MSR 2026
Mon 13 - Tue 14 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
co-located with ICSE 2026

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr 2026 15:00 - 15:10 at Oceania V - Session 2-A: Ecosystems & Methods

The advent of transformer-based language models has reshaped how AI systems process and generate text. In software engineering (SE), these models now support diverse activities, accelerating automation and decision-making. Yet, evidence shows that these models can reproduce or amplify social biases, raising fairness concerns. Recent work on neuron editing has shown that internal activations in pre-trained transformers can be traced and modified to alter model behavior. Building on the concept of \textit{knowledge neurons}-neurons that encode factual information-we hypothesize the existence of \textit{biased neurons} that capture stereotypical associations within pre-trained transformers.

To test this hypothesis, we build a dataset of \textit{biased relations}, i.e., triplets encoding stereotypes across nine bias types, and adapt neuron attribution strategies to trace and suppress biased neurons in \textit{BERT} models. We then assess the impact of suppression on SE tasks. Our findings show that biased knowledge is localized within small neuron subsets, and suppressing them substantially reduces bias with minimal performance loss. This demonstrates that bias in transformers can be traced and mitigated at the neuron level, offering an interpretable approach to fairness in SE.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 14 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

14:00 - 15:30
Session 2-A: Ecosystems & MethodsTechnical Papers / Industry Track / MSR Program at Oceania V
14:00
10m
Talk
Analyzing GitHub Issues and Pull Requests in nf-core Pipelines: Insights into nf-core Pipeline Repositories
Technical Papers
Khairul Alam University of Saskatchewan, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan
14:10
10m
Talk
Modeling Sampling Workflows for Code Repositories
Technical Papers
Romain Lefeuvre University of Rennes, Maiwenn Le Goasteller University of Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, Jessie Galasso-Carbonnel McGill University, Benoit Combemale University of Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, Quentin Perez INSA Rennes, Houari Sahraoui DIRO, Université de Montréal
14:20
10m
Talk
Quantifying Competitive Relationships Among Open-Source Software Projects
Technical Papers
Yuki Takei Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Toshiaki Aoki JAIST, Chaiyong Rakhitwetsagul Mahidol University, Thailand
Pre-print
14:30
10m
Talk
Role of CI Adoption in Mobile App Success: An Empirical Study of Open-Source Android Projects
Technical Papers
xiaoxin zhou University of Toronto, Taher A. Ghaleb Trent University, Safwat Hassan University of Toronto
Pre-print
14:40
10m
Talk
ML in a Box: Analyzing Containerization Practices in Open Source ML Projects
Technical Papers
Faten Jebari Grand Valley State University, Emna Ksontini University of North Carolina Wilmington, Amine Barrak Oakland University, USA, Wael Kessentini DePaul University
14:50
10m
Talk
An Empirical Study of Policy as Code: Adoption, Purpose, and Maintenance
Technical Papers
Ruben Opdebeeck Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Mahmoud Alfadel University of Calgary, Akond Rahman Auburn University, Yutaro Kashiwa Nara Institute of Science and Technology, João F. Ferreira Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto & INESC-ID, Raula Gaikovina Kula The University of Osaka, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pre-print
15:00
10m
Talk
Tracing Stereotypes in Pre-trained Transformers: From Biased Neurons to Fairer Models
Technical Papers
Gianmario Voria University of Salerno, Moses Openja Polytechnique Montreal, Foutse Khomh Polytechnique Montréal, Gemma Catolino University of Salerno, Fabio Palomba University of Salerno
Pre-print
15:10
5m
Industry talk
Can Data Mining Help to Survive the Annual Compiler Upgrade?
Industry Track
Gunnar Kudrjavets Amazon Web Services, USA, Aditya Kumar Google, Piotr Przymus Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland
Pre-print
15:15
5m
Talk
Underutilization in Research GPU Clusters: SE Challenges
Industry Track
Krzysztof Kaczmarski Warsaw University of Technology, Jakub Narębski Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Piotr Przymus Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland