Daily Papers

We propose a new shared task for tactical data-to-text generation in the domain of source code libraries. Specifically, we focus on text generation of function descriptions from example software projects. Data is drawn from existing resources used for studying the related problem of semantic parser induction (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017b; Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a), and spans a wide variety of both natural languages and programming languages. In this paper, we describe these existing resources, which will serve as training and development data for the task, and discuss plans for building new independent test sets.

Publicly available source-code libraries are continuously growing and changing. This makes it impossible for models of code to keep current with all available APIs by simply training these models on existing code repositories. Thus, existing models inherently cannot generalize to using unseen functions and libraries, because these would never appear in the training data. In contrast, when human programmers use functions and libraries for the first time, they frequently refer to textual resources such as code manuals and documentation, to explore and understand the available functionality. Inspired by this observation, we introduce DocPrompting: a natural-language-to-code generation approach that explicitly leverages documentation by (1) retrieving the relevant documentation pieces given an NL intent, and (2) generating code based on the NL intent and the retrieved documentation. DocPrompting is general: it can be applied to any programming language and is agnostic to the underlying neural model. We demonstrate that DocPrompting consistently improves NL-to-code models: DocPrompting improves strong base models such as CodeT5 by 2.85% in pass@1 (52% relative gain) and 4.39% in pass@10 (30% relative gain) in execution-based evaluation on the popular Python CoNaLa benchmark; on a new Bash dataset tldr, DocPrompting improves CodeT5 and GPT-Neo1.3B by up to absolute 6.9% exact match.

The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent version updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51\% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.

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.

In real world, large language models (LLMs) can serve as the assistant to help users accomplish their jobs, and also support the development of advanced applications. For the wide application of LLMs, the inference efficiency is an essential concern, which has been widely studied in existing work, and numerous optimization algorithms and code libraries have been proposed to improve it. Nonetheless, users still find it challenging to compare the effectiveness of all the above methods and understand the underlying mechanisms. In this work, we perform a detailed coarse-to-fine analysis of the inference performance of various code libraries. To evaluate the overall effectiveness, we examine four usage scenarios within two practical applications. We further provide both theoretical and empirical fine-grained analyses of each module in the Transformer architecture. Our experiments yield comprehensive results that are invaluable for researchers to evaluate code libraries and improve inference strategies.

Recent work by (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a,b; Richardson et al., 2018) looks at semantic parser induction and question answering in the domain of source code libraries and APIs. In this brief note, we formalize the representations being learned in these studies and introduce a simple domain specific language and a systematic translation from this language to first-order logic. By recasting the target representations in terms of classical logic, we aim to broaden the applicability of existing code datasets for investigating more complex natural language understanding and reasoning problems in the software domain.

While large language models (LLMs) now excel at code generation, a key aspect of software development is the art of refactoring: consolidating code into libraries of reusable and readable programs. In this paper, we introduce LILO, a neurosymbolic framework that iteratively synthesizes, compresses, and documents code to build libraries tailored to particular problem domains. LILO combines LLM-guided program synthesis with recent algorithmic advances in automated refactoring from Stitch: a symbolic compression system that efficiently identifies optimal lambda abstractions across large code corpora. To make these abstractions interpretable, we introduce an auto-documentation (AutoDoc) procedure that infers natural language names and docstrings based on contextual examples of usage. In addition to improving human readability, we find that AutoDoc boosts performance by helping LILO's synthesizer to interpret and deploy learned abstractions. We evaluate LILO on three inductive program synthesis benchmarks for string editing, scene reasoning, and graphics composition. Compared to existing neural and symbolic methods - including the state-of-the-art library learning algorithm DreamCoder - LILO solves more complex tasks and learns richer libraries that are grounded in linguistic knowledge.

When presented with questions involving visual thinking, humans naturally switch reasoning modalities, often forming mental images or drawing visual aids. Large language models have shown promising results in arithmetic and symbolic reasoning by expressing intermediate reasoning in text as a chain of thought, yet struggle to extend this capability to answer text queries that are easily solved by visual reasoning, even with extensive multimodal pretraining. We introduce a simple method, whiteboard-of-thought prompting, to unlock the visual reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models across modalities. Whiteboard-of-thought prompting provides multimodal large language models with a metaphorical `whiteboard' to draw out reasoning steps as images, then returns these images back to the model for further processing. We find this can be accomplished with no demonstrations or specialized modules, instead leveraging models' existing ability to write code with libraries such as Matplotlib and Turtle. This simple approach shows state-of-the-art results on four difficult natural language tasks that involve visual and spatial reasoning. We identify multiple settings where GPT-4o using chain-of-thought fails dramatically, including more than one where it achieves 0% accuracy, while whiteboard-of-thought enables up to 92% accuracy in these same settings. We present a detailed exploration of where the technique succeeds as well as its sources of error.

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex and GPT-4, have recently showcased their remarkable code generation abilities, facilitating a significant boost in coding efficiency. This paper will delve into utilizing LLMs for code generation in private libraries, as they are widely employed in everyday programming. Despite their remarkable capabilities, generating such private APIs poses a formidable conundrum for LLMs, as they inherently lack exposure to these private libraries during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that emulates the process of programmers writing private code. This framework comprises two modules: APIFinder first retrieves potentially useful APIs from API documentation; and APICoder then leverages these retrieved APIs to generate private code. Specifically, APIFinder employs vector retrieval techniques and allows user involvement in the retrieval process. For APICoder, it can directly utilize off-the-shelf code generation models. To further cultivate explicit proficiency in invoking APIs from prompts, we continuously pre-train a reinforced version of APICoder, named CodeGenAPI. Our goal is to train the above two modules on vast public libraries, enabling generalization to private ones. Meanwhile, we create four private library benchmarks, including TorchDataEval, TorchDataComplexEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval, and meticulously handcraft test cases for each benchmark to support comprehensive evaluations. Numerous experiments on the four benchmarks consistently affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, deeper analysis is also conducted to glean additional insights.

We present KNOW--the Knowledge Navigator Ontology for the World--the first ontology designed to capture everyday knowledge to augment large language models (LLMs) in real-world generative AI use cases such as personal AI assistants. Our domain is human life, both its everyday concerns and its major milestones. We have limited the initial scope of the modeled concepts to only established human universals: spacetime (places, events) plus social (people, groups, organizations). The inclusion criteria for modeled concepts are pragmatic, beginning with universality and utility. We compare and contrast previous work such as Schema.org and Cyc--as well as attempts at a synthesis of knowledge graphs and language models--noting how LLMs already encode internally much of the commonsense tacit knowledge that took decades to capture in the Cyc project. We also make available code-generated software libraries for the 12 most popular programming languages, enabling the direct use of ontology concepts in software engineering. We emphasize simplicity and developer experience in promoting AI interoperability.

Large language models have shown promising performance in code generation benchmarks. However, a considerable divide exists between these benchmark achievements and their practical applicability, primarily attributed to real-world programming's reliance on pre-existing libraries. Instead of evaluating LLMs to code from scratch, this work aims to propose a new evaluation setup where LLMs use open-source libraries to finish machine learning tasks. Therefore, we propose ML-Bench, an expansive benchmark developed to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in leveraging existing functions in open-source libraries. Consisting of 10044 samples spanning 130 tasks over 14 notable machine learning GitHub repositories. In this setting, given a specific machine learning task instruction and the accompanying README in a codebase, an LLM is tasked to generate code to accomplish the task. This necessitates the comprehension of long and language-code interleaved documents, as well as the understanding of complex cross-file code structures, introducing new challenges. Notably, while GPT-4 exhibits remarkable improvement over other LLMs, it manages to accomplish only 39.73\% of the tasks, leaving a huge space for improvement. We address these challenges by proposing ML-Agent, designed to effectively navigate the codebase, locate documentation, retrieve code, and generate executable code. Empirical results demonstrate that ML-Agent, built upon GPT-4, results in further improvements. Code, data, and models are available at https://ml-bench.github.io/.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown remarkable progress in natural language reasoning with long chain-of-thought (CoT), yet they remain inefficient or inaccurate when handling complex mathematical operations. Addressing these limitations through computational tools (e.g., computation libraries and symbolic solvers) is promising, but it introduces a technical challenge: Code Interpreter (CI) brings external knowledge beyond the model's internal text representations, thus the direct combination is not efficient. This paper introduces CoRT, a post-training framework for teaching LRMs to leverage CI effectively and efficiently. As a first step, we address the data scarcity issue by synthesizing code-integrated reasoning data through Hint-Engineering, which strategically inserts different hints at appropriate positions to optimize LRM-CI interaction. We manually create 30 high-quality samples, upon which we post-train models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters, with supervised fine-tuning, rejection fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Hint-Engineering models achieve 4\% and 8\% absolute improvements on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B respectively, across five challenging mathematical reasoning datasets. Furthermore, Hint-Engineering models use about 30\% fewer tokens for the 32B model and 50\% fewer tokens for the 1.5B model compared with the natural language models. The models and code are available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/CoRT.

