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Previous studies have demonstrated that neural code comprehension models are vulnerable to identifier naming. By renaming as few as one identifier in the source code, the models would output completely irrelevant results, indicating that identifiers can be misleading for model prediction. However, identifiers are not completely detrimental to code comprehension, since the semantics of identifier names can be related to the program semantics. Well exploiting the two opposite impacts of identifiers is essential for enhancing the robustness and accuracy of neural code comprehension, and still remains under-explored. In this work, we propose to model the impact of identifiers from a novel causal perspective, and propose a counterfactual reasoning-based framework named CREAM. CREAM explicitly captures the misleading information of identifiers through multi-task learning in the training stage, and reduces the misleading impact by counterfactual inference in the inference stage. We evaluate CREAM on three popular neural code comprehension tasks, including function naming, defect detection and code classification. Experiment results show that CREAM not only significantly outperforms baselines in terms of robustness (e.g., +37.9% on the function naming task at F1 score), but also achieve improved results on the original datasets (e.g., +0.5% on the function naming task at F1 score)., Comment: Accepted to ICSE'2023

Most anomaly detection (AD) models are learned using only normal samples in an unsupervised way, which may result in ambiguous decision boundary and insufficient discriminability. In fact, a few anomaly samples are often available in real-world applications, the valuable knowledge of known anomalies should also be effectively exploited. However, utilizing a few known anomalies during training may cause another issue that the model may be biased by those known anomalies and fail to generalize to unseen anomalies. In this paper, we tackle supervised anomaly detection, i.e., we learn AD models using a few available anomalies with the objective to detect both the seen and unseen anomalies. We propose a novel explicit boundary guided semi-push-pull contrastive learning mechanism, which can enhance model's discriminability while mitigating the bias issue. Our approach is based on two core designs: First, we find an explicit and compact separating boundary as the guidance for further feature learning. As the boundary only relies on the normal feature distribution, the bias problem caused by a few known anomalies can be alleviated. Second, a boundary guided semi-push-pull loss is developed to only pull the normal features together while pushing the abnormal features apart from the separating boundary beyond a certain margin region. In this way, our model can form a more explicit and discriminative decision boundary to distinguish known and also unseen anomalies from normal samples more effectively. Code will be available at https://github.com/xcyao00/BGAD., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023

Information leakage can have dramatic consequences on systems security. Among harmful information leaks, the timing information leakage occurs whenever an attacker successfully deduces confidential internal information. In this work, we consider that the attacker has access (only) to the system execution time. We address the following timed opacity problem: given a timed system, a private location and a final location, synthesize the execution times from the initial location to the final location for which one cannot deduce whether the system went through the private location. We also consider the full timed opacity problem, asking whether the system is opaque for all execution times. We show that these problems are decidable for timed automata (TAs) but become undecidable when one adds parameters, yielding parametric timed automata (PTAs). We identify a subclass with some decidability results. We then devise an algorithm for synthesizing PTAs parameter valuations guaranteeing that the resulting TA is opaque. We finally show that our method can also apply to program analysis., Comment: This is the author version of the manuscript of the same name published in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ToSEM). This work is partially supported by the ANR national research program PACS (ANR-14-CE28-0002), by the ANR-NRF research program ProMiS (ANR-19-CE25-0015), and by ERATO HASUO Metamathematics for Systems Design Project (No. JPMJER1603), JST. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1907.00537

Neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in solving many problems, including many applications in safety/security-critical systems. Researchers also discovered multiple security issues associated with neural networks. One of them is backdoor attacks, i.e., a neural network may be embedded with a backdoor such that a target output is almost always generated in the presence of a trigger. Existing defense approaches mostly focus on detecting whether a neural network is 'backdoored' based on heuristics, e.g., activation patterns. To the best of our knowledge, the only line of work which certifies the absence of backdoor is based on randomized smoothing, which is known to significantly reduce neural network performance. In this work, we propose an approach to verify whether a given neural network is free of backdoor with a certain level of success rate. Our approach integrates statistical sampling as well as abstract interpretation. The experiment results show that our approach effectively verifies the absence of backdoor or generates backdoor triggers.

Neural networks have had discernible achievements in a wide range of applications. The wide-spread adoption also raises the concern of their dependability and reliability. Similar to traditional decision-making programs, neural networks can have defects that need to be repaired. The defects may cause unsafe behaviors, raise security concerns or unjust societal impacts. In this work, we address the problem of repairing a neural network for desirable properties such as fairness and the absence of backdoor. The goal is to construct a neural network that satisfies the property by (minimally) adjusting the given neural network's parameters (i.e., weights). Specifically, we propose CARE (\textbf{CA}usality-based \textbf{RE}pair), a causality-based neural network repair technique that 1) performs causality-based fault localization to identify the `guilty' neurons and 2) optimizes the parameters of the identified neurons to reduce the misbehavior. We have empirically evaluated CARE on various tasks such as backdoor removal, neural network repair for fairness and safety properties. Our experiment results show that CARE is able to repair all neural networks efficiently and effectively. For fairness repair tasks, CARE successfully improves fairness by $61.91\%$ on average. For backdoor removal tasks, CARE reduces the attack success rate from over $98\%$ to less than $1\%$. For safety property repair tasks, CARE reduces the property violation rate to less than $1\%$. Results also show that thanks to the causality-based fault localization, CARE's repair focuses on the misbehavior and preserves the accuracy of the neural networks.

Neural networks can be regarded as a new programming paradigm, i.e., instead of building ever-more complex programs through (often informal) logical reasoning in the programmers' mind, complex 'AI' systems are built by optimising generic neural network models with big data. In this new paradigm, AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch play a key role, which is as essential as the compiler for traditional programs. It is known that the lack of a proper semantics for programming languages (such as C), i.e., a correctness specification for compilers, has contributed to many problematic program behaviours and security issues. While it is in general hard to have a correctness specification for compilers due to the high complexity of programming languages and their rapid evolution, we have a unique opportunity to do it right this time for neural networks (which have a limited set of functions, and most of them have stable semantics). In this work, we report our effort on providing a correctness specification of neural network frameworks such as TensorFlow. We specify the semantics of almost all TensorFlow layers in the logical programming language Prolog. We demonstrate the usefulness of the semantics through two applications. One is a fuzzing engine for TensorFlow, which features a strong oracle and a systematic way of generating valid neural networks. The other is a model validation approach which enables consistent bug reporting for TensorFlow models.

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are responsible for automating process control in many industrial systems (e.g. in manufacturing and public infrastructure), and thus it is critical to ensure that they operate correctly and safely. The majority of PLCs are programmed in languages such as Structured Text (ST). However, a lack of formal semantics makes it difficult to ascertain the correctness of their translators and compilers, which vary from vendor-to-vendor. In this work, we develop K-ST, a formal executable semantics for ST in the K framework. Defined with respect to the IEC 61131-3 standard and PLC vendor manuals, K-ST is a high-level reference semantics that can be used to evaluate the correctness and consistency of different ST implementations. We validate K-ST by executing 509 ST programs extracted from Github and comparing the results against existing commercial compilers (i.e., CODESYS, CX-Programmer, and GX Works2). We then apply K-ST to validate the implementation of the open source OpenPLC platform, comparing the executions of several test programs to uncover five bugs and nine functional defects in the compiler., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering