Forge 2025

The special event of AI Foundation Models and Software Engineering (FORGE 2025) in ICSE 2025 aims to bring researchers, practitioners, and educators from the AI and Software Engineering community together to solve the new challenges that we meet in the era of foundation models.

Research Papers: Call for Papers

The special event of AI Foundation Models and Software Engineering (FORGE 2025) in ICSE 2025 aims to bring researchers, practitioners, and educators from the AI and Software Engineering community to solve the new challenges that we meet in the era of foundation models.

Foundation models (e.g., ChatGPT and Llama) have attracted great attention from both academia and industry. In Software Engineering, several studies showed that Large-Language Models (LLMs) achieved remarkable performance in various tasks, including code generation, testing, code review, and program repair. Recently, many LLM-based development tools have been released to improve software development and show great potential, for example, GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer.

FORGE aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to explore new frontiers in using foundation models on SE tasks, boost software development productivity, and improve code quality.

FORGE 2025 will be held on Sun 27 - Mon 28 April 2025, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Topic of Interests

We solicit submissions describing original and unpublished results of theoretical, empirical, conceptual, and experimental software engineering research related to Software Engineering with Foundation Models. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

1. FM for Requirement Engineering and Software Design
2. FM for Code Generation/Reuse
3. FM for Software Quality Assurance (e.g., including code review, analysis, testing, and debugging)
4. FM to support software evolution (e.g., refactoring, technical debt management)
5. FM for Software Security and Privacy
6. FM for AIOps
7. FM for software supply chain management, e.g., FM-based vulnerability identification, software composition analysis
8. LLM Agents for SE tasks, e.g., how to use various FMs (e.g., LangChain) to complete a SE task.
9. Prompt Engineering for Software Development
10. Legal Aspects of using FM

Awards

The best papers will be awarded with an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FORGE.

How to Submit

We accept both full and new idea papers:

1. Full Papers are expected to present new techniques, and/or provide research results, and/or report industry/open-source practice when applying foundation models for SE, and should be evaluated in a scientific way. Full Paper must not exceed 10 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.
2. New Idea Papers should present new ideas in the field, e.g., new directions or techniques that are not yet fully developed and/or evaluated, or visions that show the future of AI foundation models and SE. Accepted new idea papers will present their ideas in a short lightning talk. New Idea Paper must not exceed 4 pages for the main text, inclusive of all figures, tables, appendices, etc. Two more pages containing only references are permitted.

All submissions must be in PDF. The page limit is strict, and it will not be possible to purchase additional pages at any point in the process (including after acceptance).

Submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Note, we use double-anonymous reviewing. Be sure to remove the list of authors from the submitted paper. If citing your own prior work, please do so in the third person to obscure the relationship you have with it. For advice, guidance, and explanation about the double-anonymous review process, see ICSE Research Track’s Q&A page.

All papers must be written in English. The authors are strongly encouraged to use the HotCRP format checker on their submissions. Note that the format checker is not perfect. In particular, it can complain about small fonts in figures, footnotes, or references. As long as the main text follows the requested format, and the figures are readable, the paper will not be rejected for format violations. If you have any concerns, please contact the program chairs.

All papers should be made accessible to people with disabilities. Some guidelines from the SIGACCESS community are available here: https://assets21.sigaccess.org/creating_accessible_pdfs.html.

Please submit your paper on HotCRP: https://forge2025.hotcrp.com/.

Review Criteria

Following the review criteria of ICSE 2025, each paper submitted to the FORGE 2025 will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

1. Novelty: The novelty and innovativeness of contributed solutions, problem formulations, methodologies, theories, and/or evaluations, i.e., the extent to which the paper is sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art.
2. Rigor: The soundness, clarity, and depth of a technical or theoretical contribution, and the level of thoroughness and completeness of an evaluation.
3. Relevance: The significance and/or potential impact of the research on the field of software engineering.
4. Verifiability and Transparency: The extent to which the paper includes sufficient information to understand how an innovation works; to understand how data was obtained, analyzed, and interpreted; and how the paper supports independent verification or replication of the paper’s claimed contributions. Any artifacts attached to or linked from the paper will be checked by one reviewer.
5. Presentation: The clarity of the exposition in the paper.

Reviewers will carefully consider all of the above criteria during the review process, and authors should take great care in clearly addressing them all. The paper should clearly explain and justify the claimed contributions. Each paper will be handled by an area chair who will ensure reviewing consistency among papers submitted within that area.