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Dec 26

Frustrated with Code Quality Issues? LLMs can Help!

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality issues. However, developers need to spend extra efforts to revise their code to improve code quality based on the tool findings. In this work, we investigate the use of (instruction-following) large language models (LLMs) to assist developers in revising code to resolve code quality issues. We present a tool, CORE (short for COde REvisions), architected using a pair of LLMs organized as a duo comprised of a proposer and a ranker. Providers of static analysis tools recommend ways to mitigate the tool warnings and developers follow them to revise their code. The proposer LLM of CORE takes the same set of recommendations and applies them to generate candidate code revisions. The candidates which pass the static quality checks are retained. However, the LLM may introduce subtle, unintended functionality changes which may go un-detected by the static analysis. The ranker LLM evaluates the changes made by the proposer using a rubric that closely follows the acceptance criteria that a developer would enforce. CORE uses the scores assigned by the ranker LLM to rank the candidate revisions before presenting them to the developer. CORE could revise 59.2% Python files (across 52 quality checks) so that they pass scrutiny by both a tool and a human reviewer. The ranker LLM is able to reduce false positives by 25.8% in these cases. CORE produced revisions that passed the static analysis tool in 76.8% Java files (across 10 quality checks) comparable to 78.3% of a specialized program repair tool, with significantly much less engineering efforts.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023

PyRadar: Towards Automatically Retrieving and Validating Source Code Repository Information for PyPI Packages

A package's source code repository records the development history of the package, providing indispensable information for the use and risk monitoring of the package. However, a package release often misses its source code repository due to the separation of the package's development platform from its distribution platform. Existing tools retrieve the release's repository information from its metadata, which suffers from two limitations: the metadata may not contain or contain wrong information. Our analysis shows that existing tools can only retrieve repository information for up to 70.5% of PyPI releases. To address the limitations, this paper proposes PyRadar, a novel framework that utilizes the metadata and source distribution to retrieve and validate the repository information for PyPI releases. We start with an empirical study to compare four existing tools on 4,227,425 PyPI releases and analyze phantom files (files appearing in the release's distribution but not in the release's repository) in 14,375 correct package-repository links and 2,064 incorrect links. Based on the findings, we design PyRadar with three components, i.e., Metadata-based Retriever, Source Code Repository Validator, and Source Code-based Retriever. In particular, the Metadata-based Retriever combines best practices of existing tools and successfully retrieves repository information from the metadata for 72.1% of PyPI releases. The Source Code Repository Validator applies common machine learning algorithms on six crafted features and achieves an AUC of up to 0.995. The Source Code-based Retriever queries World of Code with the SHA-1 hashes of all Python files in the release's source distribution and retrieves repository information for 90.2% of packages in our dataset with an accuracy of 0.970. Both practitioners and researchers can employ the PyRadar to better use PyPI packages.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024

Learning and Evaluating Contextual Embedding of Source Code

Recent research has achieved impressive results on understanding and improving source code by building up on machine-learning techniques developed for natural languages. A significant advancement in natural-language understanding has come with the development of pre-trained contextual embeddings, such as BERT, which can be fine-tuned for downstream tasks with less labeled data and training budget, while achieving better accuracies. However, there is no attempt yet to obtain a high-quality contextual embedding of source code, and to evaluate it on multiple program-understanding tasks simultaneously; that is the gap that this paper aims to mitigate. Specifically, first, we curate a massive, deduplicated corpus of 7.4M Python files from GitHub, which we use to pre-train CuBERT, an open-sourced code-understanding BERT model; and, second, we create an open-sourced benchmark that comprises five classification tasks and one program-repair task, akin to code-understanding tasks proposed in the literature before. We fine-tune CuBERT on our benchmark tasks, and compare the resulting models to different variants of Word2Vec token embeddings, BiLSTM and Transformer models, as well as published state-of-the-art models, showing that CuBERT outperforms them all, even with shorter training, and with fewer labeled examples. Future work on source-code embedding can benefit from reusing our benchmark, and from comparing against CuBERT models as a strong baseline.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 21, 2019

Gen2Sim: Scaling up Robot Learning in Simulation with Generative Models

Generalist robot manipulators need to learn a wide variety of manipulation skills across diverse environments. Current robot training pipelines rely on humans to provide kinesthetic demonstrations or to program simulation environments and to code up reward functions for reinforcement learning. Such human involvement is an important bottleneck towards scaling up robot learning across diverse tasks and environments. We propose Generation to Simulation (Gen2Sim), a method for scaling up robot skill learning in simulation by automating generation of 3D assets, task descriptions, task decompositions and reward functions using large pre-trained generative models of language and vision. We generate 3D assets for simulation by lifting open-world 2D object-centric images to 3D using image diffusion models and querying LLMs to determine plausible physics parameters. Given URDF files of generated and human-developed assets, we chain-of-thought prompt LLMs to map these to relevant task descriptions, temporal decompositions, and corresponding python reward functions for reinforcement learning. We show Gen2Sim succeeds in learning policies for diverse long horizon tasks, where reinforcement learning with non temporally decomposed reward functions fails. Gen2Sim provides a viable path for scaling up reinforcement learning for robot manipulators in simulation, both by diversifying and expanding task and environment development, and by facilitating the discovery of reinforcement-learned behaviors through temporal task decomposition in RL. Our work contributes hundreds of simulated assets, tasks and demonstrations, taking a step towards fully autonomous robotic manipulation skill acquisition in simulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 27, 2023

PyBench: Evaluating LLM Agent on various real-world coding tasks

The LLM Agent, equipped with a code interpreter, is capable of automatically solving real-world coding tasks, such as data analysis and image editing. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on either simplistic tasks, such as completing a few lines of code, or on extremely complex and specific tasks at the repository level, neither of which are representative of various daily coding tasks. To address this gap, we introduce PyBench, a benchmark encompassing five main categories of real-world tasks, covering more than 10 types of files. Given a high-level user query and related files, the LLM Agent needs to reason and execute Python code via a code interpreter for a few turns before making a formal response to fulfill the user's requirements. Successfully addressing tasks in PyBench demands a robust understanding of various Python packages, superior reasoning capabilities, and the ability to incorporate feedback from executed code. Our evaluations indicate that current open-source LLMs are struggling with these tasks. Hence, we conduct analysis and experiments on four kinds of datasets proving that comprehensive abilities are needed for PyBench. Our fine-tuned 8B size model: PyLlama3 achieves an exciting performance on PyBench which surpasses many 33B and 70B size models. Our Benchmark, Training Dataset, and Model are available at: https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench{https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench}

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024

Computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks from biomedical publications

Jupyter notebooks facilitate the bundling of executable code with its documentation and output in one interactive environment, and they represent a popular mechanism to document and share computational workflows. The reproducibility of computational aspects of research is a key component of scientific reproducibility but has not yet been assessed at scale for Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. We address computational reproducibility at two levels: First, using fully automated workflows, we analyzed the computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks related to publications indexed in PubMed Central. We identified such notebooks by mining the articles full text, locating them on GitHub and re-running them in an environment as close to the original as possible. We documented reproduction success and exceptions and explored relationships between notebook reproducibility and variables related to the notebooks or publications. Second, this study represents a reproducibility attempt in and of itself, using essentially the same methodology twice on PubMed Central over two years. Out of 27271 notebooks from 2660 GitHub repositories associated with 3467 articles, 22578 notebooks were written in Python, including 15817 that had their dependencies declared in standard requirement files and that we attempted to re-run automatically. For 10388 of these, all declared dependencies could be installed successfully, and we re-ran them to assess reproducibility. Of these, 1203 notebooks ran through without any errors, including 879 that produced results identical to those reported in the original notebook and 324 for which our results differed from the originally reported ones. Running the other notebooks resulted in exceptions. We zoom in on common problems, highlight trends and discuss potential improvements to Jupyter-related workflows associated with biomedical publications.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

CAT-LM: Training Language Models on Aligned Code And Tests

Testing is an integral part of the software development process. Yet, writing tests is time-consuming and therefore often neglected. Classical test generation tools such as EvoSuite generate behavioral test suites by optimizing for coverage, but tend to produce tests that are hard to understand. Language models trained on code can generate code that is highly similar to that written by humans, but current models are trained to generate each file separately, as is standard practice in natural language processing, and thus fail to consider the code-under-test context when producing a test file. In this work, we propose the Aligned Code And Tests Language Model (CAT-LM), a GPT-style language model with 2.7 Billion parameters, trained on a corpus of Python and Java projects. We utilize a novel pretraining signal that explicitly considers the mapping between code and test files when available. We also drastically increase the maximum sequence length of inputs to 8,192 tokens, 4x more than typical code generation models, to ensure that the code context is available to the model when generating test code. We analyze its usefulness for realistic applications, showing that sampling with filtering (e.g., by compilability, coverage) allows it to efficiently produce tests that achieve coverage similar to ones written by developers while resembling their writing style. By utilizing the code context, CAT-LM generates more valid tests than even much larger language models trained with more data (CodeGen 16B and StarCoder) and substantially outperforms a recent test-specific model (TeCo) at test completion. Overall, our work highlights the importance of incorporating software-specific insights when training language models for code and paves the way to more powerful automated test generation.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks

Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

A Systematic Literature Review of Software Engineering Research on Jupyter Notebook

Context: Jupyter Notebook has emerged as a versatile tool that transforms how researchers, developers, and data scientists conduct and communicate their work. As the adoption of Jupyter notebooks continues to rise, so does the interest from the software engineering research community in improving the software engineering practices for Jupyter notebooks. Objective: The purpose of this study is to analyze trends, gaps, and methodologies used in software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks. Method: We selected 146 relevant publications from the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography up to the end of 2024, following established systematic literature review guidelines. We explored publication trends, categorized them based on software engineering topics, and reported findings based on those topics. Results: The most popular venues for publishing software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks are related to human-computer interaction instead of traditional software engineering venues. Researchers have addressed a wide range of software engineering topics on notebooks, such as code reuse, readability, and execution environment. Although reusability is one of the research topics for Jupyter notebooks, only 64 of the 146 studies can be reused based on their provided URLs. Additionally, most replication packages are not hosted on permanent repositories for long-term availability and adherence to open science principles. Conclusion: Solutions specific to notebooks for software engineering issues, including testing, refactoring, and documentation, are underexplored. Future research opportunities exist in automatic testing frameworks, refactoring clones between notebooks, and generating group documentation for coherent code cells.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 22

CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models

Despite the substantial success of Information Retrieval (IR) in various NLP tasks, most IR systems predominantly handle queries and corpora in natural language, neglecting the domain of code retrieval. Code retrieval is critically important yet remains under-explored, with existing methods and benchmarks inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. Addressing this gap, we present \name (Code Information Retrieval Benchmark), a robust and comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. \name comprises ten meticulously curated code datasets, spanning eight distinctive retrieval tasks across seven diverse domains. We first discuss the construction of \name and its diverse dataset composition. Further, we evaluate nine widely used retrieval models using \name, uncovering significant difficulties in performing code retrieval tasks even with state-of-the-art systems. To facilitate easy adoption and integration within existing research workflows, \name has been developed as a user-friendly Python framework, readily installable via pip. It shares same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR, enabling seamless cross-benchmark evaluations. Through \name, we aim to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain, providing a versatile benchmarking tool that encourages further development and exploration of code retrieval systems\url{ https://github.com/CoIR-team/coir}.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

Pop Quiz! Do Pre-trained Code Models Possess Knowledge of Correct API Names?

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Towards Automatic Translation of Machine Learning Visual Insights to Analytical Assertions

We present our vision for developing an automated tool capable of translating visual properties observed in Machine Learning (ML) visualisations into Python assertions. The tool aims to streamline the process of manually verifying these visualisations in the ML development cycle, which is critical as real-world data and assumptions often change post-deployment. In a prior study, we mined 54,070 Jupyter notebooks from Github and created a catalogue of 269 semantically related visualisation-assertion (VA) pairs. Building on this catalogue, we propose to build a taxonomy that organises the VA pairs based on ML verification tasks. The input feature space comprises of a rich source of information mined from the Jupyter notebooks -- visualisations, Python source code, and associated markdown text. The effectiveness of various AI models, including traditional NLP4Code models and modern Large Language Models, will be compared using established machine translation metrics and evaluated through a qualitative study with human participants. The paper also plans to address the challenge of extending the existing VA pair dataset with additional pairs from Kaggle and to compare the tool's effectiveness with commercial generative AI models like ChatGPT. This research not only contributes to the field of ML system validation but also explores novel ways to leverage AI for automating and enhancing software engineering practices in ML.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 15, 2024

