Daily Papers

This research introduces DesignQA, a novel benchmark aimed at evaluating the proficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending and applying engineering requirements in technical documentation. Developed with a focus on real-world engineering challenges, DesignQA uniquely combines multimodal data-including textual design requirements, CAD images, and engineering drawings-derived from the Formula SAE student competition. Different from many existing MLLM benchmarks, DesignQA contains document-grounded visual questions where the input image and input document come from different sources. The benchmark features automatic evaluation metrics and is divided into segments-Rule Comprehension, Rule Compliance, and Rule Extraction-based on tasks that engineers perform when designing according to requirements. We evaluate state-of-the-art models like GPT4 and LLaVA against the benchmark, and our study uncovers the existing gaps in MLLMs' abilities to interpret complex engineering documentation. Key findings suggest that while MLLMs demonstrate potential in navigating technical documents, substantial limitations exist, particularly in accurately extracting and applying detailed requirements to engineering designs. This benchmark sets a foundation for future advancements in AI-supported engineering design processes. DesignQA is publicly available at: https://github.com/anniedoris/design_qa/.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the prime areas in software development. Since agile software development englobes several emerging techniques and advocates for continuous improvement, it urges the question of which agile RE practices are currently most used, their characteristics, and the challenges in their employment. The aim of this work is to investigate and categorize the collection and specification of agile requirements practices based on how professionals perceive their importance for a software project that applies agile methodologies. Thus, a survey was carried out with forty-six (46) Brazilian software development professionals, inquiring which methods are used for the collection and specification of agile requirements, as well as the features, benefits, and difficulties when employing the methods. The responses allowed us to perform data analysis and identify the relationships between the respondents' experience and the viewpoints on the collection methods and the agile requirements specification. In addition, it was noted that the adoption of these methods is still very recent. They have mainly been used for less than five years. Moreover, it was noted that, for most respondents, there are yet significant challenges and advances to be made for better efficiency in applying the informed methods.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical phase in software development including the elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation of software requirements. Despite the importance of RE, it remains a challenging process due to the complexities of communication, uncertainty in the early stages and inadequate automation support. In recent years, large-language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in diverse domains, including natural language processing, code generation, and program understanding. This chapter explores the potential of LLMs in driving RE processes, aiming to improve the efficiency and accuracy of requirements-related tasks. We propose key directions and SWOT analysis for research and development in using LLMs for RE, focusing on the potential for requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. We further present the results from a preliminary evaluation, in this context.

To use Large Language Models (LLMs) in a targeted way for NLP problems in RE, we require both (1) basic knowledge about the inner workings of LLMs and (2) a guideline on how to select and systematically utilize or repurpose LLMs for NLP4RE tasks. This chapter establishes the required knowledge and introduces the fundamentals of LLMs in the first part. In the second part, we present a detailed guideline for students, researchers, and practitioners on using LLMs for their purposes.

GUI (graphical user interface) prototyping is a widely-used technique in requirements engineering for gathering and refining requirements, reducing development risks and increasing stakeholder engagement. However, GUI prototyping can be a time-consuming and costly process. In recent years, deep learning models such as Stable Diffusion have emerged as a powerful text-to-image tool capable of generating detailed images based on text prompts. In this paper, we propose UI-Diffuser, an approach that leverages Stable Diffusion to generate mobile UIs through simple textual descriptions and UI components. Preliminary results show that UI-Diffuser provides an efficient and cost-effective way to generate mobile GUI designs while reducing the need for extensive prototyping efforts. This approach has the potential to significantly improve the speed and efficiency of GUI prototyping in requirements engineering.

Large language models that enhance software development tasks, such as code generation, code completion, and code question answering (QA), have been extensively studied in both academia and the industry. The models are integrated into popular intelligent IDEs like JetBrains and Cursor. Current benchmarks for evaluating models' code comprehension capabilities primarily focus on code generation or completion, often neglecting QA, which is a crucial aspect of understanding code. Existing code QA benchmarks are derived from code comments with predefined patterns (e.g., CodeQA) or focus on specific domains, such as education (e.g., CS1QA). These benchmarks fail to capture the real-world complexity of software engineering and user requirements for understanding code repositories. To address this gap, we introduce CoReQA, a benchmark for Code Repository-level question answering, constructed from GitHub issues and comments from 176 popular repositories across four programming languages. Since questions and answers may include both natural language and code snippets, traditional evaluation metrics such as BLEU are inadequate for assessing repository-level QA performance. Thus, we provide an LLM-as-a-judge framework to evaluate QA performance from five aspects. Based on CoReQA, we evaluate the performance of three baselines, including two short-context models using generic retrieval strategies and one long-context model that utilizes the entire repository context. Evaluation results show that state-of-the-art proprietary and long-context models struggle to address repository-level questions effectively. Our analysis highlights the limitations of language models in assisting developers in understanding repositories and suggests future directions for improving repository comprehension systems through effective context retrieval methodologies.