Personalized vaccines and T-cell immunotherapies depend critically on identifying peptide-MHC class I (pMHC-I) interactions capable of eliciting potent immune responses. However, current benchmarks and models inherit biases present in mass-spectrometry and binding-assay datasets, limiting discovery of novel peptide ligands. To address this issue, we introduce a structure-guided benchmark of pMHC-I peptides designed using diffusion models conditioned on crystal structure interaction distances. Spanning twenty high-priority HLA alleles, this benchmark is independent of previously characterized peptides yet reproduces canonical anchor residue preferences, indicating structural generalization without experimental dataset bias. Using this resource, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art sequence-based predictors perform poorly at recognizing the binding potential of these structurally stable designs, indicating allele-specific limitations invisible in conventional evaluations. Our geometry-aware design pipeline yields peptides with high predicted structural integrity and higher residue diversity than existing datasets, representing a key resource for unbiased model training and evaluation. Our code, and data are available at: https://github.com/sermare/struct-mhc-dev.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on code completion have been shown to be capable of synthesizing simple Python programs from docstrings [1]. We find that these code-writing LLMs can be re-purposed to write robot policy code, given natural language commands. Specifically, policy code can express functions or feedback loops that process perception outputs (e.g.,from object detectors [2], [3]) and parameterize control primitive APIs. When provided as input several example language commands (formatted as comments) followed by corresponding policy code (via few-shot prompting), LLMs can take in new commands and autonomously re-compose API calls to generate new policy code respectively. By chaining classic logic structures and referencing third-party libraries (e.g., NumPy, Shapely) to perform arithmetic, LLMs used in this way can write robot policies that (i) exhibit spatial-geometric reasoning, (ii) generalize to new instructions, and (iii) prescribe precise values (e.g., velocities) to ambiguous descriptions ("faster") depending on context (i.e., behavioral commonsense). This paper presents code as policies: a robot-centric formulation of language model generated programs (LMPs) that can represent reactive policies (e.g., impedance controllers), as well as waypoint-based policies (vision-based pick and place, trajectory-based control), demonstrated across multiple real robot platforms. Central to our approach is prompting hierarchical code-gen (recursively defining undefined functions), which can write more complex code and also improves state-of-the-art to solve 39.8% of problems on the HumanEval [1] benchmark. Code and videos are available at https://code-as-policies.github.io

Significant research has focused on improving the performance of large language model on code-related tasks due to their practical importance. Although performance is typically evaluated using public benchmark datasets, the existing datasets do not account for the concept of version, which is crucial in professional software development. In this paper, we introduce VersiCode, the first comprehensive dataset designed to assess the ability of large language models to generate verifiable code for specific library versions. VersiCode encompasses 300 libraries across more than 2,000 versions spanning 9 years. We design two dedicated evaluation tasks: version-specific code completion (VSCC) and version-aware code editing (VACE). Comprehensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the performance of LLMs, revealing the challenging nature of these tasks and VersiCode, that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to generate version-correct code. This dataset, together with the proposed tasks, sheds light on LLMs' capabilities and limitations in handling version-specific code generation, and opens up an important new area of research for further investigation. The resources can be found at https://github.com/wutong8023/VersiCode.

Large-scale code generation models such as Codex and CodeT5 have achieved impressive performance. However, libraries are upgraded or deprecated very frequently and re-training large-scale language models is computationally expensive. Therefore, Continual Learning (CL) is an important aspect that remains underexplored in the code domain. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called CodeTask-CL that covers a wide range of tasks, including code generation, translation, summarization, and refinement, with different input and output programming languages. Next, on our CodeTask-CL benchmark, we compare popular CL techniques from NLP and Vision domains. We find that effective methods like Prompt Pooling (PP) suffer from catastrophic forgetting due to the unstable training of the prompt selection mechanism caused by stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. We address this issue with our proposed method, Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing (PP-TF), that stabilizes training by enforcing constraints on the prompt selection mechanism and leads to a 21.54% improvement over Prompt Pooling. Along with the benchmark, we establish a training pipeline that can be used for CL on code models, which we believe can motivate further development of CL methods for code models. Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/codetaskcl-pptf

Recent developments show that Large Language Models (LLMs) produce state-of-the-art performance on natural language (NL) to code generation for resource-rich general-purpose languages like C++, Java, and Python. However, their practical usage for structured domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as YAML, JSON is limited due to domain-specific schema, grammar, and customizations generally unseen by LLMs during pre-training. Efforts have been made to mitigate this challenge via in-context learning through relevant examples or by fine-tuning. However, it suffers from problems, such as limited DSL samples and prompt sensitivity but enterprises maintain good documentation of the DSLs. Therefore, we propose DocCGen, a framework that can leverage such rich knowledge by breaking the NL-to-Code generation task for structured code languages into a two-step process. First, it detects the correct libraries using the library documentation that best matches the NL query. Then, it utilizes schema rules extracted from the documentation of these libraries to constrain the decoding. We evaluate our framework for two complex structured languages, Ansible YAML and Bash command, consisting of two settings: Out-of-domain (OOD) and In-domain (ID). Our extensive experiments show that DocCGen consistently improves different-sized language models across all six evaluation metrics, reducing syntactic and semantic errors in structured code. We plan to open-source the datasets and code to motivate research in constrained code generation.

To extend the scope of coding queries to more realistic settings, we propose ODEX, the first Open-Domain EXecution-based natural language (NL) to Python code generation dataset. ODEX has 945 NL-Code pairs spanning 79 diverse libraries, along with 1,707 human-written test cases for execution. Our NL-Code pairs are harvested from StackOverflow forums to encourage natural and practical coding queries. Moreover, ODEX supports four natural languages as intents, in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. ODEX unveils intriguing behavioral differences among top-performing code language models (LM). While CODEX achieves better overall results, CODEGEN improves effectively via scaling -- CODEGEN 6.1B performs comparably with CODEX 12B. Both models show substantial gaps between open and closed domains, but CODEGEN gaps tend to decrease with model size while CODEX gaps increase. We release ODEX to facilitate research into open-domain problems for the code generation community.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the torus (TFHE) enables computation on encrypted data without decryption, making it a cornerstone of secure and confidential computing. Despite its potential in privacy preserving machine learning, secure multi party computation, private blockchain transactions, and secure medical diagnostics, its adoption remains limited due to cryptographic complexity and usability challenges. While various TFHE libraries and compilers exist, practical code generation remains a hurdle. We propose a compiler integrated framework to evaluate LLM inference and agentic optimization for TFHE code generation, focusing on logic gates and ReLU activation. Our methodology assesses error rates, compilability, and structural similarity across open and closedsource LLMs. Results highlight significant limitations in off-the-shelf models, while agentic optimizations such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and few-shot prompting reduce errors and enhance code fidelity. This work establishes the first benchmark for TFHE code generation, demonstrating how LLMs, when augmented with domain-specific feedback, can bridge the expertise gap in FHE code generation.

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.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a Python interpreter, CodeAct can execute code actions and dynamically revise prior actions or emit new actions upon new observations through multi-turn interactions. Our extensive analysis of 17 LLMs on API-Bank and a newly curated benchmark shows that CodeAct outperforms widely used alternatives (up to 20% higher success rate). The encouraging performance of CodeAct motivates us to build an open-source LLM agent that interacts with environments by executing interpretable code and collaborates with users using natural language. To this end, we collect an instruction-tuning dataset CodeActInstruct that consists of 7k multi-turn interactions using CodeAct. We show that it can be used with existing data to improve models in agent-oriented tasks without compromising their general capability. CodeActAgent, finetuned from Llama2 and Mistral, is integrated with Python interpreter and uniquely tailored to perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., model training) using existing libraries and autonomously self-debug.

Automated software engineering has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for programming. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can perform various software engineering tasks like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks. Solving challenging and practical programming tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs. To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical programming tasks, we introduce Bench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained programming tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of Bench, Benchi, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.

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.

Open-source AI libraries are foundational to modern AI systems but pose significant, underexamined risks across security, licensing, maintenance, supply chain integrity, and regulatory compliance. We present LibVulnWatch, a graph-based agentic assessment framework that performs deep, source-grounded evaluations of these libraries. Built on LangGraph, the system coordinates a directed acyclic graph of specialized agents to extract, verify, and quantify risk using evidence from trusted sources such as repositories, documentation, and vulnerability databases. LibVulnWatch generates reproducible, governance-aligned scores across five critical domains, publishing them to a public leaderboard for longitudinal ecosystem monitoring. Applied to 20 widely used libraries, including ML frameworks, LLM inference engines, and agent orchestration tools, our system covers up to 88% of OpenSSF Scorecard checks while uncovering up to 19 additional risks per library. These include critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, absent Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), licensing constraints, undocumented telemetry, and widespread gaps in regulatory documentation and auditability. By translating high-level governance principles into practical, verifiable metrics, LibVulnWatch advances technical AI governance with a scalable, transparent mechanism for continuous supply chain risk assessment and informed library selection.

This paper introduces the human-curated PandasPlotBench dataset, designed to evaluate language models' effectiveness as assistants in visual data exploration. Our benchmark focuses on generating code for visualizing tabular data - such as a Pandas DataFrame - based on natural language instructions, complementing current evaluation tools and expanding their scope. The dataset includes 175 unique tasks. Our experiments assess several leading Large Language Models (LLMs) across three visualization libraries: Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly. We show that the shortening of tasks has a minimal effect on plotting capabilities, allowing for the user interface that accommodates concise user input without sacrificing functionality or accuracy. Another of our findings reveals that while LLMs perform well with popular libraries like Matplotlib and Seaborn, challenges persist with Plotly, highlighting areas for improvement. We hope that the modular design of our benchmark will broaden the current studies on generating visualizations. Our benchmark is available online: https://huggingface.co/datasets/JetBrains-Research/plot_bench. The code for running the benchmark is also available: https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/PandasPlotBench.

Software reverse engineering is an essential task in software engineering and security, but it can be a challenging process, especially for adversarial artifacts. To address this challenge, we present STraceBERT, a novel approach that utilizes a Java dynamic analysis tool to record calls to core Java libraries, and pretrain a BERT-style model on the recorded application traces for effective method source code retrieval from a candidate set. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of STraceBERT in retrieving the source code compared to existing approaches. Our proposed approach offers a promising solution to the problem of code retrieval in software reverse engineering and opens up new avenues for further research in this area.

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

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.

Recently the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) paradigm has raised much attention for its potential in incorporating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) without further training. While widely explored in natural language applications, its utilization in code generation remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce Active Retrieval in Knowledge Soup (ARKS), an advanced strategy for generalizing large language models for code. In contrast to relying on a single source, we construct a knowledge soup integrating web search, documentation, execution feedback, and evolved code snippets. We employ an active retrieval strategy that iteratively refines the query and updates the knowledge soup. To assess the performance of ARKS, we compile a new benchmark comprising realistic coding problems associated with frequently updated libraries and long-tail programming languages. Experimental results on ChatGPT and CodeLlama demonstrate a substantial improvement in the average execution accuracy of ARKS on LLMs. The analysis confirms the effectiveness of our proposed knowledge soup and active retrieval strategies, offering rich insights into the construction of effective retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) pipelines. Our model, code, and data are available at https://arks-codegen.github.io.

This paper presents prompt design techniques for software engineering, in the form of patterns, to solve common problems when using large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT to automate common software engineering activities, such as ensuring code is decoupled from third-party libraries and simulating a web application API before it is implemented. This paper provides two contributions to research on using LLMs for software engineering. First, it provides a catalog of patterns for software engineering that classifies patterns according to the types of problems they solve. Second, it explores several prompt patterns that have been applied to improve requirements elicitation, rapid prototyping, code quality, refactoring, and system design.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance in software engineering yet face challenges in adapting to continually evolving code knowledge, particularly regarding the frequent updates of third-party library APIs. This limitation, stemming from static pre-training datasets, often results in non-executable code or implementations with suboptimal safety and efficiency. To this end, this paper introduces CODESYNC, a data engine for identifying outdated code patterns and collecting real-time code knowledge updates from Python third-party libraries. Building upon CODESYNC, we develop CODESYNCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to stay synchronized with code evolution, which covers real-world updates for 220 APIs from six Python libraries. Our benchmark offers 3,300 test cases across three evaluation tasks and an update-aware instruction tuning dataset consisting of 2,200 training samples. Extensive experiments on 14 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that they struggle with dynamic code evolution, even with the support of advanced knowledge updating methods (e.g., DPO, ORPO, and SimPO). We believe that our benchmark can offer a strong foundation for the development of more effective methods for real-time code knowledge updating in the future. The experimental code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucky-voyage/Code-Sync.

High-level synthesis (HLS) enables software developers to describe and implement hardware at a higher level of abstraction by using C/C++ instead of traditional hardware description languages to automatically generate FPGA-ready designs. However, generating HLS code significantly differs from standard C/C++: it disallows certain coding idioms, relies on specialized libraries, and critically requires fine-grained transformations and the insertion of optimization directives (pragmas) to achieve high performance. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating such transformations, yet existing open-source datasets lack sufficient complexity and optimization diversity. To address this gap, we introduce the HLStrans dataset, a comprehensive collection of 137 distinct real word programs, each annotated with a variety of C-to-HLS transformations that yield over 23K labeled design variants. These include a broad spectrum of pragmas and code-level optimizations. We benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs on this dataset to evaluate their ability to generate synthesizable, high-performance HLS code. As part of an ongoing effort, we plan to expand the HLStrans dataset in both scale and program variety, further empowering research at the intersection of AI and hardware synthesis.

We introduce DS-1000, a code generation benchmark with a thousand data science problems spanning seven Python libraries, such as NumPy and Pandas. Compared to prior works, DS-1000 incorporates three core features. First, our problems reflect diverse, realistic, and practical use cases since we collected them from StackOverflow. Second, our automatic evaluation is highly specific (reliable) -- across all Codex-002-predicted solutions that our evaluation accept, only 1.8% of them are incorrect; we achieve this with multi-criteria metrics, checking both functional correctness by running test cases and surface-form constraints by restricting API usages or keywords. Finally, we proactively defend against memorization by slightly modifying our problems to be different from the original StackOverflow source; consequently, models cannot answer them correctly by memorizing the solutions from pre-training. The current best public system (Codex-002) achieves 43.3% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://ds1000-code-gen.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. Despite their great success, their effectiveness within particular domains (e.g., web development) necessitates further evaluation. In this study, we conduct an empirical study of domain-specific code generation with LLMs. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit sub-optimal performance in generating domain-specific code, due to their limited proficiency in utilizing domain-specific libraries. We further observe that incorporating API knowledge as prompts can empower LLMs to generate more professional code. Based on these findings, we further investigate how to efficiently incorporate API knowledge into the code generation process. We experiment with three strategies for incorporating domain knowledge, namely, external knowledge inquirer, chain-of-thought prompting, and chain-of-thought fine-tuning. We refer to these strategies as a new code generation approach called DomCoder. Experimental results show that all strategies of DomCoder lead to improvement in the effectiveness of domain-specific code generation under certain settings. The results also show that there is still ample room for further improvement, based on which we suggest possible future works.

With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in code generation tasks, geospatial code generation has emerged as a critical frontier in the integration of artificial intelligence and geoscientific analysis. This trend underscores the urgent need for systematic evaluation methodologies to assess LLMs generation capabilities in geospatial contexts. In particular, geospatial computation and visualization tasks in JavaScript environments rely heavily on orchestrating diverse frontend libraries and ecosystems, placing elevated demands on a model's semantic understanding and code synthesis abilities. To address this challenge, we propose GeoJSEval--the first multimodal, function-level automatic evaluation framework for LLMs in JavaScript-based geospatial code generation. GeoJSEval comprises three core components: a standardized test suite (GeoJSEval-Bench), a code submission engine, and an evaluation module. It includes 432 function-level tasks and 2,071 structured test cases spanning five widely used JavaScript geospatial libraries and 25 mainstream geospatial data types. GeoJSEval enables multidimensional quantitative evaluation across metrics such as accuracy, output stability, execution efficiency, resource consumption, and error type distribution, and integrates boundary testing mechanisms to enhance robustness and coverage. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 state-of-the-art LLMs using GeoJSEval, revealing significant performance disparities and bottlenecks in spatial semantic understanding, code reliability, and function invocation accuracy. GeoJSEval provides a foundational methodology, evaluation resource, and practical toolkit for the standardized assessment and optimization of geospatial code generation models, with strong extensibility and applicability in real-world scenarios.

Machine learning (ML) has been increasingly used in a variety of domains, while solving ML programming tasks poses unique challenges because of the fundamentally different nature and construction from general programming tasks, especially for developers who do not have ML backgrounds. Automatic code generation that produces a code snippet from a natural language description can be a promising technique to accelerate ML programming tasks. In recent years, although many deep learning-based neural code generation models have been proposed with high accuracy, the fact that most of them are mainly evaluated on general programming tasks calls into question their effectiveness and usefulness in ML programming tasks. In this paper, we set out to investigate the effectiveness of existing neural code generation models on ML programming tasks. For our analysis, we select six state-of-the-art neural code generation models, and evaluate their performance on four widely used ML libraries, with newly-created 83K pairs of natural-language described ML programming tasks. Our empirical study reveals some good, bad, and missing aspects of neural code generation models on ML tasks, with a few major ones listed below. (Good) Neural code generation models perform significantly better on ML tasks than on non-ML tasks. (Bad) Most of the generated code is semantically incorrect. (Bad) Code generation models cannot significantly improve developers' completion time. (Good) The generated code can help developers write more correct code by providing developers with clues for using correct APIs. (Missing) The observation from our user study reveals the missing aspects of code generation for ML tasks, e.g., decomposing code generation for divide-and-conquer into two tasks: API sequence identification and API usage generation.

Much work has been done on conversational LLM agents which directly assist human users with tasks. We present an alternative paradigm for interacting with LLM agents, which we call "overhearing agents". These overhearing agents do not actively participate in conversation -- instead, they "listen in" on human-to-human conversations and perform background tasks or provide suggestions to assist the user. In this work, we explore the overhearing agents paradigm through the lens of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay. We present an in-depth study using large multimodal audio-language models as overhearing agents to assist a Dungeon Master. We perform a human evaluation to examine the helpfulness of such agents and find that some large audio-language models have the emergent ability to perform overhearing agent tasks using implicit audio cues. Finally, we release Python libraries and our project code to support further research into the overhearing agents paradigm at https://github.com/zhudotexe/overhearing_agents.

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.

The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.

In the past few years, more and more AI applications have been applied to edge devices. However, models trained by data scientists with machine learning frameworks, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, can not be seamlessly executed on edge. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end code generator parsing a pre-trained model to C source libraries for the backend using MicroTVM, a machine learning compiler framework extension addressing inference on bare metal devices. An analysis shows that specific compute-intensive operators can be easily offloaded to the dedicated accelerator with a Universal Modular Accelerator (UMA) interface, while others are processed in the CPU cores. By using the automatically generated ahead-of-time C runtime, we conduct a hand gesture recognition experiment on an ARM Cortex M4F core.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely applicable natural language processing task and building block of question answering, topic modeling, information retrieval, etc. In the medical domain, NER plays a crucial role by extracting meaningful chunks from clinical notes and reports, which are then fed to downstream tasks like assertion status detection, entity resolution, relation extraction, and de-identification. Reimplementing a Bi-LSTM-CNN-Char deep learning architecture on top of Apache Spark, we present a single trainable NER model that obtains new state-of-the-art results on seven public biomedical benchmarks without using heavy contextual embeddings like BERT. This includes improving BC4CHEMD to 93.72% (4.1% gain), Species800 to 80.91% (4.6% gain), and JNLPBA to 81.29% (5.2% gain). In addition, this model is freely available within a production-grade code base as part of the open-source Spark NLP library; can scale up for training and inference in any Spark cluster; has GPU support and libraries for popular programming languages such as Python, R, Scala and Java; and can be extended to support other human languages with no code changes.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in spatial reasoning, yet they remain fundamentally limited to qualitative precision and lack the computational precision required for real-world robotics. Current approaches fail to leverage metric cues from depth sensors and camera calibration, instead reducing geometric problems to pattern recognition tasks that cannot deliver the centimeter-level accuracy essential for robotic manipulation. We present TIGeR (Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning), a novel framework that transforms VLMs from perceptual estimators to geometric computers by enabling them to generate and execute precise geometric computations through external tools. Rather than attempting to internalize complex geometric operations within neural networks, TIGeR empowers models to recognize geometric reasoning requirements, synthesize appropriate computational code, and invoke specialized libraries for exact calculations. To support this paradigm, we introduce TIGeR-300K, a comprehensive tool-invocation-oriented dataset covering point transformations, pose estimation, and spatial compatibility verification, complete with tool invocation sequences and intermediate computations. Through a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) with our proposed hierarchical reward design, TIGeR achieves SOTA performance on geometric reasoning benchmarks while demonstrating centimeter-level precision in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

Deep learning frameworks have often focused on either usability or speed, but not both. PyTorch is a machine learning library that shows that these two goals are in fact compatible: it provides an imperative and Pythonic programming style that supports code as a model, makes debugging easy and is consistent with other popular scientific computing libraries, while remaining efficient and supporting hardware accelerators such as GPUs. In this paper, we detail the principles that drove the implementation of PyTorch and how they are reflected in its architecture. We emphasize that every aspect of PyTorch is a regular Python program under the full control of its user. We also explain how the careful and pragmatic implementation of the key components of its runtime enables them to work together to achieve compelling performance. We demonstrate the efficiency of individual subsystems, as well as the overall speed of PyTorch on several common benchmarks.

Advanced compiler technology is crucial for enabling machine learning applications to run on novel hardware, but traditional compilers fail to deliver performance, popular auto-tuners have long search times and expert-optimized libraries introduce unsustainable costs. To address this, we developed LoopTune, a deep reinforcement learning compiler that optimizes tensor computations in deep learning models for the CPU. LoopTune optimizes tensor traversal order while using the ultra-fast lightweight code generator LoopNest to perform hardware-specific optimizations. With a novel graph-based representation and action space, LoopTune speeds up LoopNest by 3.2x, generating an order of magnitude faster code than TVM, 2.8x faster than MetaSchedule, and 1.08x faster than AutoTVM, consistently performing at the level of the hand-tuned library Numpy. Moreover, LoopTune tunes code in order of seconds.

AnalogVNN, a simulation framework built on PyTorch which can simulate the effects of optoelectronic noise, limited precision, and signal normalization present in photonic neural network accelerators. We use this framework to train and optimize linear and convolutional neural networks with up to 9 layers and ~1.7 million parameters, while gaining insights into how normalization, activation function, reduced precision, and noise influence accuracy in analog photonic neural networks. By following the same layer structure design present in PyTorch, the AnalogVNN framework allows users to convert most digital neural network models to their analog counterparts with just a few lines of code, taking full advantage of the open-source optimization, deep learning, and GPU acceleration libraries available through PyTorch. Code is available at https://analogvnn.github.io

The open-source software (OSS) ecosystem suffers from security threats caused by malware.However, OSS malware research has three limitations: a lack of high-quality datasets, a lack of malware diversity, and a lack of attack campaign contexts. In this paper, we first build the largest dataset of 24,356 malicious packages from online sources, then propose a knowledge graph to represent the OSS malware corpus and conduct malware analysis in the wild.Our main findings include (1) it is essential to collect malicious packages from various online sources because their data overlapping degrees are small;(2) despite the sheer volume of malicious packages, many reuse similar code, leading to a low diversity of malware;(3) only 28 malicious packages were repeatedly hidden via dependency libraries of 1,354 malicious packages, and dependency-hidden malware has a shorter active time;(4) security reports are the only reliable source for disclosing the malware-based context. Index Terms: Malicious Packages, Software Analysis

Code search is an important task that has seen many developments in recent years. However, previous attempts have mostly considered the problem of searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an associated traceback) as a query and looking for answers with bugfixing instructions and code samples is a natural use case that is not covered by existing approaches. Moreover, existing datasets use comments extracted from code rather than full-text descriptions as text, making them unsuitable for this use case. We present a new SearchBySnippet dataset implementing the search-by-code use case based on StackOverflow data; it turns out that in this setting, existing architectures fall short of the simplest BM25 baseline even after fine-tuning. We present a new single encoder model SnippeR that outperforms several strong baselines on the SearchBySnippet dataset with a result of 0.451 Recall@10; we propose the SearchBySnippet dataset and SnippeR as a new important benchmark for code search evaluation.

We present CodeNav, an LLM agent that navigates and leverages previously unseen code repositories to solve user queries. In contrast to tool-use LLM agents that require ``registration'' of all relevant tools via manual descriptions within the LLM context, CodeNav automatically indexes and searches over code blocks in the target codebase, finds relevant code snippets, imports them, and uses them to iteratively generate a solution with execution feedback. To highlight the core-capabilities of CodeNav, we first showcase three case studies where we use CodeNav for solving complex user queries using three diverse codebases. Next, on three benchmarks, we quantitatively compare the effectiveness of code-use (which only has access to the target codebase) to tool-use (which has privileged access to all tool names and descriptions). Finally, we study the effect of varying kinds of tool and library descriptions on code-use performance, as well as investigate the advantage of the agent seeing source code as opposed to natural descriptions of code. All code will be made open source under a permissive license.

While language models (LMs) have proven remarkably adept at generating code, many programs are challenging for LMs to generate using their parametric knowledge alone. Providing external contexts such as library documentation can facilitate generating accurate and functional code. Despite the success of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in various text-oriented tasks, its potential for improving code generation remains under-explored. In this work, we conduct a systematic, large-scale analysis by asking: in what scenarios can retrieval benefit code generation models? and what challenges remain? We first curate a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, CodeRAG-Bench, encompassing three categories of code generation tasks, including basic programming, open-domain, and repository-level problems. We aggregate documents from five sources for models to retrieve contexts: competition solutions, online tutorials, library documentation, StackOverflow posts, and GitHub repositories. We examine top-performing models on CodeRAG-Bench by providing contexts retrieved from one or multiple sources. While notable gains are made in final code generation by retrieving high-quality contexts across various settings, our analysis reveals room for improvement -- current retrievers still struggle to fetch useful contexts especially with limited lexical overlap, and generators fail to improve with limited context lengths or abilities to integrate additional contexts. We hope CodeRAG-Bench serves as an effective testbed to encourage further development of advanced code-oriented RAG methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce \framework, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, \framework enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess \framework using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, \framework demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.

Despite the success of text retrieval in many NLP tasks, code retrieval remains a largely underexplored area. Most text retrieval systems are tailored for natural language queries, often neglecting the specific challenges of retrieving code. This gap leaves existing models unable to effectively capture the diversity of programming languages and tasks across different domains, highlighting the need for more focused research in code retrieval. To address this, we introduce CodeXEmbed, a family of large-scale code embedding models ranging from 400M to 7B parameters. Our novel training pipeline unifies multiple programming languages and transforms various code-related tasks into a common retrieval framework, enhancing model generalizability and retrieval performance. Our 7B model sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) in code retrieval, outperforming the previous leading model, Voyage-Code, by over 20% on CoIR benchmark. In addition to excelling in code retrieval, our models demonstrate competitive performance on the widely adopted BeIR text retrieval benchmark, offering versatility across domains. Experimental results demonstrate that improving retrieval performance significantly enhances end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) performance for code-related tasks.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code generation from natural language queries. However, despite their extensive knowledge and ability to produce high-quality code, LLMs often struggle with contextual accuracy, particularly in evolving codebases. Current code search and retrieval methods frequently lack robustness in both the quality and contextual relevance of retrieved results, leading to suboptimal code generation. This paper introduces a novel knowledge graph-based approach to improve code search and retrieval leading to better quality of code generation in the context of repository-level tasks. The proposed approach represents code repositories as graphs, capturing structural and relational information for enhanced context-aware code generation. Our framework employs a hybrid approach for code retrieval to improve contextual relevance, track inter-file modular dependencies, generate more robust code and ensure consistency with the existing codebase. We benchmark the proposed approach on the Evolutionary Code Benchmark (EvoCodeBench) dataset, a repository-level code generation benchmark, and demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baseline approach. These findings suggest that knowledge graph based code generation could advance robust, context-sensitive coding assistance tools.

Graph representations of programs are commonly a central element of machine learning for code research. We introduce an open source Python library python_graphs that applies static analysis to construct graph representations of Python programs suitable for training machine learning models. Our library admits the construction of control-flow graphs, data-flow graphs, and composite ``program graphs'' that combine control-flow, data-flow, syntactic, and lexical information about a program. We present the capabilities and limitations of the library, perform a case study applying the library to millions of competitive programming submissions, and showcase the library's utility for machine learning research.

Code intelligence plays a key role in transforming modern software engineering. Recently, deep learning-based models, especially Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable potential in tackling these tasks by leveraging massive open-source code data and programming language features. However, the development and deployment of such models often require expertise in both machine learning and software engineering, creating a barrier for the model adoption. In this paper, we present CodeTF, an open-source Transformer-based library for state-of-the-art Code LLMs and code intelligence. Following the principles of modular design and extensible framework, we design CodeTF with a unified interface to enable rapid access and development across different types of models, datasets and tasks. Our library supports a collection of pretrained Code LLM models and popular code benchmarks, including a standardized interface to train and serve code LLMs efficiently, and data features such as language-specific parsers and utility functions for extracting code attributes. In this paper, we describe the design principles, the architecture, key modules and components, and compare with other related library tools. Finally, we hope CodeTF is able to bridge the gap between machine learning/generative AI and software engineering, providing a comprehensive open-source solution for developers, researchers, and practitioners.

In this paper, we describe Function Assistant, a lightweight Python-based toolkit for querying and exploring source code repositories using natural language. The toolkit is designed to help end-users of a target API quickly find information about functions through high-level natural language queries and descriptions. For a given text query and background API, the tool finds candidate functions by performing a translation from the text to known representations in the API using the semantic parsing approach of Richardson and Kuhn (2017). Translations are automatically learned from example text-code pairs in example APIs. The toolkit includes features for building translation pipelines and query engines for arbitrary source code projects. To explore this last feature, we perform new experiments on 27 well-known Python projects hosted on Github.

Code search is a task to find programming codes that semantically match the given natural language queries. Even though some of the existing datasets for this task are multilingual on the programming language side, their query data are only in English. In this research, we create a multilingual code search dataset in four natural and four programming languages using a neural machine translation model. Using our dataset, we pre-train and fine-tune the Transformer-based models and then evaluate them on multiple code search test sets. Our results show that the model pre-trained with all natural and programming language data has performed best in most cases. By applying back-translation data filtering to our dataset, we demonstrate that the translation quality affects the model's performance to a certain extent, but the data size matters more.

Understanding and reasoning about code semantics is essential for enhancing code LLMs' abilities to solve real-world software engineering (SE) tasks. Although several code reasoning benchmarks exist, most rely on synthetic datasets or educational coding problems and focus on coarse-grained reasoning tasks such as input/output prediction, limiting their effectiveness in evaluating LLMs in practical SE contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose CodeSense, the first benchmark that makes available a spectrum of fine-grained code reasoning tasks concerned with the software engineering of real-world code. We collected Python, C and Java software projects from real-world repositories. We executed tests from these repositories, collected their execution traces, and constructed a ground truth dataset for fine-grained semantic reasoning tasks. We then performed comprehensive evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results show a clear performance gap for the models to handle fine-grained reasoning tasks. Although prompting techniques such as chain-of-thought and in-context learning helped, the lack of code semantics in LLMs fundamentally limit models' capabilities of code reasoning. Besides dataset, benchmark and evaluation, our work produced an execution tracing framework and tool set that make it easy to collect ground truth for fine-grained SE reasoning tasks, offering a strong basis for future benchmark construction and model post training. Our code and data are located at https://codesense-bench.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered remarkable advancements across diverse code-related tasks, known as Code LLMs, particularly in code generation that generates source code with LLM from natural language descriptions. This burgeoning field has captured significant interest from both academic researchers and industry professionals due to its practical significance in software development, e.g., GitHub Copilot. Despite the active exploration of LLMs for a variety of code tasks, either from the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) or software engineering (SE) or both, there is a noticeable absence of a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review dedicated to LLM for code generation. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by providing a systematic literature review that serves as a valuable reference for researchers investigating the cutting-edge progress in LLMs for code generation. We introduce a taxonomy to categorize and discuss the recent developments in LLMs for code generation, covering aspects such as data curation, latest advances, performance evaluation, and real-world applications. In addition, we present a historical overview of the evolution of LLMs for code generation and offer an empirical comparison using the widely recognized HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks to highlight the progressive enhancements in LLM capabilities for code generation. We identify critical challenges and promising opportunities regarding the gap between academia and practical development. Furthermore, we have established a dedicated resource website (https://codellm.github.io) to continuously document and disseminate the most recent advances in the field.

