EASE 2025
Tue 17 - Fri 20 June 2025 Istanbul, Turkey
Fri 20 Jun 2025 13:55 - 14:05 at Senate Hall - API Chair(s): Vesna Nowack

Third-party libraries (TPLs) have become an integral part of modern software development, enhancing developer productivity and accelerating time-to-market. However, identifying suitable candidates from a rapidly growing and continuously evolving collection of TPLs remains a challenging task. TPL recommender systems have been studied, offering a promising solution to address this issue. They typically rely on collaborative filtering (CF) that exploits a two-dimensional project-library matrix (user-item in general context of recommendation) when making recommendations. We have noticed that CF-based approaches often encounter two challenges: (i) a tendency to recommend popular items more frequently, making them even more dominant, a phenomenon known as popularity bias, and (ii) difficulty in generating recommendations for new users or items due to limited user-item interactions, commonly referred to as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based approach to address popularity bias and the cold-start problem in TPL recommendation. Our method comprises three key components. First, we utilize a graph convolution network (GCN)-based embedding model to learn user preferences and user-item interactions, allowing us to capture complex relationships within interaction subgraphs and effectively represent new user/item embeddings. Second, we introduce an aggregation operator to generate a representative embedding from user and item embeddings, which is then used to model cold-start users. Finally, we adopt a model-based RL framework for TPL recommendation, where popularity bias is mitigated through a carefully designed reward function and a rarity-based replay buffer partitioning strategy. The results demonstrated that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in cold-start scenarios while effectively mitigating the impact of popularity bias.

Fri 20 Jun

Displayed time zone: Athens change

13:30 - 15:00
13:30
15m
Talk
Version-level Third-Party Library Detection in Android Applications via Class Structural Similarity
Research Papers
Bolin Zhou Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingzheng Wu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiang Ling Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianyue Luo Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingkun Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Pre-print
13:45
10m
Short-paper
Analyzing the Usage of Donation Platforms for PyPI Libraries
Short Papers, Emerging Results
Link to publication Pre-print
13:55
10m
Talk
Bake Two Cakes with One Oven: RL for Defusing Popularity Bias and Cold-start in Third-Party Library Recommendations
Short Papers, Emerging Results
Hoang Minh Vuong Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Anh M. T. Bui Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila, Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila
Pre-print
14:05
10m
Talk
Identifying Critical Dependencies in Large-Scale Continuous Software Engineering
Short Papers, Emerging Results
Anastasiia Tkalich SINTEF, Eriks Klotins Blekinge Institute of Technology, Nils Brede Moe Sintef
Pre-print
14:15
15m
Talk
Large Language Models for API Classification: An Explorative Study
AI Models / Data
Gabriel Morais UQAR, Edwin Lemelin Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR) - Université Laval, Mehdi Adda Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR), Dominik Bork TU Wien, Vienna, Austria
Pre-print
14:30
15m
Talk
Understanding API Usage and Testing: An Empirical Study of C Libraries
Research Papers
Ahmed Zaki Imperial College London, Cristian Cadar Imperial College London