Ensuring that Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) align with higher-level organizational or national requirements is vital, particularly in regulated environments such as finance and aerospace. In these domains, maintaining consistency, adhering to regulatory frameworks, minimizing errors, and meeting critical expectations are essential for the reliable functioning of systems. The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights their immense potential, yet there remains considerable scope for improvement in retrieving relevant information and enhancing reasoning capabilities. This study demonstrates that integrating a robust Graph-RAG framework with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as Chain of Thought and Tree of Thought, can significantly enhance performance. Compared to baseline RAG methods and simple prompting strategies, this approach delivers more accurate and context-aware results. While this method demonstrates significant improvements in performance, it comes with challenges. It is both costly and more complex to implement across diverse contexts, requiring careful adaptation to specific scenarios. Additionally, its effectiveness heavily relies on having complete and accurate input data, which may not always be readily available, posing further limitations to its scalability and practicality.

Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of requirements and code semantics. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two code LMs. Our finding is that they generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We will release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at https://aka.ms/NoFunEval.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating code generation and software engineering tasks, yet they often struggle with complex, multi-file projects due to context limitations and knowledge gaps. We propose a novel context engineering workflow that combines multiple AI components: an Intent Translator (GPT-5) for clarifying user requirements, an Elicit-powered semantic literature retrieval for injecting domain knowledge, NotebookLM-based document synthesis for contextual understanding, and a Claude Code multi-agent system for code generation and validation. Our integrated approach leverages intent clarification, retrieval-augmented generation, and specialized sub-agents orchestrated via Claude's agent framework. We demonstrate that this method significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of code assistants in real-world repositories, yielding higher single-shot success rates and better adherence to project context than baseline single-agent approaches. Qualitative results on a large Next.js codebase show the multi-agent system effectively plans, edits, and tests complex features with minimal human intervention. We compare our system with recent frameworks like CodePlan, MASAI, and HyperAgent, highlighting how targeted context injection and agent role decomposition lead to state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we discuss the implications for deploying LLM-based coding assistants in production, along with lessons learned on context management and future research directions.

Prompting ChatGPT to achieve complex goals (e.g., creating a customer support chatbot) often demands meticulous prompt engineering, including aspects like fluent writing and chain-of-thought techniques. While emerging prompt optimizers can automatically refine many of these aspects, we argue that clearly conveying customized requirements (e.g., how to handle diverse inputs) remains a human-centric challenge. In this work, we introduce Requirement-Oriented Prompt Engineering (ROPE), a paradigm that focuses human attention on generating clear, complete requirements during prompting. We implement ROPE through an assessment and training suite that provides deliberate practice with LLM-generated feedback. In a study with 30 novices, we show that requirement-focused training doubles novices' prompting performance, significantly outperforming conventional prompt engineering training and prompt optimization. We also demonstrate that high-quality LLM outputs are directly tied to the quality of input requirements. Our work paves the way for more effective task delegation in human-LLM collaborative prompting.

Ontology engineering (OE) in large projects poses a number of challenges arising from the heterogeneous backgrounds of the various stakeholders, domain experts, and their complex interactions with ontology designers. This multi-party interaction often creates systematic ambiguities and biases from the elicitation of ontology requirements, which directly affect the design, evaluation and may jeopardise the target reuse. Meanwhile, current OE methodologies strongly rely on manual activities (e.g., interviews, discussion pages). After collecting evidence on the most crucial OE activities, we introduce OntoChat, a framework for conversational ontology engineering that supports requirement elicitation, analysis, and testing. By interacting with a conversational agent, users can steer the creation of user stories and the extraction of competency questions, while receiving computational support to analyse the overall requirements and test early versions of the resulting ontologies. We evaluate OntoChat by replicating the engineering of the Music Meta Ontology, and collecting preliminary metrics on the effectiveness of each component from users. We release all code at https://github.com/King-s-Knowledge-Graph-Lab/OntoChat.

This paper presents prompt design techniques for software engineering, in the form of patterns, to solve common problems when using large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT to automate common software engineering activities, such as ensuring code is decoupled from third-party libraries and simulating a web application API before it is implemented. This paper provides two contributions to research on using LLMs for software engineering. First, it provides a catalog of patterns for software engineering that classifies patterns according to the types of problems they solve. Second, it explores several prompt patterns that have been applied to improve requirements elicitation, rapid prototyping, code quality, refactoring, and system design.

