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  1. Background: Software Package Registries (SPRs) are an integral part of the software supply chain. These collaborative platforms unite contributors, users, and packages, and they streamline pack- age management. Much engineering work focuses on synthesizing packages from SPRs into a downstream project. Prior work has thoroughly characterized the SPRs associated with traditional soft- ware, 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: A growing body of empirical research has examined PTM registries from various angles, such as vulnerabilities, reuse processes, and evolution. However, no existing research synthesizes them to provide a systematic understanding of the current knowledge. Furthermore, much of the existing research includes unsupported qualitative claims and lacks sufficient quantitative analysis. Our research aims to fill these gaps by providing a thorough knowledge synthesis and use it to inform further quantitative analysis. Methods: To consolidate existing knowledge on PTM reuse, we first conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). We then observe that some of the claims are qualitative and lack quantitative evidence. 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 two most notable findings are: (1) PTMs have a significantly 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: Our findings validate several qual- stative research claims with concrete metrics, confirming prior qualitative and case study research. Our measures show further dynamics of PTM reuse, motivating further research infrastructure and new kinds of measurements. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 15, 2025
  2. The development and training of deep learning models have become increasingly costly and complex. Consequently, software engineers are adopting pre-trained models (PTMs) for their downstream applications. The dynamics of the PTM supply chain remain largely unexplored, signaling a clear need for structured datasets that document not only the metadata but also the subsequent applications of these models. Without such data, the MSR community cannot comprehensively understand the impact of PTM adoption and reuse. This paper presents the PeaTMOSS dataset, which comprises metadata for 281,638 PTMs and detailed snapshots for all PTMs with over 50 monthly downloads (14,296 PTMs), along with 28,575 open-source software repositories from GitHub that utilize these models. Additionally, the dataset includes 44,337 mappings from 15,129 downstream GitHub repositories to the 2,530 PTMs they use. To enhance the dataset’s comprehensiveness, we developed prompts for a large language model to automatically extract model metadata, including the model’s training datasets, parameters, and evaluation metrics. Our analysis of this dataset provides the first summary statistics for the PTM supply chain, showing the trend of PTM development and common shortcomings of PTM package documentation. Our example application reveals inconsistencies in software licenses across PTMs and their dependent projects. PeaTMOSS lays the foundation for future research, offering rich opportunities to investigate the PTM supply chain. We outline mining opportunities on PTMs, their downstream usage, and cross-cutting questions. Our artifact is available at https://github.com/PurdueDualityLab/PeaTMOSS-Artifact. Our dataset is available at https://transfer.rcac.purdue.edu/file-manager?origin_id=ff978999-16c2-4b50-ac7a-947ffdc3eb1d&origin_path=%2F. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 16, 2025
  3. Zero Involvement Pairing and Authentication (ZIPA) is a promising technique for autoprovisioning large networks of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In this work, we present the first successful signal injection attack on a ZIPA system. Most existing ZIPA systems assume there is a negligible amount of influence from the unsecured outside space on the secured inside space. In reality, environmental signals do leak from adjacent unsecured spaces and influence the environment of the secured space. Our attack takes advantage of this fact to perform a signal injection attack on the popular Schurmann & Sigg algorithm. The keys generated by the adversary with a signal injection attack at 95 dBA is within the standard error of the legitimate device. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 13, 2025
  4. Computer vision often uses highly accurate Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but these deep learning models are associated with ever-increasing energy and computation requirements. Producing more energy-efficient CNNs often requires model training which can be cost-prohibitive. We propose a novel, automated method to make a pretrained CNN more energyefficient without re-training. Given a pretrained CNN, we insert a threshold layer that filters activations from the preceding layers to identify regions of the image that are irrelevant, i.e. can be ignored by the following layers while maintaining accuracy. Our modified focused convolution operation saves inference latency (by up to 25%) and energy costs (by up to 22%) on various popular pretrained CNNs, with little to no loss in accuracy 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 22, 2025
  5. Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on many tasks, but require increasingly complex architectures and costly training procedures. Engineers can reduce costs by reusing a pre-trained model (PTM) and fine-tuning it for their own tasks. To facilitate software reuse, engineers collaborate around model hubs, collections of PTMs and datasets organized by problem domain. Although model hubs are now comparable in popularity and size to other software ecosystems, the associated PTM supply chain has not yet been examined from a software engineering perspective. We present an empirical study of artifacts and security features in 8 model hubs. We indicate the potential threat models and show that the existing defenses are insufficient for ensuring the security of PTMs. We compare PTM and traditional supply chains, and propose directions for further measurements and tools to increase the reliability of the PTM supply chain. 
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  6. Software metrics capture information about software development processes and products. These metrics support decision-making, e.g., in team management or dependency selection. However, existing metrics tools measure only a snapshot of a software project. Little attention has been given to enabling engineers to reason about metric trends over time—longitudinal metrics that give insight about process, not just product. In thiswork,we present PRIME (PRocess MEtrics), a tool to compute and visualize process metrics. The currently-supported metrics include productivity, issue density, issue spoilage, and bus factor.We illustrate the value of longitudinal data and conclude with a research agenda. The tool’s demo video can be watched at https://bit.ly/ase2022-prime. Source code can be found at https://github.com/SoftwareSystemsLaboratory/prime. 
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