PyGen: A Collaborative Human-AI Approach to Python Package Creation

The principles of automation and innovation serve as foundational elements for advancement in contemporary science and technology. Here, we introduce Pygen, an automation platform designed to empower researchers, technologists, and hobbyists to bring abstract ideas to life as core, usable software tools written in Python. Pygen leverages the immense power of autoregressive large language models to augment human creativity during the ideation, iteration, and innovation process. By combining state-of-the-art language models with open-source code generation technologies, Pygen has significantly reduced the manual overhead of tool development. From a user prompt, Pygen automatically generates Python packages for a complete workflow from concept to package generation and documentation. The findings of our work show that Pygen considerably enhances the researcher's productivity by enabling the creation of resilient, modular, and well-documented packages for various specialized purposes. We employ a prompt enhancement approach to distill the user's package description into increasingly specific and actionable. While being inherently an open-ended task, we have evaluated the generated packages and the documentation using Human Evaluation, LLM-based evaluation, and CodeBLEU, with detailed results in the results section. Furthermore, we documented our results, analyzed the limitations, and suggested strategies to alleviate them. Pygen is our vision of ethical automation, a framework that promotes inclusivity, accessibility, and collaborative development. This project marks the beginning of a large-scale effort towards creating tools where intelligent agents collaborate with humans to improve scientific and technological development substantially. Our code and generated examples are open-sourced at [https://github.com/GitsSaikat/Pygen]

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

MeSH Suggester: A Library and System for MeSH Term Suggestion for Systematic Review Boolean Query Construction

Boolean query construction is often critical for medical systematic review literature search. To create an effective Boolean query, systematic review researchers typically spend weeks coming up with effective query terms and combinations. One challenge to creating an effective systematic review Boolean query is the selection of effective MeSH Terms to include in the query. In our previous work, we created neural MeSH term suggestion methods and compared them to state-of-the-art MeSH term suggestion methods. We found neural MeSH term suggestion methods to be highly effective. In this demonstration, we build upon our previous work by creating (1) a Web-based MeSH term suggestion prototype system that allows users to obtain suggestions from a number of underlying methods and (2) a Python library that implements ours and others' MeSH term suggestion methods and that is aimed at researchers who want to further investigate, create or deploy such type of methods. We describe the architecture of the web-based system and how to use it for the MeSH term suggestion task. For the Python library, we describe how the library can be used for advancing further research and experimentation, and we validate the results of the methods contained in the library on standard datasets. Our web-based prototype system is available at http://ielab-mesh-suggest.uqcloud.net, while our Python library is at https://github.com/ielab/meshsuggestlib.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 18, 2022

GitChameleon: Unmasking the Version-Switching Capabilities of Code Generation Models

The rapid evolution of software libraries presents a significant challenge for code generation models, which must adapt to frequent version updates while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. Existing code completion benchmarks often overlook this dynamic aspect, and the one that does consider it relies on static code prediction tasks without execution-based evaluation, offering a limited perspective on a model's practical usability. To address this gap, we introduce \GitChameleon{}, a novel, manually curated dataset comprising 116 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. is designed to rigorously assess the ability of modern large language models (LLMs) to generate version-specific code that is not only syntactically correct but also functionally accurate upon execution. Our comprehensive evaluations reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with this task; for instance, GPT-4o achieves a pass@10 of only 39.9\% (43.7\% when provided with error feedback), highlighting the complexity of the problem and the limitations of current models. By providing an execution-based benchmark that emphasizes the dynamic nature of code libraries, serves as a critical tool to advance the development of more adaptable and reliable code generation models. For facilitation for further exploration of version-conditioned code generation, we make our code repository publicly accessible at https://github.com/NizarIslah/GitChameleon.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 2

When LLMs Meet API Documentation: Can Retrieval Augmentation Aid Code Generation Just as It Helps Developers?

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has increasingly shown its power in extending large language models' (LLMs') capability beyond their pre-trained knowledge. Existing works have shown that RAG can help with software development tasks such as code generation, code update, and test generation. Yet, the effectiveness of adapting LLMs to fast-evolving or less common API libraries using RAG remains unknown. To bridge this gap, we take an initial step to study this unexplored yet practical setting - when developers code with a less common library, they often refer to its API documentation; likewise, when LLMs are allowed to look up API documentation via RAG, to what extent can LLMs be advanced? To mimic such a setting, we select four less common open-source Python libraries with a total of 1017 eligible APIs. We study the factors that affect the effectiveness of using the documentation of less common API libraries as additional knowledge for retrieval and generation. Our intensive study yields interesting findings: (1) RAG helps improve LLMs' performance by 83%-220%. (2) Example code contributes the most to advance LLMs, instead of the descriptive texts and parameter lists in the API documentation. (3) LLMs could sometimes tolerate mild noises (typos in description or incorrect parameters) by referencing their pre-trained knowledge or document context. Finally, we suggest that developers pay more attention to the quality and diversity of the code examples in the API documentation. The study sheds light on future low-code software development workflows.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 19

An Empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Python Packages and Their Detection

In the rapidly evolving software development landscape, Python stands out for its simplicity, versatility, and extensive ecosystem. Python packages, as units of organization, reusability, and distribution, have become a pressing concern, highlighted by the considerable number of vulnerability reports. As a scripting language, Python often cooperates with other languages for performance or interoperability. This adds complexity to the vulnerabilities inherent to Python packages, and the effectiveness of current vulnerability detection tools remains underexplored. This paper addresses these gaps by introducing PyVul, the first comprehensive benchmark suite of Python-package vulnerabilities. PyVul includes 1,157 publicly reported, developer-verified vulnerabilities, each linked to its affected packages. To accommodate diverse detection techniques, it provides annotations at both commit and function levels. An LLM-assisted data cleansing method is incorporated to improve label accuracy, achieving 100% commit-level and 94% function-level accuracy, establishing PyVul as the most precise large-scale Python vulnerability benchmark. We further carry out a distribution analysis of PyVul, which demonstrates that vulnerabilities in Python packages involve multiple programming languages and exhibit a wide variety of types. Moreover, our analysis reveals that multi-lingual Python packages are potentially more susceptible to vulnerabilities. Evaluation of state-of-the-art detectors using this benchmark reveals a significant discrepancy between the capabilities of existing tools and the demands of effectively identifying real-world security issues in Python packages. Additionally, we conduct an empirical review of the top-ranked CWEs observed in Python packages, to diagnose the fine-grained limitations of current detection tools and highlight the necessity for future advancements in the field.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 4

Syntax-Aware On-the-Fly Code Completion

Code completion aims to help improve developers' productivity by suggesting the next code tokens from a given context. Various approaches have been proposed to incorporate abstract syntax tree (AST) information for model training, ensuring that code completion is aware of the syntax of the programming languages. However, existing syntax-aware code completion approaches are not on-the-fly, as we found that for every two-thirds of characters that developers type, AST fails to be extracted because it requires the syntactically correct source code, limiting its practicality in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, existing on-the-fly code completion does not consider syntactic information yet. In this paper, we propose PyCoder to leverage token types, a kind of lightweight syntactic information, which is readily available and aligns with the natural order of source code. Our PyCoder is trained in a multi-task training manner so that by learning the supporting task of predicting token types during the training phase, the models achieve better performance on predicting tokens and lines of code without the need for token types in the inference phase. Comprehensive experiments show that PyCoder achieves the first rank on the CodeXGLUE leaderboard with an accuracy of 77.12% for the token-level predictions, which is 0.43%-24.25% more accurate than baselines. In addition, PyCoder achieves an exact match of 43.37% for the line-level predictions, which is 3.63%-84.73% more accurate than baselines. These results lead us to conclude that token type information (an alternative to syntactic information) that is rarely used in the past can greatly improve the performance of code completion approaches, without requiring the syntactically correct source code like AST-based approaches do. Our PyCoder is publicly available on HuggingFace.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 8, 2022

LLM Interactive Optimization of Open Source Python Libraries -- Case Studies and Generalization

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, a natural question is the extent to which these models can be utilized for source code optimization. This paper presents methodologically stringent case studies applied to well-known open source python libraries pillow and numpy. We find that contemporary LLM ChatGPT-4 (state September and October 2023) is surprisingly adept at optimizing energy and compute efficiency. However, this is only the case in interactive use, with a human expert in the loop. Aware of experimenter bias, we document our qualitative approach in detail, and provide transcript and source code. We start by providing a detailed description of our approach in conversing with the LLM to optimize the _getextrema function in the pillow library, and a quantitative evaluation of the performance improvement. To demonstrate qualitative replicability, we report further attempts on another locus in the pillow library, and one code locus in the numpy library, to demonstrate generalization within and beyond a library. In all attempts, the performance improvement is significant (factor up to 38). We have also not omitted reporting of failed attempts (there were none). We conclude that LLMs are a promising tool for code optimization in open source libraries, but that the human expert in the loop is essential for success. Nonetheless, we were surprised by how few iterations were required to achieve substantial performance improvements that were not obvious to the expert in the loop. We would like bring attention to the qualitative nature of this study, more robust quantitative studies would need to introduce a layer of selecting experts in a representative sample -- we invite the community to collaborate.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 8, 2023

PyGlove: Symbolic Programming for Automated Machine Learning

Neural networks are sensitive to hyper-parameter and architecture choices. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is a promising paradigm for automating these choices. Current ML software libraries, however, are quite limited in handling the dynamic interactions among the components of AutoML. For example, efficientNAS algorithms, such as ENAS and DARTS, typically require an implementation coupling between the search space and search algorithm, the two key components in AutoML. Furthermore, implementing a complex search flow, such as searching architectures within a loop of searching hardware configurations, is difficult. To summarize, changing the search space, search algorithm, or search flow in current ML libraries usually requires a significant change in the program logic. In this paper, we introduce a new way of programming AutoML based on symbolic programming. Under this paradigm, ML programs are mutable, thus can be manipulated easily by another program. As a result, AutoML can be reformulated as an automated process of symbolic manipulation. With this formulation, we decouple the triangle of the search algorithm, the search space and the child program. This decoupling makes it easy to change the search space and search algorithm (without and with weight sharing), as well as to add search capabilities to existing code and implement complex search flows. We then introduce PyGlove, a new Python library that implements this paradigm. Through case studies on ImageNet and NAS-Bench-101, we show that with PyGlove users can easily convert a static program into a search space, quickly iterate on the search spaces and search algorithms, and craft complex search flows to achieve better results.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 21, 2021

Learning to Mine Aligned Code and Natural Language Pairs from Stack Overflow

For tasks like code synthesis from natural language, code retrieval, and code summarization, data-driven models have shown great promise. However, creating these models require parallel data between natural language (NL) and code with fine-grained alignments. Stack Overflow (SO) is a promising source to create such a data set: the questions are diverse and most of them have corresponding answers with high-quality code snippets. However, existing heuristic methods (e.g., pairing the title of a post with the code in the accepted answer) are limited both in their coverage and the correctness of the NL-code pairs obtained. In this paper, we propose a novel method to mine high-quality aligned data from SO using two sets of features: hand-crafted features considering the structure of the extracted snippets, and correspondence features obtained by training a probabilistic model to capture the correlation between NL and code using neural networks. These features are fed into a classifier that determines the quality of mined NL-code pairs. Experiments using Python and Java as test beds show that the proposed method greatly expands coverage and accuracy over existing mining methods, even when using only a small number of labeled examples. Further, we find that reasonable results are achieved even when training the classifier on one language and testing on another, showing promise for scaling NL-code mining to a wide variety of programming languages beyond those for which we are able to annotate data.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2018

Out of the BLEU: how should we assess quality of the Code Generation models?

In recent years, researchers have created and introduced a significant number of various code generation models. As human evaluation of every new model version is unfeasible, the community adopted automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU to approximate the results of human judgement. These metrics originate from the machine translation domain and it is unclear whether they are applicable for the code generation tasks and how well they agree with the human evaluation on this task. There are also other metrics, CodeBLEU and RUBY, developed to estimate the similarity of code, that take into account the properties of source code. However, for these metrics there are hardly any studies on their agreement with the human evaluation. Despite all that, minimal differences in the metric scores have been used in recent papers to claim superiority of some code generation models over the others. In this paper, we present a study on the applicability of six metrics -- BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, ChrF, CodeBLEU, and RUBY -- for evaluation of code generation models. We conduct a study on two different code generation datasets and use human annotators to assess the quality of all models run on these datasets. The results indicate that for the CoNaLa dataset of Python one-liners, none of the metrics can correctly emulate human judgement on which model is better with >95% certainty if the difference in model scores is less than 5 points. For the HearthStone dataset, which consists of classes of a particular structure, a difference in model scores of at least 2 points is enough to claim the superiority of one model over the other. Our findings suggest that the ChrF metric is a better fit for the evaluation of code generation models than the commonly used BLEU and CodeBLEU. Yet, finding a metric for code generation that closely agrees with humans requires additional work.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 5, 2022

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 19, 2024

CrossCodeEval: A Diverse and Multilingual Benchmark for Cross-File Code Completion

Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years, yet current popular evaluation datasets, such as HumanEval and MBPP, predominantly focus on code completion tasks within a single file. This over-simplified setting falls short of representing the real-world software development scenario where repositories span multiple files with numerous cross-file dependencies, and accessing and understanding cross-file context is often required to complete the code correctly. To fill in this gap, we propose CrossCodeEval, a diverse and multilingual code completion benchmark that necessitates an in-depth cross-file contextual understanding to complete the code accurately. CrossCodeEval is built on a diverse set of real-world, open-sourced, permissively-licensed repositories in four popular programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#. To create examples that strictly require cross-file context for accurate completion, we propose a straightforward yet efficient static-analysis-based approach to pinpoint the use of cross-file context within the current file. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art code language models like CodeGen and StarCoder demonstrate that CrossCodeEval is extremely challenging when the relevant cross-file context is absent, and we see clear improvements when adding these context into the prompt. However, despite such improvements, the pinnacle of performance remains notably unattained even with the highest-performing model, indicating that CrossCodeEval is also capable of assessing model's capability in leveraging extensive context to make better code completion. Finally, we benchmarked various methods in retrieving cross-file context, and show that CrossCodeEval can also be used to measure the capability of code retrievers.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023 1

RepoFusion: Training Code Models to Understand Your Repository

Despite the huge success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, these models struggle to understand the context present in the repository (e.g., imports, parent classes, files with similar names, etc.), thereby producing inaccurate code completions. This effect is more pronounced when using these assistants for repositories that the model has not seen during training, such as proprietary software or work-in-progress code projects. Recent work has shown the promise of using context from the repository during inference. In this work, we extend this idea and propose RepoFusion, a framework to train models to incorporate relevant repository context. Experiments on single-line code completion show that our models trained with repository context significantly outperform much larger code models as CodeGen-16B-multi (sim73times larger) and closely match the performance of the sim 70times larger StarCoderBase model that was trained with the Fill-in-the-Middle objective. We find these results to be a novel and compelling demonstration of the gains that training with repository context can bring. We carry out extensive ablation studies to investigate the impact of design choices such as context type, number of contexts, context length, and initialization within our framework. Lastly, we release Stack-Repo, a dataset of 200 Java repositories with permissive licenses and near-deduplicated files that are augmented with three types of repository contexts. Additionally, we are making available the code and trained checkpoints for our work. Our released resources can be found at https://huggingface.co/RepoFusion.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

Programming Puzzles

We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by a short Python program f, and the goal is to find an input which makes f return True. The puzzles are objective in that each one is specified entirely by the source code of its verifier f, so evaluating f is all that is needed to test a candidate solution. They do not require an answer key or input/output examples, nor do they depend on natural language understanding. The dataset is comprehensive in that it spans problems of a range of difficulties and domains, ranging from trivial string manipulation problems, to classic programming puzzles (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), to interview/competitive-programming problems (e.g., dynamic programming), to longstanding open problems in algorithms and mathematics (e.g., factoring). We develop baseline enumerative program synthesis, GPT-3 and Codex solvers that are capable of solving puzzles -- even without access to any reference solutions -- by learning from their own past solutions. Codex performs best, solving up to 18% of 397 test problems with a single try and 80% of the problems with 1,000 tries per problem. In a small user study, we find a positive correlation between puzzle-solving performance and coding experience, and between the puzzle difficulty for humans and AI solvers. Therefore, further improvements on P3 could have a significant impact on many program synthesis areas.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 10, 2021

Cracks in The Stack: Hidden Vulnerabilities and Licensing Risks in LLM Pre-Training Datasets

A critical part of creating code suggestion systems is the pre-training of Large Language Models on vast amounts of source code and natural language text, often of questionable origin or quality. This may contribute to the presence of bugs and vulnerabilities in code generated by LLMs. While efforts to identify bugs at or after code generation exist, it is preferable to pre-train or fine-tune LLMs on curated, high-quality, and compliant datasets. The need for vast amounts of training data necessitates that such curation be automated, minimizing human intervention. We propose an automated source code autocuration technique that leverages the complete version history of open-source software projects to improve the quality of training data. This approach leverages the version history of all OSS projects to identify training data samples that have been modified or have undergone changes in at least one OSS project, and pinpoint a subset of samples that include fixes for bugs or vulnerabilities. We evaluate this method using The Stack v2 dataset, and find that 17% of the code versions in the dataset have newer versions, with 17% of those representing bug fixes, including 2.36% addressing known CVEs. The deduplicated version of Stack v2 still includes blobs vulnerable to 6,947 known CVEs. Furthermore, 58% of the blobs in the dataset were never modified after creation, suggesting they likely represent software with minimal or no use. Misidentified blob origins present an additional challenge, as they lead to the inclusion of non-permissively licensed code, raising serious compliance concerns. By addressing these issues, the training of new models can avoid perpetuating buggy code patterns or license violations. We expect our results to inspire process improvements for automated data curation, with the potential to enhance the reliability of outputs generated by AI tools.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 5

