LLMs in Mobile Apps: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities

The integration of AI techniques has become increasingly popular in software development, enhancing performance, usability, and the availability of intelligent features. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, developers now have access to a wealth of high-quality open-source models and APIs from closed-source providers, enabling easier experimentation and integration of LLMs into various systems. This has also opened new possibilities in mobile application (app) development, allowing for more personalized and intelligent apps. However, integrating LLM into mobile apps might present unique challenges for developers, particularly regarding mobile device constraints, API management, and code infrastructure. In this project, we constructed a comprehensive dataset of 149 LLM-enabled Android apps and conducted an exploratory analysis to understand how LLMs are deployed and used within mobile apps. This analysis highlights key characteristics of the dataset, prevalent integration strategies, and common challenges developers face. Our findings provide valuable insights for future research and tooling development aimed at enhancing LLM-enabled mobile apps.

Unraveling Code Clone Dynamics in Deep Learning Frameworks

Deep Learning (DL) frameworks play a critical role in advancing artificial intelligence, and their rapid growth underscores the need for a comprehensive understanding of software quality and maintainability. DL frameworks, like other systems, are prone to code clones. Code clones refer to identical or highly similar source code fragments within the same project or even across different projects. Code cloning can have positive and negative implications for software development, influencing maintenance, readability, and bug propagation. In this paper, we aim to address the knowledge gap concerning the evolutionary dimension of code clones in DL frameworks and the extent of code reuse across these frameworks. We empirically analyze code clones in nine popular DL frameworks, i.e., TensorFlow, Paddle, PyTorch, Aesara, Ray, MXNet, Keras, Jax and BentoML, to investigate (1) the characteristics of the long-term code cloning evolution over releases in each framework, (2) the short-term, i.e., within-release, code cloning patterns and their influence on the long-term trends, and (3) the file-level code clones within the DL frameworks. Our findings reveal that DL frameworks adopt four distinct cloning trends and that these trends present some common and distinct characteristics. For instance, bug-fixing activities persistently happen in clones irrespective of the clone evolutionary trend but occur more in the "Serpentine" trend. Moreover, the within release level investigation demonstrates that short-term code cloning practices impact long-term cloning trends. The cross-framework code clone investigation reveals the presence of functional and architectural adaptation file-level cross-framework code clones across the nine studied frameworks. We provide insights that foster robust clone practices and collaborative maintenance in the development of DL frameworks.