We introduce **SWE-Flow**, a novel data synthesis framework grounded in Test-Driven Development (TDD). Unlike existing software engineering data that rely on human-submitted issues, **SWE-Flow** automatically infers incremental development steps directly from unit tests, which inherently encapsulate high-level requirements. The core of **SWE-Flow** is the construction of a Runtime Dependency Graph (RDG), which precisely captures function interactions, enabling the generation of a structured, step-by-step *development schedule*. At each step, **SWE-Flow** produces a partial codebase, the corresponding unit tests, and the necessary code modifications, resulting in fully verifiable TDD tasks. With this approach, we generated 16,061 training instances and 2,020 test instances from real-world GitHub projects, creating the **SWE-Flow-Eval** benchmark. Our experiments show that fine-tuning open model on this dataset significantly improves performance in TDD-based coding. To facilitate further research, we release all code, datasets, models, and Docker images at [Github](https://github.com/Hambaobao/SWE-Flow).

Code generation problems differ from common natural language problems - they require matching the exact syntax of the target language, identifying happy paths and edge cases, paying attention to numerous small details in the problem spec, and addressing other code-specific issues and requirements. Hence, many of the optimizations and tricks that have been successful in natural language generation may not be effective for code tasks. In this work, we propose a new approach to code generation by LLMs, which we call AlphaCodium - a test-based, multi-stage, code-oriented iterative flow, that improves the performances of LLMs on code problems. We tested AlphaCodium on a challenging code generation dataset called CodeContests, which includes competitive programming problems from platforms such as Codeforces. The proposed flow consistently and significantly improves results. On the validation set, for example, GPT-4 accuracy (pass@5) increased from 19% with a single well-designed direct prompt to 44% with the AlphaCodium flow. Many of the principles and best practices acquired in this work, we believe, are broadly applicable to general code generation tasks. Full implementation is available at: https://github.com/Codium-ai/AlphaCodium

A growing variety of prompt engineering techniques has been proposed for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systematic evaluation of each technique on individual software engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we present a systematic evaluation of 14 established prompt techniques across 10 SE tasks using four LLM models. As identified in the prior literature, the selected prompting techniques span six core dimensions (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Thought Generation, Ensembling, Self-Criticism, and Decomposition). They are evaluated on tasks such as code generation, bug fixing, and code-oriented question answering, to name a few. Our results show which prompting techniques are most effective for SE tasks requiring complex logic and intensive reasoning versus those that rely more on contextual understanding and example-driven scenarios. We also analyze correlations between the linguistic characteristics of prompts and the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of prompting techniques in enhancing performance on SE tasks. Additionally, we report the time and token consumption for each prompting technique when applied to a specific task and model, offering guidance for practitioners in selecting the optimal prompting technique for their use cases.

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-cases can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers have therefore proposed automated link-generation solutions primarily based on information-retrieval (IR) techniques; however, these solutions have failed to deliver the accuracy needed for full adoption in industrial projects. Improvements can be achieved using deep-learning traceability models; however, their efficacy is impeded by the limited size and availability of project-level artifacts and links to serve as training data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and evaluating several deep-learning approaches for text-to-text traceability. Our method, named NLTrace, explores three transfer learning strategies that use datasets mined from open world platforms. Through pretraining Language Models (LMs) and leveraging adjacent tracing tasks, we demonstrate that NLTrace can significantly improve the performance of LM based trace models when training links are available. In such scenarios NLTrace outperforms the best performing classical IR method with an 188% improvement in F2 score and 94.01% in Mean Average Precision (MAP). It also outperforms the general LM based trace model by 7% and 23% for F2 and MAP respectively. In addition, NLTrace can adapt to low-resource tracing scenarios where other LM models can not. The knowledge learned from adjacent tasks enables NLTrace to outperform VSM models by 28% F2 on generation challenges when presented with a small number of training examples.

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io

While complex simulations of physical systems have been widely used in engineering and scientific computing, lowering their often prohibitive computational requirements has only recently been tackled by deep learning approaches. In this paper, we present GraphSplineNets, a novel deep-learning method to speed up the forecasting of physical systems by reducing the grid size and number of iteration steps of deep surrogate models. Our method uses two differentiable orthogonal spline collocation methods to efficiently predict response at any location in time and space. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive collocation strategy in space to prioritize sampling from the most important regions. GraphSplineNets improve the accuracy-speedup tradeoff in forecasting various dynamical systems with increasing complexity, including the heat equation, damped wave propagation, Navier-Stokes equations, and real-world ocean currents in both regular and irregular domains.

Efficient information retrieval (IR) from building information models (BIMs) poses significant challenges due to the necessity for deep BIM knowledge or extensive engineering efforts for automation. We introduce BIM-GPT, a prompt-based virtual assistant (VA) framework integrating BIM and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technologies to support NL-based IR. A prompt manager and dynamic template generate prompts for GPT models, enabling interpretation of NL queries, summarization of retrieved information, and answering BIM-related questions. In tests on a BIM IR dataset, our approach achieved 83.5% and 99.5% accuracy rates for classifying NL queries with no data and 2% data incorporated in prompts, respectively. Additionally, we validated the functionality of BIM-GPT through a VA prototype for a hospital building. This research contributes to the development of effective and versatile VAs for BIM IR in the construction industry, significantly enhancing BIM accessibility and reducing engineering efforts and training data requirements for processing NL queries.