Evaluating the Impact of Source Code Parsers on ML4SE Models

As researchers and practitioners apply Machine Learning to increasingly more software engineering problems, the approaches they use become more sophisticated. A lot of modern approaches utilize internal code structure in the form of an abstract syntax tree (AST) or its extensions: path-based representation, complex graph combining AST with additional edges. Even though the process of extracting ASTs from code can be done with different parsers, the impact of choosing a parser on the final model quality remains unstudied. Moreover, researchers often omit the exact details of extracting particular code representations. In this work, we evaluate two models, namely Code2Seq and TreeLSTM, in the method name prediction task backed by eight different parsers for the Java language. To unify the process of data preparation with different parsers, we develop SuperParser, a multi-language parser-agnostic library based on PathMiner. SuperParser facilitates the end-to-end creation of datasets suitable for training and evaluation of ML models that work with structural information from source code. Our results demonstrate that trees built by different parsers vary in their structure and content. We then analyze how this diversity affects the models' quality and show that the quality gap between the most and least suitable parsers for both models turns out to be significant. Finally, we discuss other features of the parsers that researchers and practitioners should take into account when selecting a parser along with the impact on the models' quality. The code of SuperParser is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366591. We also publish Java-norm, the dataset we use to evaluate the models: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366599.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 17, 2022

SC2EGSet: StarCraft II Esport Replay and Game-state Dataset

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2022

ToolCoder: Teach Code Generation Models to use API search tools

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

  • 6 authors
·
May 6, 2023

MultiPL-E: A Scalable and Extensible Approach to Benchmarking Neural Code Generation

Large language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Such models open up the possibility of multi-language code generation: could code generation models generalize knowledge from one language to another? Although contemporary code generation models can generate semantically correct Python code, little is known about their abilities with other languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages. We create the first massively multilingual code generation benchmark by using MultiPL-E to translate two popular Python code generation benchmarks to 18 additional programming languages. We use MultiPL-E to extend the HumanEval benchmark and MBPP benchmark to 18 languages that encompass a range of programming paradigms and popularity. Using these new parallel benchmarks, we evaluate the multi-language performance of three state-of-the-art code generation models: Codex, CodeGen, and InCoder. We find that Codex matches or even exceeds its performance on Python for several other languages. The range of programming languages represented in MultiPL-E allow us to explore the impact of language frequency and language features on model performance. Finally, the MultiPL-E approach of compiling code generation benchmarks to new programming languages is both scalable and extensible, making it straightforward to evaluate new models, benchmarks, and languages.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 17, 2022

Evaluation of OpenAI Codex for HPC Parallel Programming Models Kernel Generation

We evaluate AI-assisted generative capabilities on fundamental numerical kernels in high-performance computing (HPC), including AXPY, GEMV, GEMM, SpMV, Jacobi Stencil, and CG. We test the generated kernel codes for a variety of language-supported programming models, including (1) C++ (e.g., OpenMP [including offload], OpenACC, Kokkos, SyCL, CUDA, and HIP), (2) Fortran (e.g., OpenMP [including offload] and OpenACC), (3) Python (e.g., numba, Numba, cuPy, and pyCUDA), and (4) Julia (e.g., Threads, CUDA.jl, AMDGPU.jl, and KernelAbstractions.jl). We use the GitHub Copilot capabilities powered by OpenAI Codex available in Visual Studio Code as of April 2023 to generate a vast amount of implementations given simple <kernel> + <programming model> + <optional hints> prompt variants. To quantify and compare the results, we propose a proficiency metric around the initial 10 suggestions given for each prompt. Results suggest that the OpenAI Codex outputs for C++ correlate with the adoption and maturity of programming models. For example, OpenMP and CUDA score really high, whereas HIP is still lacking. We found that prompts from either a targeted language such as Fortran or the more general-purpose Python can benefit from adding code keywords, while Julia prompts perform acceptably well for its mature programming models (e.g., Threads and CUDA.jl). We expect for these benchmarks to provide a point of reference for each programming model's community. Overall, understanding the convergence of large language models, AI, and HPC is crucial due to its rapidly evolving nature and how it is redefining human-computer interactions.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 26, 2023