation of urgency and 1.5 times as likely to increase their estimation of importance and effort for SATD co
Millions of people suffer from mental health conditions, yet many remain undiagnosed or receive delayed care due to limited clinical resources and labor-intensive assessment methods. While most machine-assisted approaches focus on diagnostic classification, estimating symptom severity is essential for prioritizing care, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Speech-based AI provides a scalable alternative by enabling automated, continuous, and remote monitoring, reducing reliance on subjective self-reports and time-consuming evaluations. In this paper, we introduce a speech-based model for pairwise comparison of schizophrenia symptom severity, leveraging articulatory and acoustic features. These comparisons are used to generate severity rankings via the Bradley-Terry model. Our approach outperforms previous regression-based models on ranking-based metrics, offering a more effective solution for clinical triage and prioritization.
Gene prioritization (identifying genes potentially associated with a biological process) is increasingly tackled with Artificial Intelligence. However, existing methods struggle with the high dimensionality and incomplete labelling of biomedical data. This work proposes a more robust and efficient pipeline that leverages Fast-mRMR Feature Selection to retain only relevant, non-redundant features for classifiers, building simpler, more interpretable and more efficient models. Experiments in our domain of interest, prioritizing genes related to Dietary Restriction (DR), show significant improvements over existing methods and enables us to integrate heterogeneous biological feature sets for better performance, a strategy that previously degraded performance due to noise accumulation. This work focuses on DR given the availability of curated data and expert knowledge for validation, yet this pipeline would be applicable to other biological processes, proving that feature selection is critical for reliable gene prioritization in high-dimensional omics.
This document presents the artifact associated with the ICSE SEIP 25 paper titled On the Diagnosis of Flaky Job Failures: Understanding and Prioritizing Failure Categories. The original paper identifies and analyzes 46 distinct categories of flaky job failures that developers encounter, using Recency (R), Frequency (F), and Monetary (M) measures. In addition, it uses an RFM clustering model to identify and prioritize the most wasteful and persistent. The original paper only discusses the rankings and evolution of the top 20 categories in the results. This artifact contains (1) the regex and scripts used to automate the labeling process for RQ1, (2) complete analysis results, including the ranking of all 46 categories by cost in RQ2 and the evolution of these categories over time in RQ3, and (3) the RFM dataset and scripts used to create the RFM clustering model for prioritization in RQ4. In addition, we engineered the labeling tool and the RFM-based prioritization methodology in a command-line interface (CLI) called FLAKERANKER to facilitate reuse and repurposing in future studies.
Prioritized experience replay, which improves sample efficiency by selecting relevant transitions to update parameter estimates, is a crucial component of contemporary value-based deep reinforcement learning models. Typically, transitions are prioritized based on their temporal difference error. However, this approach is prone to favoring noisy transitions, even when the value estimation closely approximates the target mean. This phenomenon resembles the noisy TV problem postulated in the exploration literature, in which exploration-guided agents get stuck by mistaking noise for novelty. To mitigate the disruptive effects of noise in value estimation, we propose using epistemic uncertainty estimation to guide the prioritization of transitions from the replay buffer. Epistemic uncertainty quantifies the uncertainty that can be reduced by learning, hence reducing transitions sampled from the buffer generated by unpredictable random processes. We first illustrate the benefits of epistemic uncertainty prioritized replay in two tabular toy models: a simple multi-arm bandit task, and a noisy gridworld. Subsequently, we evaluate our prioritization scheme on the Atari suite, outperforming