Many engineering organizations are reimplementing and extending deep neural networks from the research community. We describe this process as deep learning model reengineering. Deep learning model reengineering - reusing, reproducing, adapting, and enhancing state-of-the-art deep learning approaches - is challenging for reasons including under-documented reference models, changing requirements, and the cost of implementation and testing. In addition, individual engineers may lack expertise in software engineering, yet teams must apply knowledge of software engineering and deep learning to succeed. Prior work has examined on DL systems from a "product" view, examining defects from projects regardless of the engineers' purpose. Our study is focused on reengineering activities from a "process" view, and focuses on engineers specifically engaged in the reengineering process. Our goal is to understand the characteristics and challenges of deep learning model reengineering. We conducted a case study of this phenomenon, focusing on the context of computer vision. Our results draw from two data sources: defects reported in open-source reeengineering projects, and interviews conducted with open-source project contributors and the leaders of a reengineering team. Our results describe how deep learning-based computer vision techniques are reengineered, analyze the distribution of defects in this process, and discuss challenges and practices. Integrating our quantitative and qualitative data, we proposed a novel reengineering workflow. Our findings inform several future directions, including: measuring additional unknown aspects of model reengineering; standardizing engineering practices to facilitate reengineering; and developing tools to support model reengineering and model reuse.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

In this work we systematically review the recent advancements in software engineering with language models, covering 70+ models, 40+ evaluation tasks, 180+ datasets, and 900 related works. Unlike previous works, we integrate software engineering (SE) with natural language processing (NLP) by discussing the perspectives of both sides: SE applies language models for development automation, while NLP adopts SE tasks for language model evaluation. We break down code processing models into general language models represented by the GPT family and specialized models that are specifically pretrained on code, often with tailored objectives. We discuss the relations and differences between these models, and highlight the historical transition of code modeling from statistical models and RNNs to pretrained Transformers and LLMs, which is exactly the same course that had been taken by NLP. We also go beyond programming and review LLMs' application in other software engineering activities including requirement engineering, testing, deployment, and operations in an endeavor to provide a global view of NLP in SE, and identify key challenges and potential future directions in this domain. We keep the survey open and updated on GitHub at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/Awesome-Code-LLM.

The recent development on large language models makes automatically constructing small programs possible. It thus has the potential to free software engineers from low-level coding and allow us to focus on the perhaps more interesting parts of software development, such as requirement engineering and system testing. In this project, we develop a prototype named AISD (AI-aided Software Development), which is capable of taking high-level (potentially vague) user requirements as inputs, generates detailed use cases, prototype system designs, and subsequently system implementation. Different from existing attempts, AISD is designed to keep the user in the loop, i.e., by repeatedly taking user feedback on use cases, high-level system designs, and prototype implementations through system testing. AISD has been evaluated with a novel benchmark of non-trivial software projects. The experimental results suggest that it might be possible to imagine a future where software engineering is reduced to requirement engineering and system testing only.

Building precise simulations of the real world and invoking numerical solvers to answer quantitative problems is an essential requirement in engineering and science. We present FEABench, a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) and LLM agents to simulate and solve physics, mathematics and engineering problems using finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a comprehensive evaluation scheme to investigate the ability of LLMs to solve these problems end-to-end by reasoning over natural language problem descriptions and operating COMSOL Multiphysics^circledR, an FEA software, to compute the answers. We additionally design a language model agent equipped with the ability to interact with the software through its Application Programming Interface (API), examine its outputs and use tools to improve its solutions over multiple iterations. Our best performing strategy generates executable API calls 88% of the time. LLMs that can successfully interact with and operate FEA software to solve problems such as those in our benchmark would push the frontiers of automation in engineering. Acquiring this capability would augment LLMs' reasoning skills with the precision of numerical solvers and advance the development of autonomous systems that can tackle complex problems in the real world. The code is available at https://github.com/google/feabench

Steering the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a challenge, particularly in engineering applications where precision and reliability are critical. While fine-tuning and prompting methods can modify model behavior, they lack the dynamic and exact control necessary for engineering applications. Inference-time intervention techniques provide a promising alternative, allowing targeted adjustments to LLM outputs. In this work, we demonstrate how interventions enable fine-grained control for automating the usually time-intensive requirement verification process in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). Using two early-stage Capella SysML models of space missions with associated requirements, we apply the intervened LLMs to reason over a graph representation of the model to determine whether a requirement is fulfilled. Our method achieves robust and reliable outputs, significantly improving over both a baseline model and a fine-tuning approach. By identifying and modifying as few as one to three specialised attention heads, we can significantly change the model's behavior. When combined with self-consistency, this allows us to achieve perfect precision on our holdout test set.

