Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

10-24-2024

Publication Title

ESEM '24: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

Pages

13-24

Publisher Name

ACM

Abstract

Background: Collaborative Software Package Registries (SPRs) are an integral part of the software supply chain. Much engineering work synthesizes SPR package into applications. Prior research has examined SPRs for traditional software, such as NPM (JavaScript) and PyPI (Python). Pre-Trained Model (PTM) Registries are an emerging class of SPR of increasing importance, because they support the deep learning supply chain.
Aims: Recent empirical research has examined PTM registries in ways such as vulnerabilities, reuse processes, and evolution. However, no existing research synthesizes them to provide a systematic understanding of the current knowledge. Some of the existing research includes qualitative claims lacking quantitative analysis. Our research fills these gaps by providing a knowledge synthesis and quantitative analyses.
Methods: We first conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). We then observe that some of the claims are qualitative. We identify quantifiable metrics associated with those claims, and measure in order to substantiate these claims.
Results: From our SLR, we identify 12 claims about PTM reuse on the HuggingFace platform, 4 of which lack quantitative validation. We successfully test 3 of these claims through a quantitative analysis, and directly compare one with traditional software. Our findings corroborate qualitative claims with quantitative measurements. Our findings are: (1) PTMs have a much higher turnover rate than traditional software, indicating a dynamic and rapidly evolving reuse environment within the PTM ecosystem; and (2) There is a strong correlation between documentation quality and PTM popularity.
Conclusions: We confirm qualitative research claims with concrete metrics, supporting prior qualitative and case study research. Our measures show further dynamics of PTM reuse, inspiring research infrastructure and new measures.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author(s), 2024. This article is posted here by permission of ACM for personal use and redistribution. This article was published open access in ESEM '24: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, (October 24, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1145/3674805.3686665.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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