Code embeddings are essential for semantic code search; however, current approaches often struggle to capture the precise syntactic and contextual nuances inherent in code. Open-source models such as CodeBERT and UniXcoder exhibit limitations in scalability and efficiency, while high-performing proprietary systems impose substantial computational costs. We introduce a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to construct task-specific adapters for code retrieval. Our approach reduces the number of trainable parameters to less than two percent of the base model, enabling rapid fine-tuning on extensive code corpora (2 million samples in 25 minutes on two H100 GPUs). Experiments demonstrate an increase of up to 9.1% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) for Code2Code search, and up to 86.69% for Text2Code search tasks across multiple programming languages. Distinction in task-wise and language-wise adaptation helps explore the sensitivity of code retrieval for syntactical and linguistic variations.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending CodeSearchNet Challenge to more queries and programming languages in the future.

Code search is crucial for code reuse, enabling developers to efficiently locate relevant snippets. Current methods rely on encoder-based models, which suffer from limitations such as poor generalization and restricted input lengths. Decoder-only large language models (LLMs), with their extensive pre-training, larger size, and longer input capabilities, offer potential solutions to these issues, yet their effectiveness in code search remains underexplored. To fill this gap, our study presents the first systematic exploration of decoder-only LLMs for code search. We evaluate nine state-of-the-art decoder-only models using two fine-tuning methods, two datasets (CSN and CoSQA^+), and three model sizes. Our findings reveal that fine-tuned CodeGemma significantly outperforms encoder-only models like UniXcoder, achieving a 5.57% improvement in MRR on CSN and a 49.6% increase in MAP on CoSQA^+ compared to zero-shot UniXcoder. These results highlight the superior performance and adaptability of decoder-only models. Additionally, we provide valuable insights into optimizing these models for code search, covering aspects such as model selection, fine-tuning methods, training data, and model size, and discussing their strengths and limitations.

Motivated by recent work on lifelong learning applications for language models (LMs) of code, we introduce CodeLL, a lifelong learning dataset focused on code changes. Our contribution addresses a notable research gap marked by the absence of a long-term temporal dimension in existing code change datasets, limiting their suitability in lifelong learning scenarios. In contrast, our dataset aims to comprehensively capture code changes across the entire release history of open-source software repositories. In this work, we introduce an initial version of CodeLL, comprising 71 machine-learning-based projects mined from Software Heritage. This dataset enables the extraction and in-depth analysis of code changes spanning 2,483 releases at both the method and API levels. CodeLL enables researchers studying the behaviour of LMs in lifelong fine-tuning settings for learning code changes. Additionally, the dataset can help studying data distribution shifts within software repositories and the evolution of API usages over time.

Semantic code search, retrieving code that matches a given natural language query, is an important task to improve productivity in software engineering. Existing code search datasets are problematic: either using unrealistic queries, or with mismatched codes, and typically using one-to-one query-code pairing, which fails to reflect the reality that a query might have multiple valid code matches. This paper introduces CoSQA+, pairing high-quality queries (reused from CoSQA) with multiple suitable codes. We collect code candidates from diverse sources and form candidate pairs by pairing queries with these codes. Utilizing the power of large language models (LLMs), we automate pair annotation, filtering, and code generation for queries without suitable matches. Through extensive experiments, CoSQA+ has demonstrated superior quality over CoSQA. Models trained on CoSQA+ exhibit improved performance. Furthermore, we propose a new metric Mean Multi-choice Reciprocal Rank (MMRR), to assess one-to-N code search performance. We provide the code and data at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/CoSQA_Plus.

In this work, we discuss a recently popular type of recommender system: an LLM-based coding assistant. Connecting the task of providing code recommendations in multiple formats to traditional RecSys challenges, we outline several similarities and differences due to domain specifics. We emphasize the importance of providing relevant context to an LLM for this use case and discuss lessons learned from context enhancements & offline and online evaluation of such AI-assisted coding systems.

Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

With the rapid increase in the amount of public code repositories, developers maintain a great desire to retrieve precise code snippets by using natural language. Despite existing deep learning based approaches(e.g., DeepCS and MMAN) have provided the end-to-end solutions (i.e., accepts natural language as queries and shows related code fragments retrieved directly from code corpus), the accuracy of code search in the large-scale repositories is still limited by the code representation (e.g., AST) and modeling (e.g., directly fusing the features in the attention stage). In this paper, we propose a novel learnable deep Graph for Code Search (calleddeGraphCS), to transfer source code into variable-based flow graphs based on the intermediate representation technique, which can model code semantics more precisely compared to process the code as text directly or use the syntactic tree representation. Furthermore, we propose a well-designed graph optimization mechanism to refine the code representation, and apply an improved gated graph neural network to model variable-based flow graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of deGraphCS, we collect a large-scale dataset from GitHub containing 41,152 code snippets written in C language, and reproduce several typical deep code search methods for comparison. Besides, we design a qualitative user study to verify the practical value of our approach. The experimental results have shown that deGraphCS can achieve state-of-the-art performances, and accurately retrieve code snippets satisfying the needs of the users.

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.

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}.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) on code-related tasks has shown the potential of fully automated software development. In light of this, we introduce a new software engineering task, namely Natural Language to code Repository (NL2Repo). This task aims to generate an entire code repository from its natural language requirements. To address this task, we propose a simple yet effective framework CodeS, which decomposes NL2Repo into multiple sub-tasks by a multi-layer sketch. Specifically, CodeS includes three modules: RepoSketcher, FileSketcher, and SketchFiller. RepoSketcher first generates a repository's directory structure for given requirements; FileSketcher then generates a file sketch for each file in the generated structure; SketchFiller finally fills in the details for each function in the generated file sketch. To rigorously assess CodeS on the NL2Repo task, we carry out evaluations through both automated benchmarking and manual feedback analysis. For benchmark-based evaluation, we craft a repository-oriented benchmark, SketchEval, and design an evaluation metric, SketchBLEU. For feedback-based evaluation, we develop a VSCode plugin for CodeS and engage 30 participants in conducting empirical studies. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness and practicality of CodeS on the NL2Repo task.

Open Source Software (OSS) is forming the spines of technology infrastructures, attracting millions of talents to contribute. Notably, it is challenging and critical to consider both the developers' interests and the semantic features of the project code to recommend appropriate development tasks to OSS developers. In this paper, we formulate the novel problem of code recommendation, whose purpose is to predict the future contribution behaviors of developers given their interaction history, the semantic features of source code, and the hierarchical file structures of projects. Considering the complex interactions among multiple parties within the system, we propose CODER, a novel graph-based code recommendation framework for open source software developers. CODER jointly models microscopic user-code interactions and macroscopic user-project interactions via a heterogeneous graph and further bridges the two levels of information through aggregation on file-structure graphs that reflect the project hierarchy. Moreover, due to the lack of reliable benchmarks, we construct three large-scale datasets to facilitate future research in this direction. Extensive experiments show that our CODER framework achieves superior performance under various experimental settings, including intra-project, cross-project, and cold-start recommendation. We will release all the datasets, code, and utilities for data retrieval upon the acceptance of this work.

Code-LLMs, LLMs pre-trained on large code corpora, have shown great progress in learning rich representations of the structure and syntax of code, successfully using it to generate or classify code fragments. At the same time, understanding if they are able to do so because they capture code semantics, and how well, is still an open question. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing SeqCoBench, a benchmark for systematically assessing how Code-LLMs can capture code functional equivalence. SeqCoBench contains over 20 code transformations that either preserve or alter the semantics of Python programs. We conduct extensive evaluations in different settings, including zero-shot and parameter-efficient finetuning methods on state-of-the-art (Code)-LLMs to see if they can discern semantically equivalent or different pairs of programs in SeqCoBench. We find that the performance gap between these LLMs and classical match-based retrieval scores is minimal, with both approaches showing a concerning lack of depth in understanding code semantics.

Repository-level code generation remains challenging due to complex code dependencies and the limitations of large language models (LLMs) in processing long contexts. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks are widely adopted, the effectiveness of different retrieved information sources-contextual code, APIs, and similar snippets-has not been rigorously analyzed. Through an empirical study on two benchmarks, we demonstrate that in-context code and potential API information significantly enhance LLM performance, whereas retrieved similar code often introduces noise, degrading results by up to 15%. Based on the preliminary results, we propose AllianceCoder, a novel context-integrated method that employs chain-of-thought prompting to decompose user queries into implementation steps and retrieves APIs via semantic description matching. Through extensive experiments on CoderEval and RepoExec, AllianceCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Pass@1 by up to 20% over existing approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) play an ever-increasing role in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI)--not only for natural language processing but also for code understanding and generation. To stimulate open and responsible research on LLMs for code, we introduce The Stack, a 3.1 TB dataset consisting of permissively licensed source code in 30 programming languages. We describe how we collect the full dataset, construct a permissively licensed subset, present a data governance plan, discuss limitations, and show promising results on text2code benchmarks by training 350M-parameter decoders on different Python subsets. We find that (1) near-deduplicating the data significantly boosts performance across all experiments, and (2) it is possible to match previously reported HumanEval and MBPP performance using only permissively licensed data. We make the dataset available at https://hf.co/BigCode, provide a tool called "Am I in The Stack" (https://hf.co/spaces/bigcode/in-the-stack) for developers to search The Stack for copies of their code, and provide a process for code to be removed from the dataset by following the instructions at https://www.bigcode-project.org/docs/about/the-stack/.