Foundation models (FMs), particularly large language models (LLMs), have shown significant promise in various software engineering (SE) tasks, including code generation, debugging, and requirement refinement. Despite these advances, existing evaluation frameworks are insufficient for assessing model performance in iterative, context-rich workflows characteristic of SE activities. To address this limitation, we introduce SE Arena, an interactive platform designed to evaluate SE-focused chatbots. SE Arena provides a transparent, open-source leaderboard, supports multi-round conversational workflows, and enables end-to-end model comparisons. Moreover, SE Arena incorporates a new feature called RepoChat, which automatically injects repository-related context (e.g., issues, commits, pull requests) into the conversation, further aligning evaluations with real-world development processes. This paper outlines the design and capabilities of SE Arena, emphasizing its potential to advance the evaluation and practical application of FMs in software engineering.

Chaos Engineering (CE) is an engineering technique aimed at improving the resiliency of distributed systems. It involves artificially injecting specific failures into a distributed system and observing its behavior in response. Based on the observation, the system can be proactively improved to handle those failures. Recent CE tools implement the automated execution of predefined CE experiments. However, defining these experiments and improving the system based on the experimental results still remain manual. To reduce the costs of the manual operations, we propose ChaosEater, a system for automating the entire CE operations with Large Language Models (LLMs). It predefines the agentic workflow according to a systematic CE cycle and assigns subdivided operations within the workflow to LLMs. ChaosEater targets CE for Kubernetes systems, which are managed through code (i.e., Infrastructure as Code). Therefore, the LLMs in ChaosEater perform software engineering tasks to complete CE cycles, including requirement definition, code generation, debugging, and testing. We evaluate ChaosEater through case studies on both small and large Kubernetes systems. The results demonstrate that it stably completes reasonable single CE cycles with significantly low time and monetary costs. The CE cycles are also qualitatively validated by human engineers and LLMs.

Chaos Engineering (CE) is an engineering technique aimed at improving the resilience of distributed systems. It involves intentionally injecting faults into a system to test its resilience, uncover weaknesses, and address them before they cause failures in production. Recent CE tools automate the execution of predefined CE experiments. However, planning such experiments and improving the system based on the experimental results still remain manual. These processes are labor-intensive and require multi-domain expertise. To address these challenges and enable anyone to build resilient systems at low cost, this paper proposes ChaosEater, a system that automates the entire CE cycle with Large Language Models (LLMs). It predefines an agentic workflow according to a systematic CE cycle and assigns subdivided processes within the workflow to LLMs. ChaosEater targets CE for software systems built on Kubernetes. Therefore, the LLMs in ChaosEater complete CE cycles through software engineering tasks, including requirement definition, code generation, testing, and debugging. We evaluate ChaosEater through case studies on small- and large-scale Kubernetes systems. The results demonstrate that it consistently completes reasonable CE cycles with significantly low time and monetary costs. Its cycles are also qualitatively validated by human engineers and LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code understanding and generation; however, their effectiveness on non-code Software Engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. We present the first comprehensive benchmark, which we name `Software Engineering Language Understanding' (SELU), for evaluating LLMs on 17 non-code tasks, spanning from identifying whether a requirement is functional or non-functional to estimating the effort and complexity of backlog items. SELU covers classification, regression, Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Masked Language Modeling (MLM) targets, with data drawn from diverse sources such as code repositories, issue tracking systems, and developer forums. We fine-tune 22 open-source LLMs, prompt two proprietary alternatives, and train two baselines. Performance is measured using metrics such as F1-macro, SMAPE, F1-micro, and accuracy, and compared via the Bayesian signed-rank test. Our results show that moderate-scale decoder-only models consistently form a top-tier, exhibiting high mean performance and low across-task variance, while domain adaptation via code-focused pre-training might yield only modest improvements. These insights guide model selection for non-code SE workflows and highlight directions for expanding SELU to generative and design-oriented scenarios.

Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) systems have recently been widely researched to deal with the significant growth of the Web. NERD systems are crucial for several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as summarization, understanding, and machine translation. However, there is no standard interface specification, i.e. these systems may vary significantly either for exporting their outputs or for processing the inputs. Thus, when a given company desires to implement more than one NERD system, the process is quite exhaustive and prone to failure. In addition, industrial solutions demand critical requirements, e.g., large-scale processing, completeness, versatility, and licenses. Commonly, these requirements impose a limitation, making good NERD models to be ignored by companies. This paper presents TANKER, a distributed architecture which aims to overcome scalability, reliability and failure tolerance limitations related to industrial needs by combining NERD systems. To this end, TANKER relies on a micro-services oriented architecture, which enables agile development and delivery of complex enterprise applications. In addition, TANKER provides a standardized API which makes possible to combine several NERD systems at once.

AI systems are gaining widespread adoption across various sectors and domains. Creating high-quality AI system requirements is crucial for aligning the AI system with business goals and consumer values and for social responsibility. However, with the uncertain nature of AI systems and the heavy reliance on sensitive data, more research is needed to address the elicitation and analysis of AI systems requirements. With the proprietary nature of many AI systems, there is a lack of open-source requirements artifacts and technical requirements documents for AI systems, limiting broader research and investigation. With Large Language Models (LLMs) emerging as a promising alternative to human-generated text, this paper investigates the potential use of LLMs to generate user stories for AI systems based on abstracts from scholarly papers. We conducted an empirical evaluation using three LLMs and generated 1260 user stories from 42 abstracts from 26 domains. We assess their quality using the Quality User Story (QUS) framework. Moreover, we identify relevant non-functional requirements (NFRs) and ethical principles. Our analysis demonstrates that the investigated LLMs can generate user stories inspired by the needs of various stakeholders, offering a promising approach for generating user stories for research purposes and for aiding in the early requirements elicitation phase of AI systems. We have compiled and curated a collection of stories generated by various LLMs into a dataset (UStAI), which is now publicly available for use.

Requirement traceability is the process of identifying the inter-dependencies between requirements. It poses a significant challenge when conducted manually, especially when dealing with requirements at various levels of abstraction. In this work, we propose a novel approach to automate the task of linking high-level business requirements with more technical system requirements. The proposed approach begins by representing each requirement using a Bag of-Words (BOW) model combined with the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) scoring function. Then, we suggested an enhanced cosine similarity that uses recent advances in word embedding representation to correct traditional cosine similarity function limitations. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted experiments on three well-known datasets: COEST, WARC(NFR), and WARC(FRS). The results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves efficiency compared to existing methods. We achieved better results with an increase of approximately 18.4% in one of the datasets, as measured by the F2 score.

In computer-aided engineering design, the goal of a designer is to find an optimal design on a given requirement using the numerical simulator in loop with an optimization method. In this design optimization process, a good design optimization process is one that can reduce the time from inception to design. In this work, we take a class of design problem, that is computationally cheap to evaluate but has high dimensional design space. In such cases, traditional surrogate-based optimization does not offer any benefits. In this work, we propose an alternative way to use ML model to surrogate the design process that formulates the search problem as an inverse problem and can save time by finding the optimal design or at least a good initial seed design for optimization. By using this trained surrogate model with the traditional optimization method, we can get the best of both worlds. We call this as Surrogate Assisted Optimization (SAO)- a hybrid approach by mixing ML surrogate with the traditional optimization method. Empirical evaluations of propeller design problems show that a better efficient design can be found in fewer evaluations using SAO.

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

We introduce BikeBench, an engineering design benchmark for evaluating generative models on problems with multiple real-world objectives and constraints. As generative AI's reach continues to grow, evaluating its capability to understand physical laws, human guidelines, and hard constraints grows increasingly important. Engineering product design lies at the intersection of these difficult tasks, providing new challenges for AI capabilities. BikeBench evaluates AI models' capabilities to generate bicycle designs that not only resemble the dataset, but meet specific performance objectives and constraints. To do so, BikeBench quantifies a variety of human-centered and multiphysics performance characteristics, such as aerodynamics, ergonomics, structural mechanics, human-rated usability, and similarity to subjective text or image prompts. Supporting the benchmark are several datasets of simulation results, a dataset of 10,000 human-rated bicycle assessments, and a synthetically generated dataset of 1.6M designs, each with a parametric, CAD/XML, SVG, and PNG representation. BikeBench is uniquely configured to evaluate tabular generative models, large language models (LLMs), design optimization, and hybrid algorithms side-by-side. Our experiments indicate that LLMs and tabular generative models fall short of hybrid GenAI+optimization algorithms in design quality, constraint satisfaction, and similarity scores, suggesting significant room for improvement. We hope that BikeBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark, will help catalyze progress in generative AI for constrained multi-objective engineering design problems. We provide code, data, an interactive leaderboard, and other resources at https://github.com/Lyleregenwetter/BikeBench.

The Industry 4.0 refers to a industrial ecology which will merge the information system, physical system and service system into an integrate platform. Since now the industrial designers either conceive the physical part of products, or design the User Interfaces of computer systems, the new industrial ecology will give them a chance to redefine their roles in R&D work-flow. In this paper we discussed the required qualities of industrial designer in the new era, according to an investigation among Chinese enterprises. Additionally, how to promote these qualities though educational program.

