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LIPIcs, Volume 333, ECOOP 2025, Complete Volume
No full textLIPIcs, Volume 333, ECOOP 2025, Complete Volum
GSOHC: Global Synchronization Optimization in Heterogeneous Computing
Get PDFThe use of heterogeneous systems has become widespread and popular in the past decade with more than one type of processor, such as CPUs, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) etc. A wide range of applications use both CPU and GPU to leverage the benefits of their unique features and strengths. Therefore, collaborative computation between CPU and GPU is essential to achieve high program performance. However, poorly placed global synchronization barriers and synchronous memory transfers are the main bottlenecks to enhanced program performance, preventing CPU and GPU computations from overlapping.
Based on this observation, we propose a new optimization technique called hetero-sync motion that can relocate such barrier instructions to new locations, resulting in improved performance in CPU-GPU heterogeneous programs. Further, we propose GSOHC, a compiler analysis and optimization framework that automatically finds opportunities for hetero-sync motion in the input program and then performs code transformation to apply the optimization. Our static analysis is a context-sensitive, flow-sensitive inter-procedural data-flow analysis with three phases to identify the optimization opportunities precisely. We have implemented GSOHC using LLVM/Clang infrastructure. On A4000, P100 and A100 GPUs, our optimization achieves speedups of up to 1.8x, 1.9x and 1.9x over the baseline, respectively
Chain of Grounded Objectives: Concise Goal-Oriented Prompting for Code Generation
Get PDFThe use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation has gained significant attention in recent years. Existing methods often aim to improve the quality of generated code by incorporating additional contextual information or guidance into input prompts. Many of these approaches adopt process-oriented reasoning strategies, mimicking human-like step-by-step thinking; however, they may not always align with the structured nature of programming languages. This paper introduces Chain of Grounded Objectives (CGO), a concise goal-oriented prompting approach that embeds functional objectives into prompts to enhance code generation. By focusing on precisely defined objectives rather than explicit procedural steps, CGO aligns more naturally with programming tasks while retaining flexibility. Empirical evaluations on HumanEval, MBPP, their extended versions, and LiveCodeBench show that CGO achieves accuracy comparable to or better than existing methods while using fewer tokens, making it a more efficient approach to LLM-based code generation
Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification (Replication Paper)
No full textThe widespread use of smartphones in daily life has raised concerns about privacy and security among researchers and practitioners. Privacy issues are generally highly prevalent in mobile applications, particularly targeting the Android platform - the most popular mobile operating system. For this reason, several techniques have been proposed to identify malicious behavior in Android applications, including the Mining Android Sandbox approach (MAS approach), which aims to identify malicious behavior in repackaged Android applications (apps). However, previous empirical studies evaluated the MAS approach using a small dataset consisting of only 102 pairs of original and repackaged apps. This limitation raises questions about the external validity of their findings and whether the MAS approach can be generalized to larger datasets. To address these concerns, this paper presents the results of a replication study focused on evaluating the performance of the MAS approach regarding its capabilities of correctly classifying malware from different families. Unlike previous studies, our research employs a dataset that is an order of magnitude larger, comprising 4,076 pairs of apps covering a more diverse range of Android malware families. Surprisingly, our findings indicate a poor performance of the MAS approach for identifying malware, with the F1-score decreasing from 0.90 for the small dataset used in the previous studies to 0.54 in our more extensive dataset. Upon closer examination, we discovered that certain malware families partially account for the low accuracy of the MAS approach, which fails to classify a repackaged version of an app as malware correctly. Our findings highlight the limitations of the MAS approach, particularly when scaled, and underscore the importance of complementing it with other techniques to detect a broader range of malware effectively. This opens avenues for further discussion on addressing the blind spots that affect the accuracy of the MAS approach
Reusing Caches and Invariants for Efficient and Sound Incremental Static Analysis (Artifact)
Get PDFStatic analysis by means of abstract interpretation is a tool of choice for proving absence of some classes of errors, typically undefined behaviors in code, in a sound way. However, static analysis tools are hardly integrated in CI/CD processes. One of the main reasons is that they are still time- and memory-expensive to apply after every single patch when developing a program. For solving this issue, incremental static analysis helps developers quickly obtain analysis results after making changes to a program. However, existing approaches are often not guaranteed to be sound, limited to specific analyses, or tied to specific tools. This limits their generalizability and applicability in practice, especially for large and critical software. In this paper, we propose a generic, sound approach to incremental static analysis that is applicable to any abstract interpreter. Our approach leverages the similarity between two versions of a program to soundly reuse previously computed analysis results. We introduce novel methods for summarizing functions and reusing loop invariants. They significantly reduce the cost of reanalysis, while maintaining soundness and a high level of precision. We have formalized our approach, proved it sound, implemented it in Eva, the abstract interpreter of Frama-C, and evaluated it on a set of real-world commits of open-source programs
Quantifying Cache Side-Channel Leakage by Refining Set-Based Abstractions (Artifact)
Get PDFThis is the accompanying artifact for the ECOOP 25' paper "Quantifying Cache Side-Channel Leakage by Refining Set-Based Abstractions"
Improved Approximation Algorithms for Capacitated Network Design and Flexible Graph Connectivity
Get PDFWe present improved approximation algorithms for some problems in the related areas of Capacitated Network Design and Flexible Graph Connectivity.