With the success of large language models (LLMs) of code and their use as code assistants (e.g. Codex used in GitHub Copilot), techniques for introducing domain-specific knowledge in the prompt design process become important. In this work, we propose a framework called Repo-Level Prompt Generator that learns to generate example-specific prompts using prompt proposals. The prompt proposals take context from the entire repository, thereby incorporating both the structure of the repository and the context from other relevant files (e.g. imports, parent class files). Our technique doesn't require any access to the weights of the LLM, making it applicable in cases where we only have black-box access to the LLM. We conduct experiments on the task of single-line code-autocompletion using code repositories taken from Google Code archives. We demonstrate that an oracle constructed from our prompt proposals gives a remarkably high relative improvement of 36% over Codex, showing the quality of these proposals. Further, we show that when we train a model to predict a prompt proposal, we can achieve significant performance gains over Codex and other baselines. We release our code, data, and trained checkpoints at: https://github.com/shrivastavadisha/repo_level_prompt_generation.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

Code completion, which aims to predict the following code token(s) according to the code context, can improve the productivity of software development. Recent work has proved that statistical language modeling with transformers can greatly improve the performance in the code completion task via learning from large-scale source code datasets. However, current approaches focus only on code context within the file or project, i.e. internal context. Our distinction is utilizing "external" context, inspired by human behaviors of copying from the related code snippets when writing code. Specifically, we propose a retrieval-augmented code completion framework, leveraging both lexical copying and referring to code with similar semantics by retrieval. We adopt a stage-wise training approach that combines a source code retriever and an auto-regressive language model for programming language. We evaluate our approach in the code completion task in Python and Java programming languages, achieving a state-of-the-art performance on CodeXGLUE benchmark.

Code large language models mark a pivotal breakthrough in artificial intelligence. They are specifically crafted to understand and generate programming languages, significantly boosting the efficiency of coding development workflows. In this technical report, we present CodeShell-Base, a seven billion-parameter foundation model with 8K context length, showcasing exceptional proficiency in code comprehension. By incorporating Grouped-Query Attention and Rotary Positional Embedding into GPT-2, CodeShell-Base integrates the structural merits of StarCoder and CodeLlama and forms its unique architectural design. We then carefully built a comprehensive data pre-processing process, including similar data deduplication, perplexity-based data filtering, and model-based data filtering. Through this process, We have curated 100 billion high-quality pre-training data from GitHub. Benefiting from the high-quality data, CodeShell-Base outperforms CodeLlama in Humaneval after training on just 500 billion tokens (5 epochs). We have conducted extensive experiments across multiple language datasets, including Python, Java, and C++, and the results indicate that our model possesses robust foundational capabilities in code comprehension and generation.

Recent advancements in Code Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) have predominantly focused on open-ended code generation tasks, often neglecting the critical aspect of code understanding and comprehension. To bridge this gap, we present CodeMMLU, a comprehensive multiple-choice question-answer benchmark designed to evaluate the depth of software and code understanding in LLMs. CodeMMLU includes over 10,000 questions sourced from diverse domains, encompassing tasks such as code analysis, defect detection, and software engineering principles across multiple programming languages. Unlike traditional benchmarks, CodeMMLU assesses models's ability to reason about code rather than merely generate it, providing deeper insights into their grasp of complex software concepts and systems. Our extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art models face significant challenges with CodeMMLU, highlighting deficiencies in comprehension beyond code generation. By underscoring the crucial relationship between code understanding and effective generation, CodeMMLU serves as a vital resource for advancing AI-assisted software development, ultimately aiming to create more reliable and capable coding assistants.

There has been an increase of interest in code search using natural language. Assessing the performance of such code search models can be difficult without a readily available evaluation suite. In this paper, we present an evaluation dataset consisting of natural language query and code snippet pairs, with the hope that future work in this area can use this dataset as a common benchmark. We also provide the results of two code search models ([1] and [6]) from recent work. The evaluation dataset is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/Neural-Code-Search-Evaluation-Dataset

Effective code retrieval plays a crucial role in advancing code generation, bug fixing, and software maintenance, particularly as software systems increase in complexity. While current code embedding models have demonstrated promise in retrieving code snippets for small-scale, well-defined tasks, they often underperform in more demanding real-world applications such as bug localization within GitHub repositories. We hypothesize that a key issue is their reliance on noisy and inconsistent datasets for training, which impedes their ability to generalize to more complex retrieval scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce CoRNStack, a large-scale, high-quality contrastive training dataset for code that spans multiple programming languages. This dataset is curated using consistency filtering to eliminate noisy positives and is further enriched with mined hard negatives, thereby facilitating more effective learning. We demonstrate that contrastive training of embedding models using CoRNStack leads to state-of-the-art performance across a variety of code retrieval tasks. Furthermore, the dataset can be leveraged for training code reranking models, a largely underexplored area compared to text reranking. Our finetuned code reranking model significantly improves the ranking quality over the retrieved results. Finally, by employing our code retriever and reranker together, we demonstrate significant improvements in function localization for GitHub issues, an important component of real-world software development.

Recent advancements in code-fluent Large Language Models (LLMs) enabled the research on repository-level code editing. In such tasks, the model navigates and modifies the entire codebase of a project according to request. Hence, such tasks require efficient context retrieval, i.e., navigating vast codebases to gather relevant context. Despite the recognized importance of context retrieval, existing studies tend to approach repository-level coding tasks in an end-to-end manner, rendering the impact of individual components within these complicated systems unclear. In this work, we decouple the task of context retrieval from the other components of the repository-level code editing pipelines. We lay the groundwork to define the strengths and weaknesses of this component and the role that reasoning plays in it by conducting experiments that focus solely on context retrieval. We conclude that while the reasoning helps to improve the precision of the gathered context, it still lacks the ability to identify its sufficiency. We also outline the ultimate role of the specialized tools in the process of context gathering. The code supplementing this paper is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/ai-agents-code-editing.

We introduce the MultiLang Code Parser Dataset (MLCPD), a large-scale, language-agnostic dataset unifying syntactic and structural representations of code across ten major programming languages. MLCPD contains over seven million parsed source files normalized under our proposed universal Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) schema, enabling consistent cross-language reasoning, structural learning, and multilingual software analysis. Unlike existing corpora that focus purely on token-level code or isolated parsers, MLCPD provides both hierarchical tree representations and rich metadata for every file, ensuring lossless syntactic coverage and structural uniformity. Each entry includes a normalized schema, language-level metadata, and abstracted node semantics stored in Parquet format for scalable retrieval. Empirical analyses reveal strong cross-language structural regularities-demonstrating that syntactic graphs from languages as diverse as Python, Java, and Go can be aligned under a shared schema. We release the dataset publicly on Hugging Face and the accompanying codebase on GitHub, which includes complete pipelines for dataset reproduction, grammar compilation, and a visualization tool for exploring the unified AST across languages. Together, these resources establish MLCPD as an open, reproducible foundation for future research in cross-language representation learning and program analysis.

Knowledge graphs have been proven extremely useful in powering diverse applications in semantic search and natural language understanding. In this paper, we present GraphGen4Code, a toolkit to build code knowledge graphs that can similarly power various applications such as program search, code understanding, bug detection, and code automation. GraphGen4Code uses generic techniques to capture code semantics with the key nodes in the graph representing classes, functions, and methods. Edges indicate function usage (e.g., how data flows through function calls, as derived from program analysis of real code), and documentation about functions (e.g., code documentation, usage documentation, or forum discussions such as StackOverflow). Our toolkit uses named graphs in RDF to model graphs per program, or can output graphs as JSON. We show the scalability of the toolkit by applying it to 1.3 million Python files drawn from GitHub, 2,300 Python modules, and 47 million forum posts. This results in an integrated code graph with over 2 billion triples. We make the toolkit to build such graphs as well as the sample extraction of the 2 billion triples graph publicly available to the community for use.

Software engineering activities such as package migration, fixing errors reports from static analysis or testing, and adding type annotations or other specifications to a codebase, involve pervasively editing the entire repository of code. We formulate these activities as repository-level coding tasks. Recent tools like GitHub Copilot, which are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), have succeeded in offering high-quality solutions to localized coding problems. Repository-level coding tasks are more involved and cannot be solved directly using LLMs, since code within a repository is inter-dependent and the entire repository may be too large to fit into the prompt. We frame repository-level coding as a planning problem and present a task-agnostic framework, called CodePlan to solve it. CodePlan synthesizes a multi-step chain of edits (plan), where each step results in a call to an LLM on a code location with context derived from the entire repository, previous code changes and task-specific instructions. CodePlan is based on a novel combination of an incremental dependency analysis, a change may-impact analysis and an adaptive planning algorithm. We evaluate the effectiveness of CodePlan on two repository-level tasks: package migration (C#) and temporal code edits (Python). Each task is evaluated on multiple code repositories, each of which requires inter-dependent changes to many files (between 2-97 files). Coding tasks of this level of complexity have not been automated using LLMs before. Our results show that CodePlan has better match with the ground truth compared to baselines. CodePlan is able to get 5/6 repositories to pass the validity checks (e.g., to build without errors and make correct code edits) whereas the baselines (without planning but with the same type of contextual information as CodePlan) cannot get any of the repositories to pass them.

We introduce API Pack, a multilingual dataset featuring over one million instruction-API call pairs aimed at advancing large language models' API call generation capabilities. Through experiments, we demonstrate API Pack's efficacy in enhancing models for this specialized task while maintaining their overall proficiency at general coding. Fine-tuning CodeLlama-13B on just 20,000 Python instances yields over 10% and 5% higher accuracy than GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 respectively in generating unseen API calls. Scaling to 100k examples improves generalization to new APIs not seen during training. In addition, cross-lingual API call generation is achieved without needing extensive data per language. The dataset, fine-tuned models, and overall code base are publicly available at https://github.com/zguo0525/API-Pack.

