Ant Group and HKUST Win ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award for 'Complexity‑guided Container Replacement Synthesis' at OOPSLA 2022

Recently, the top conference in object‑oriented programming languages, OOPSLA, announced its paper acceptance results, and a paper co‑authored by Ant Group and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, becoming the only Chinese paper to earn this honor at OOPSLA 2022.

The ACM International Conference on Object‑Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) is a major annual ACM event focusing on language design (including extensions, type systems, semantics, and logic), supporting environments (such as compilers and runtime technologies), and applications (like program analysis, verification, and synthesis).

The award‑winning paper, titled “Complexity‑guided Container Replacement Synthesis,” is based on real business scenarios from Ant Group and aims to improve program execution efficiency while saving computational resources.

Improper container usage is common in Java (e.g., using LinkedList for random access). Although the program’s functional correctness remains intact, such choices introduce unnecessary complexity and waste resources. To address this, the paper proposes the Cres method, which uses program synthesis to replace container types with more efficient alternatives, avoiding performance problems caused by unsuitable list or map selections.

Cres employs static analysis to identify how containers are used in a program and attempts to select lower‑time‑complexity methods for each container call, preserving original behavior while reducing execution time. Evaluation on twelve real‑world Java projects shows an average runtime improvement of 8.1% after container replacement. Notably, Cres can analyze a 384.2 KLoC project in about 14 minutes. The algorithm is implemented on Ant Group’s code‑analysis platform Pinpoint and has already been merged into the Pinpoint project, delivering practical value.

Cres synthesis algorithm flowchart

According to incomplete statistics, fewer than ten Chinese papers have ever received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award at major international programming‑language conferences, highlighting the significance of Ant Group’s achievement and the progress of domestic enterprises in this field.

Public data shows that Ant Group’s annual research‑fund investment grew at an average rate of over 39% from 2018 to 2021, exceeding 18.8 billion RMB in 2021, and the company established the Ant Technology Research Institute to intensify exploration and research of frontier scientific and technological areas.