In the Cap-k-ECSS problem, we are given a graph G = (V,E) whose edges have non-negative costs and positive integer capacities, and the goal is to find a minimum-cost edge-set F such that every non-trivial cut of the graph G' = (V,F) has capacity at least k. Let n = |V| and let u_{min} (respectively, u_{max}) denote the minimum (respectively, maximum) capacity of an edge; assume that u_{max} ≤ k. We present an O(log({k}/u_{min}))-approximation algorithm for the Cap-k-ECSS problem, asymptotically improving upon the previous best approximation ratio of min(O(log{n}), k, 2u_{max}, 6 ⋅ {⌈ k/u_{min} ⌉}) whenever log(k/u_{min}) = o(log{n}) and u_{max} is sufficiently large.
In the (p,q)-Flexible Graph Connectivity problem, denoted (p,q)-FGC, the input is a graph G = (V, E) where E is partitioned into safe and unsafe edges, and the goal is to find a minimum-cost edge-set F such that the subgraph G' = (V, F) remains p-edge connected upon removal of any q unsafe edges from F. We present an 8-approximation algorithm for the (1,q)-FGC problem that improves upon the previous best approximation ratio of (q+1).
Both of our results are obtained by using natural LP relaxations strengthened with the knapsack-cover inequalities, and then, during the rounding process, utilizing a recent O(1)-approximation algorithm for the Cover Small Cuts problem. In the latter problem, the goal is to find a minimum-cost set of links such that each non-trivial cut of capacity less than a specified value is covered by a link. We also show that the problem of covering small cuts inherently arises in another variant of (p,q)-FGC. Specifically, we give Cook reductions that preserve approximation ratios within O(1) factors between the (2,q)-FGC problem and the 2-Cover Small Cuts problem; in the latter problem, each small cut needs to be covered by two links
Guessing Efficiently for Constrained Subspace Approximation
Get PDFIn this paper we study constrained subspace approximation problem. Given a set of n points {a₁,…,a_n} in ℝ^d, the goal of the subspace approximation problem is to find a k dimensional subspace that best approximates the input points. More precisely, for a given p ≥ 1, we aim to minimize the pth power of the _p norm of the error vector (‖a₁-Pa₁‖,…,‖a_n-Pa_n‖), where P denotes the projection matrix onto the subspace and the norms are Euclidean. In constrained subspace approximation (CSA), we additionally have constraints on the projection matrix P. In its most general form, we require P to belong to a given subset that is described explicitly or implicitly.
We introduce a general framework for constrained subspace approximation. Our approach, that we term coreset-guess-solve, yields either (1+ε)-multiplicative or ε-additive approximations for a variety of constraints. We show that it provides new algorithms for partition-constrained subspace approximation with applications to fair subspace approximation, k-means clustering, and projected non-negative matrix factorization, among others. Specifically, while we reconstruct the best known bounds for k-means clustering in Euclidean spaces, we improve the known results for the remainder of the problems
On the Degree Automatability of Sum-Of-Squares Proofs
Get PDFThe Sum-of-Squares (SoS) hierarchy, also known as Lasserre hierarchy, has emerged as a promising tool in optimization. However, it remains unclear whether fixed-degree SoS proofs can be automated [O'Donnell (2017)]. Indeed, there are examples of polynomial systems with bounded coefficients that admit low-degree SoS proofs, but these proofs necessarily involve numbers with an exponential number of bits, implying that low-degree SoS proofs cannot always be found efficiently.
A sufficient condition derived from the Nullstellensatz proof system [Raghavendra and Weitz (2017)] identifies cases where bit complexity issues can be circumvented. One of the main problems left open by Raghavendra and Weitz is proving any result for refutations, as their condition applies only to polynomial systems with a large set of solutions.
In this work, we broaden the class of polynomial systems for which degree-d SoS proofs can be automated. To achieve this, we develop a new criterion and we demonstrate how our criterion applies to polynomial systems beyond the scope of Raghavendra and Weitz’s result. In particular, we establish a separation for instances arising from Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Moreover, our result extends to refutations, establishing that polynomial-time refutation is possible for broad classes of polynomial time solvable constraint problems, highlighting a first advancement in this area
Simultaneously Approximating All Norms for Massively Parallel Correlation Clustering
Get PDFWe revisit the simultaneous approximation model for the correlation clustering problem introduced by Davies, Moseley, and Newman [Davies et al., 2024]. The objective is to find a clustering that minimizes given norms of the disagreement vector over all vertices.
We present an efficient algorithm that produces a clustering that is simultaneously a 63.3-approximation for all monotone symmetric norms. This significantly improves upon the previous approximation ratio of 6348 due to Davies, Moseley, and Newman [Davies et al., 2024], which works only for _p-norms.
To achieve this result, we first reduce the problem to approximating all top-k norms simultaneously, using the connection between monotone symmetric norms and top-k norms established by Chakrabarty and Swamy [Chakrabarty and Swamy, 2019]. Then we develop a novel procedure that constructs a 12.66-approximate fractional clustering for all top-k norms. Our 63.3-approximation ratio is obtained by combining this with the 5-approximate rounding algorithm by Kalhan, Makarychev, and Zhou [Kalhan et al., 2019].
We then demonstrate that with a loss of ε in the approximation ratio, the algorithm can be adapted to run in nearly linear time and in the MPC (massively parallel computation) model with poly-logarithmic number of rounds.
By allowing a further trade-off in the approximation ratio to (359+ε), the number of MPC rounds can be reduced to a constant