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

General large language models (LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have demonstrated significant potential in tasks such as code generation in software engineering. This has led to the development of specialized LLMs for software engineering, known as Code LLMs. A considerable portion of Code LLMs is derived from general LLMs through model fine-tuning. As a result, Code LLMs are often updated frequently and their performance can be influenced by the base LLMs. However, there is currently a lack of systematic investigation into Code LLMs and their performance. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of the types of Code LLMs and their differences in performance compared to general LLMs. We aim to address three questions: (1) What LLMs are specifically designed for software engineering tasks, and what is the relationship between these Code LLMs? (2) Do Code LLMs really outperform general LLMs in software engineering tasks? (3) Which LLMs are more proficient in different software engineering tasks? To answer these questions, we first collect relevant literature and work from five major databases and open-source communities, resulting in 134 works for analysis. Next, we categorize the Code LLMs based on their publishers and examine their relationships with general LLMs and among themselves. Furthermore, we investigate the performance differences between general LLMs and Code LLMs in various software engineering tasks to demonstrate the impact of base models and Code LLMs. Finally, we comprehensively maintained the performance of LLMs across multiple mainstream benchmarks to identify the best-performing LLMs for each software engineering task. Our research not only assists developers of Code LLMs in choosing base models for the development of more advanced LLMs but also provides insights for practitioners to better understand key improvement directions for Code LLMs.

Over the past few years, Large Language Models of Code (Code LLMs) have started to have a significant impact on programming practice. Code LLMs are also emerging as a building block for research in programming languages and software engineering. However, the quality of code produced by a Code LLM varies significantly by programming languages. Code LLMs produce impressive results on programming languages that are well represented in their training data (e.g., Java, Python, or JavaScript), but struggle with low-resource languages, like OCaml and Racket. This paper presents an effective approach for boosting the performance of Code LLMs on low-resource languages using semi-synthetic data. Our approach generates high-quality datasets for low-resource languages, which can then be used to fine-tune any pretrained Code LLM. Our approach, called MultiPL-T, translates training data from high-resource languages into training data for low-resource languages. We apply our approach to generate tens of thousands of new, validated training items for Racket, OCaml, and Lua from Python. Moreover, we use an open dataset (The Stack) and model (StarCoderBase), which allow us to decontaminate benchmarks and train models on this data without violating the model license. With MultiPL-T generated data, we present fine-tuned versions of StarCoderBase that achieve state-of-the-art performance for Racket, OCaml, and Lua on benchmark problems. For Lua, our fine-tuned model achieves the same performance as StarCoderBase as Python -- a very high-resource language -- on the MultiPL-E benchmarks. For Racket and OCaml, we double their performance on MultiPL-E, bringing their performance close to higher-resource languages such as Ruby and C#.

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless, software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum-based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite (300 real-life GitHub issues) show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (19% on SWE-bench-lite), which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported SWE-agent. In addition, AutoCodeRover achieved this efficacy with significantly lower cost (on average, $0.43 USD), compared to other baselines. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed automated software development by enabling direct translation of natural language descriptions into functional code, driving commercial adoption through tools like Github Copilot (Microsoft), Cursor (Anysphere), Trae (ByteDance), and Claude Code (Anthropic). While the field has evolved dramatically from rule-based systems to Transformer-based architectures, achieving performance improvements from single-digit to over 95\% success rates on benchmarks like HumanEval. In this work, we provide a comprehensive synthesis and practical guide (a series of analytic and probing experiments) about code LLMs, systematically examining the complete model life cycle from data curation to post-training through advanced prompting paradigms, code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and autonomous coding agents. We analyze the code capability of the general LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA) and code-specialized LLMs (StarCoder, Code LLaMA, DeepSeek-Coder, and QwenCoder), critically examining the techniques, design decisions, and trade-offs. Further, we articulate the research-practice gap between academic research (e.g., benchmarks and tasks) and real-world deployment (e.g., software-related code tasks), including code correctness, security, contextual awareness of large codebases, and integration with development workflows, and map promising research directions to practical needs. Last, we conduct a series of experiments to provide a comprehensive analysis of code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, covering scaling law, framework selection, hyperparameter sensitivity, model architectures, and dataset comparisons.

Current search techniques are limited to standard RAG query-document applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to expand the code and index for predicting the required APIs, directly enabling high-quality, end-to-end code generation for auto-completion and agentic AI applications. We address the problem of API leaks in current code-to-code benchmark datasets by introducing a new dataset built from real-world ServiceNow Script Includes that capture the challenge of unclear API usage intent in the code. Our evaluation metrics show that this method achieves 87.86% top-40 retrieval accuracy, allowing the critical context with APIs needed for successful downstream code generation. To enable real-time predictions, we develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline that optimizes a compact 0.6B reranker through synthetic dataset generation, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. This approach enables our compact reranker to outperform a much larger 8B model while maintaining 2.5x reduced latency, effectively addressing the nuances of enterprise-specific code without the computational overhead of larger models.

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

Over the last several decades, software has been woven into the fabric of every aspect of our society. As software development surges and code infrastructure of enterprise applications ages, it is now more critical than ever to increase software development productivity and modernize legacy applications. Advances in deep learning and machine learning algorithms have enabled numerous breakthroughs, motivating researchers to leverage AI techniques to improve software development efficiency. Thus, the fast-emerging research area of AI for Code has garnered new interest and gathered momentum. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset CodeNet, consisting of over 14 million code samples and about 500 million lines of code in 55 different programming languages, which is aimed at teaching AI to code. In addition to its large scale, CodeNet has a rich set of high-quality annotations to benchmark and help accelerate research in AI techniques for a variety of critical coding tasks, including code similarity and classification, code translation between a large variety of programming languages, and code performance (runtime and memory) improvement techniques. Additionally, CodeNet provides sample input and output test sets for 98.5% of the code samples, which can be used as an oracle for determining code correctness and potentially guide reinforcement learning for code quality improvements. As a usability feature, we provide several pre-processing tools in CodeNet to transform source code into representations that can be readily used as inputs into machine learning models. Results of code classification and code similarity experiments using the CodeNet dataset are provided as a reference. We hope that the scale, diversity and rich, high-quality annotations of CodeNet will offer unprecedented research opportunities at the intersection of AI and Software Engineering.

Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given English documentation and the programmatic context provided by the rest of the class. This task is challenging because the desired code can vary greatly depending on the functionality the class provides (e.g., a sort function may or may not be available when we are asked to "return the smallest element" in a particular member variable list). We introduce CONCODE, a new large dataset with over 100,000 examples consisting of Java classes from online code repositories, and develop a new encoder-decoder architecture that models the interaction between the method documentation and the class environment. We also present a detailed error analysis suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this task.

OpenAI's Codex, a GPT-3 like model trained on a large code corpus, has made headlines in and outside of academia. Given a short user-provided description, it is capable of synthesizing code snippets that are syntactically and semantically valid in most cases. In this work, we want to investigate whether Codex is able to localize and fix bugs, a task of central interest in the field of automated program repair. Our initial evaluation uses the multi-language QuixBugs benchmark (40 bugs in both Python and Java). We find that, despite not being trained for APR, Codex is surprisingly effective, and competitive with recent state of the art techniques. Our results also show that Codex is slightly more successful at repairing Python than Java.

Recent advances have been improving the context windows of Large Language Models (LLMs). To quantify the real long-context capabilities of LLMs, evaluators such as the popular Needle in a Haystack have been developed to test LLMs over a large chunk of raw texts. While effective, current evaluations overlook the insight of how LLMs work with long-context code, i.e., repositories. To this end, we initiate the RepoQA benchmark to evaluate LLMs on long-context code understanding. Traditional needle testers ask LLMs to directly retrieve the answer from the context without necessary deep understanding. In RepoQA, we built our initial task, namely Searching Needle Function (SNF), which exercises LLMs to search functions given their natural-language description, i.e., LLMs cannot find the desired function if they cannot understand the description and code. RepoQA is multilingual and comprehensive: it includes 500 code search tasks gathered from 50 popular repositories across 5 modern programming languages. By evaluating 26 general and code-specific LLMs on RepoQA, we show (i) there is still a small gap between the best open and proprietary models; (ii) different models are good at different languages; and (iii) models may understand code better without comments.

The ability to generate natural language sequences from source code snippets has a variety of applications such as code summarization, documentation, and retrieval. Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, adopted from neural machine translation (NMT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on these tasks by treating source code as a sequence of tokens. We present {scriptsize CODE2SEQ}: an alternative approach that leverages the syntactic structure of programming languages to better encode source code. Our model represents a code snippet as the set of compositional paths in its abstract syntax tree (AST) and uses attention to select the relevant paths while decoding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for two tasks, two programming languages, and four datasets of up to 16M examples. Our model significantly outperforms previous models that were specifically designed for programming languages, as well as state-of-the-art NMT models. An interactive online demo of our model is available at http://code2seq.org. Our code, data and trained models are available at http://github.com/tech-srl/code2seq.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a variety of complex tasks. One significant application of LLMs is in tackling software engineering challenges, particularly in resolving real-world tasks on GitHub by fixing code based on the issues reported by the users. However, many current approaches rely on proprietary LLMs, which limits reproducibility, accessibility, and transparency. The critical components of LLMs for addressing software engineering issues and how their capabilities can be effectively enhanced remain unclear. To address these challenges, we introduce SWE-Fixer, a novel open-source LLM designed to effectively and efficiently resolve GitHub issues. SWE-Fixer comprises two essential modules: a code file retrieval module and a code editing module. The retrieval module employs BM25 along with a lightweight LLM model to achieve coarse-to-fine file retrieval. Subsequently, the code editing module utilizes the other LLM model to generate patches for the identified files. Then, to mitigate the lack of publicly available datasets, we compile an extensive dataset that includes 110K GitHub issues along with their corresponding patches, and train the two modules of SWE-Fixer separately. We assess our approach on the SWE-Bench Lite and Verified benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models with scores of 23.3% and 30.2%, respectively. These outcomes highlight the efficacy of our approach. We will make our model, dataset, and code publicly available at https://github.com/InternLM/SWE-Fixer.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated code generation but typically excel only in simpler tasks such as generating standalone code units. Real-world software development, however, often involves complex code repositories (named repo) with complex dependencies and extensive documentation. To fill this gap, our research pivots towards evaluating LLMs in a more realistic setting -- real-world repo-level code generation. We introduce CodeAgentBench, a manually curated benchmark for repo-level code generation. This benchmark comprises five high-quality Python projects, encompassing a total of 101 samples. We assess nine leading LLMs on repo-level tasks and observe a decline in their performance. To tackle this, we present CodeAgent, a novel LLM-based agent framework that employs external tools for effective repo-level code generation. CodeAgent integrates five programming tools, enabling interaction with software artifacts for information retrieval, code symbol navigation, and code testing. We implement four agent strategies to optimize these tools' usage. Our experiments on CodeAgentBench show that CodeAgent enhances LLM performance significantly, with improvements ranging from 18.1\% to 250\%. Further tests on the HumanEval benchmark confirm CodeAgent's adaptability and efficacy across various code generation tasks. Notably, CodeAgent outperforms commercial products like Github Copilot, showcasing superior accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate CodeAgent's robust capabilities in code generation, highlighting its potential for real-world repo-level coding challenges.