Continuing advances in frontier model research are paving the way for widespread deployment of AI agents. Meanwhile, global interest in building large, complex systems in software, manufacturing, energy and logistics has never been greater. Although AI driven system engineering holds tremendous promise, the static benchmarks dominating agent evaluations today fail to capture the crucial skills required for implementing dynamic systems, such as managing uncertain trade-offs and ensuring proactive adaptability. This position paper advocates for training and evaluating AI agents' system engineering abilities through automation-oriented sandbox games-particularly Factorio. By directing research efforts in this direction, we can equip AI agents with the specialized reasoning and long-horizon planning necessary to design, maintain, and optimize tomorrow's most demanding engineering projects.

Large language models (LLMs), as a novel information technology, are seeing increasing adoption in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) field. They have shown their potential to streamline processes throughout the building lifecycle. However, the robustness and reliability of LLMs in such a specialized and safety-critical domain remain to be evaluated. To address this challenge, this paper establishes AECBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to quantify the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in the AEC domain. The benchmark defines 23 representative tasks within a five-level cognition-oriented evaluation framework encompassing Knowledge Memorization, Understanding, Reasoning, Calculation, and Application. These tasks were derived from authentic AEC practice, with scope ranging from codes retrieval to specialized documents generation. Subsequently, a 4,800-question dataset encompassing diverse formats, including open-ended questions, was crafted primarily by engineers and validated through a two-round expert review. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge approach was introduced to provide a scalable and consistent methodology for evaluating complex, long-form responses leveraging expert-derived rubrics. Through the evaluation of nine LLMs, a clear performance decline across five cognitive levels was revealed. Despite demonstrating proficiency in foundational tasks at the Knowledge Memorization and Understanding levels, the models showed significant performance deficits, particularly in interpreting knowledge from tables in building codes, executing complex reasoning and calculation, and generating domain-specific documents. Consequently, this study lays the groundwork for future research and development aimed at the robust and reliable integration of LLMs into safety-critical engineering practices.

Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a highly effective approach for developing models in diverse contexts, including visual perception, speech recognition, and machine translation. However, the end-to-end process for applying DL is not trivial. It requires grappling with problem formulation and context understanding, data engineering, model development, deployment, continuous monitoring and maintenance, and so on. Moreover, each of these steps typically relies heavily on humans, in terms of both knowledge and interactions, which impedes the further advancement and democratization of DL. Consequently, in response to these issues, a new field has emerged over the last few years: automated deep learning (AutoDL). This endeavor seeks to minimize the need for human involvement and is best known for its achievements in neural architecture search (NAS), a topic that has been the focus of several surveys. That stated, NAS is not the be-all and end-all of AutoDL. Accordingly, this review adopts an overarching perspective, examining research efforts into automation across the entirety of an archetypal DL workflow. In so doing, this work also proposes a comprehensive set of ten criteria by which to assess existing work in both individual publications and broader research areas. These criteria are: novelty, solution quality, efficiency, stability, interpretability, reproducibility, engineering quality, scalability, generalizability, and eco-friendliness. Thus, ultimately, this review provides an evaluative overview of AutoDL in the early 2020s, identifying where future opportunities for progress may exist.

The objective is to provide clear and well-motivated guidance to Machine Learning (ML) teams, founded on our experience in empirical turbulence modeling. Guidance is also needed for modeling outside ML. ML is not yet successful in turbulence modeling, and many papers have produced unusable proposals either due to errors in math or physics, or to severe overfitting. We believe that "Turbulence Culture" (TC) takes years to learn and is difficult to convey especially considering the modern lack of time for careful study; important facts which are self-evident after a career in turbulence research and modeling and extensive reading are easy to miss. In addition, many of them are not absolute facts, a consequence of the gaps in our understanding of turbulence and the weak connection of models to first principles. Some of the mathematical facts are rigorous, but the physical aspects often are not. Turbulence models are surprisingly arbitrary. Disagreement between experts confuses the new entrants. In addition, several key properties of the models are ascertained through non-trivial analytical properties of the differential equations, which puts them out of reach of purely data-driven ML-type approaches. The best example is the crucial behavior of the model at the edge of the turbulent region (ETR). The knowledge we wish to put out here may be divided into "Mission" and "Requirements," each combining physics and mathematics. Clear lists of "Hard" and "Soft" constraints are presented. A concrete example of how DNS data could be used, possibly allied with ML, is first carried through and illustrates the large number of decisions needed. Our focus is on creating effective products which will empower CFD, rather than on publications.

The ISO 26262 standard from 2016 represents the state of the art for a safety-guided development of safety-critical electric/electronic vehicle systems. These vehicle systems include advanced driver assistance systems and vehicle guidance systems. The development process proposed in the ISO 26262 standard is based upon multiple V-models, and defines activities and work products for each process step. In many of these process steps, scenario based approaches can be applied to achieve the defined work products for the development of automated driving functions. To accomplish the work products of different process steps, scenarios have to focus on various aspects like a human understandable notation or a description via time-space variables. This leads to contradictory requirements regarding the level of detail and way of notation for the representation of scenarios. In this paper, the authors present requirements for the representation of scenarios in different process steps defined by the ISO 26262 standard, propose a consistent terminology based on prior publications for the identified levels of abstraction, and demonstrate how scenarios can be systematically evolved along the phases of the development process outlined in the ISO 26262 standard.

Machine learning techniques are becoming a fundamental tool for scientific and engineering progress. These techniques are applied in contexts as diverse as astronomy and spam filtering. However, correctly applying these techniques requires careful engineering. Much attention has been paid to the technical potential; relatively little attention has been paid to the software engineering process required to bring research-based machine learning techniques into practical utility. Technology companies have supported the engineering community through machine learning frameworks such as TensorFLow and PyTorch, but the details of how to engineer complex machine learning models in these frameworks have remained hidden. To promote best practices within the engineering community, academic institutions and Google have partnered to launch a Special Interest Group on Machine Learning Models (SIGMODELS) whose goal is to develop exemplary implementations of prominent machine learning models in community locations such as the TensorFlow Model Garden (TFMG). The purpose of this report is to define a process for reproducing a state-of-the-art machine learning model at a level of quality suitable for inclusion in the TFMG. We define the engineering process and elaborate on each step, from paper analysis to model release. We report on our experiences implementing the YOLO model family with a team of 26 student researchers, share the tools we developed, and describe the lessons we learned along the way.

Machine learning models, such as neural networks, decision trees, random forests, and gradient boosting machines, accept a feature vector, and provide a prediction. These models learn in a supervised fashion where we provide feature vectors mapped to the expected output. It is common practice to engineer new features from the provided feature set. Such engineered features will either augment or replace portions of the existing feature vector. These engineered features are essentially calculated fields based on the values of the other features. Engineering such features is primarily a manual, time-consuming task. Additionally, each type of model will respond differently to different kinds of engineered features. This paper reports empirical research to demonstrate what kinds of engineered features are best suited to various machine learning model types. We provide this recommendation by generating several datasets that we designed to benefit from a particular type of engineered feature. The experiment demonstrates to what degree the machine learning model can synthesize the needed feature on its own. If a model can synthesize a planned feature, it is not necessary to provide that feature. The research demonstrated that the studied models do indeed perform differently with various types of engineered features.

Engineering Design is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of AI, marking a new era in how we approach product, system, and service planning. Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in enabling this shift. Yet, with text as their only input modality, they cannot leverage the large body of visual artifacts that engineers have used for centuries and are accustomed to. This gap is addressed with the release of multimodal vision language models, such as GPT-4V, enabling AI to impact many more types of tasks. In light of these advancements, this paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4V, a vision language model, across a wide spectrum of engineering design tasks, categorized into four main areas: Conceptual Design, System-Level and Detailed Design, Manufacturing and Inspection, and Engineering Education Tasks. Our study assesses GPT-4V's capabilities in design tasks such as sketch similarity analysis, concept selection using Pugh Charts, material selection, engineering drawing analysis, CAD generation, topology optimization, design for additive and subtractive manufacturing, spatial reasoning challenges, and textbook problems. Through this structured evaluation, we not only explore GPT-4V's proficiency in handling complex design and manufacturing challenges but also identify its limitations in complex engineering design applications. Our research establishes a foundation for future assessments of vision language models, emphasizing their immense potential for innovating and enhancing the engineering design and manufacturing landscape. It also contributes a set of benchmark testing datasets, with more than 1000 queries, for ongoing advancements and applications in this field.

Engineering design optimization seeks to automatically determine the shapes, topologies, or parameters of components that maximize performance under given conditions. This process often depends on physics-based simulations, which are difficult to install, computationally expensive, and require domain-specific expertise. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce EngiBench, the first open-source library and datasets spanning diverse domains for data-driven engineering design. EngiBench provides a unified API and a curated set of benchmarks -- covering aeronautics, heat conduction, photonics, and more -- that enable fair, reproducible comparisons of optimization and machine learning algorithms, such as generative or surrogate models. We also release EngiOpt, a companion library offering a collection of such algorithms compatible with the EngiBench interface. Both libraries are modular, letting users plug in novel algorithms or problems, automate end-to-end experiment workflows, and leverage built-in utilities for visualization, dataset generation, feasibility checks, and performance analysis. We demonstrate their versatility through experiments comparing state-of-the-art techniques across multiple engineering design problems, an undertaking that was previously prohibitively time-consuming to perform. Finally, we show that these problems pose significant challenges for standard machine learning methods due to highly sensitive and constrained design manifolds.