Pretrained code language models have enabled great progress towards program synthesis. However, common approaches only consider in-file local context and thus miss information and constraints imposed by other parts of the codebase and its external dependencies. Existing code completion benchmarks also lack such context. To resolve these restrictions we curate a new dataset of permissively licensed Python packages that includes full projects and their dependencies and provide tools to extract non-local information with the help of program analyzers. We then focus on the task of function call argument completion which requires predicting the arguments to function calls. We show that existing code completion models do not yield good results on our completion task. To better solve this task, we query a program analyzer for information relevant to a given function call, and consider ways to provide the analyzer results to different code completion models during inference and training. Our experiments show that providing access to the function implementation and function usages greatly improves the argument completion performance. Our ablation study provides further insights on how different types of information available from the program analyzer and different ways of incorporating the information affect the model performance.

The BigCode project, an open-scientific collaboration focused on the responsible development of Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs), introduces StarCoder2. In partnership with Software Heritage (SWH), we build The Stack v2 on top of the digital commons of their source code archive. Alongside the SWH repositories spanning 619 programming languages, we carefully select other high-quality data sources, such as GitHub pull requests, Kaggle notebooks, and code documentation. This results in a training set that is 4x larger than the first StarCoder dataset. We train StarCoder2 models with 3B, 7B, and 15B parameters on 3.3 to 4.3 trillion tokens and thoroughly evaluate them on a comprehensive set of Code LLM benchmarks. We find that our small model, StarCoder2-3B, outperforms other Code LLMs of similar size on most benchmarks, and also outperforms StarCoderBase-15B. Our large model, StarCoder2- 15B, significantly outperforms other models of comparable size. In addition, it matches or outperforms CodeLlama-34B, a model more than twice its size. Although DeepSeekCoder- 33B is the best-performing model at code completion for high-resource languages, we find that StarCoder2-15B outperforms it on math and code reasoning benchmarks, as well as several low-resource languages. We make the model weights available under an OpenRAIL license and ensure full transparency regarding the training data by releasing the SoftWare Heritage persistent IDentifiers (SWHIDs) of the source code data.

Programming assistants powered by large language models have transformed software development, yet most benchmarks focus narrowly on code generation tasks. Recent efforts like InfiBench and StackEval attempt to address this gap using Stack Overflow data but remain limited to single-turn interactions in isolated contexts, require significant manual curation, and fail to represent complete project environments. We introduce CodeAssistBench (CAB), the first benchmark framework for evaluating multi-turn programming assistance in realistic settings that address real-world questions about actual codebases. Unlike existing programming Q&A benchmarks, CAB automatically generates scalable datasets from question-related GitHub issues using configurable parameters (e.g., repository creation date, star count, programming languages), and includes automatic containerization of codebases for evaluation. It then evaluates models through simulated users in these containerized environments with full codebase access. Using this framework, we constructed a test set of 3,286 real-world programming questions across 231 repositories, spanning seven programming languages and diverse problem domains. Our evaluation of leading LLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: while models perform well on Stack Overflow questions with success rates of 70-83%, they resolve only up to 16.49% of CAB's recent issues. This discrepancy highlights the challenges of providing assistance in complex, project-specific contexts versus answering standalone questions.

Large language models that enhance software development tasks, such as code generation, code completion, and code question answering (QA), have been extensively studied in both academia and the industry. The models are integrated into popular intelligent IDEs like JetBrains and Cursor. Current benchmarks for evaluating models' code comprehension capabilities primarily focus on code generation or completion, often neglecting QA, which is a crucial aspect of understanding code. Existing code QA benchmarks are derived from code comments with predefined patterns (e.g., CodeQA) or focus on specific domains, such as education (e.g., CS1QA). These benchmarks fail to capture the real-world complexity of software engineering and user requirements for understanding code repositories. To address this gap, we introduce CoReQA, a benchmark for Code Repository-level question answering, constructed from GitHub issues and comments from 176 popular repositories across four programming languages. Since questions and answers may include both natural language and code snippets, traditional evaluation metrics such as BLEU are inadequate for assessing repository-level QA performance. Thus, we provide an LLM-as-a-judge framework to evaluate QA performance from five aspects. Based on CoReQA, we evaluate the performance of three baselines, including two short-context models using generic retrieval strategies and one long-context model that utilizes the entire repository context. Evaluation results show that state-of-the-art proprietary and long-context models struggle to address repository-level questions effectively. Our analysis highlights the limitations of language models in assisting developers in understanding repositories and suggests future directions for improving repository comprehension systems through effective context retrieval methodologies.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

The increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software development has garnered significant attention from researchers assessing the quality of the code they generate. However, much of the research focuses on controlled datasets such as HumanEval, which fail to adequately represent how developers actually utilize LLMs' code generation capabilities or clarify the characteristics of LLM-generated code in real-world development scenarios. To bridge this gap, our study investigates the characteristics of LLM-generated code and its corresponding projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings reveal several key insights: (1) ChatGPT and Copilot are the most frequently utilized for generating code on GitHub. In contrast, there is very little code generated by other LLMs on GitHub. (2) Projects containing ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code are often small and less known, led by individuals or small teams. Despite this, most projects are continuously evolving and improving. (3) ChatGPT/Copilot is mainly utilized for generating Python, Java, and TypeScript scripts for data processing and transformation. C/C++ and JavaScript code generation focuses on algorithm and data structure implementation and user interface code. Most ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code snippets are relatively short and exhibit low complexity. (4) Compared to human-written code, ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code exists in a small proportion of projects and generally undergoes fewer modifications. Additionally, modifications due to bugs are even fewer, ranging from just 3% to 8% across different languages. (5) Most comments on ChatGPT/Copilot-generated code lack detailed information, often only stating the code's origin without mentioning prompts, human modifications, or testing status. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications for researchers and practitioners.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for robust instruction-following capabilities in code generation tasks has grown significantly. Code generation not only facilitates faster prototyping and automated testing, but also augments developer efficiency through improved maintainability and reusability of code. In this paper, we introduce CodeIF, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess the abilities of LLMs to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. CodeIF encompasses a broad range of tasks, including function synthesis, error debugging, algorithmic refactoring, and code explanation, thereby providing a comprehensive suite to evaluate model performance across varying complexity levels and programming domains. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations in meeting the demands of these tasks. The experimental results offer valuable insights into how well current models align with human instructions, as well as the extent to which they can generate consistent, maintainable, and contextually relevant code. Our findings not only underscore the critical role that instruction-following LLMs can play in modern software development, but also illuminate pathways for future research aimed at enhancing their adaptability, reliability, and overall effectiveness in automated code generation.

Given a large and evolving codebase, the ability to automatically generate holistic, architecture-aware documentation that captures not only individual functions but also cross-file, cross-module, and system-level interactions remains an open challenge. Comprehensive documentation is essential for long-term software maintenance and collaboration, yet current automated approaches still fail to model the rich semantic dependencies and architectural structures that define real-world software systems. We present CodeWiki, a unified framework for automated repository-level documentation across seven programming languages. CodeWiki introduces three key innovations: (i) hierarchical decomposition that preserves architectural context across multiple levels of granularity, (ii) recursive multi-agent processing with dynamic task delegation for scalable generation, and (iii) multi-modal synthesis that integrates textual descriptions with visual artifacts such as architecture diagrams and data-flow representations. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce CodeWikiBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring multi-dimensional rubrics and LLM-based assessment protocols. Experimental results show that CodeWiki achieves a 68.79\% quality score with proprietary models, outperforming the closed-source DeepWiki baseline (64.06\%) by 4.73\%, with particularly strong improvements on high-level scripting languages (+10.47\%). We open-source CodeWiki to foster future research and community adoption.

Finding codes given natural language query isb eneficial to the productivity of software developers. Future progress towards better semantic matching between query and code requires richer supervised training resources. To remedy this, we introduce the CoSQA dataset.It includes 20,604 labels for pairs of natural language queries and codes, each annotated by at least 3 human annotators. We further introduce a contrastive learning method dubbed CoCLR to enhance query-code matching, which works as a data augmenter to bring more artificially generated training instances. We show that evaluated on CodeXGLUE with the same CodeBERT model, training on CoSQA improves the accuracy of code question answering by 5.1%, and incorporating CoCLR brings a further improvement of 10.5%.

In recent years, a lot of technological advances in computer science have aided software programmers to create innovative and real-time user-friendly software. With the creation of the software and the urging interest of people to learn to write software, there is a large collection of source codes that can be found on the web, also known as Big Code, which can be used as a source of data for driving the machine learning applications tending to solve certain software engineering problems. In this paper, we present COFO, a dataset consisting of 809 classes/problems with a total of 369K source codes written in C, C++, Java, and Python programming languages, along with other metadata such as code tags, problem specification, and input-output specifications. COFO has been scraped from the openly available Codeforces website using a selenium-beautifulsoup-python based scraper. We envision that this dataset can be useful for solving machine learning-based problems like program classification/recognition, tagging, predicting program properties, and code comprehension.

Understanding and navigating large-scale codebases remains a significant challenge in software engineering. Existing methods often treat code as flat text or focus primarily on local structural relationships, limiting their ability to provide holistic, context-aware information retrieval. We present Hierarchical Code Graph Summarization (HCGS), a novel approach that constructs a multi-layered representation of a codebase by generating structured summaries in a bottom-up fashion from a code graph. HCGS leverages the Language Server Protocol for language-agnostic code analysis and employs a parallel level-based algorithm for efficient summary generation. Through extensive evaluation on five diverse codebases totaling 7,531 functions, HCGS demonstrates significant improvements in code retrieval accuracy, achieving up to 82 percentage relative improvement in top-1 retrieval precision for large codebases like libsignal (27.15 percentage points), and perfect Pass@3 scores for smaller repositories. The system's hierarchical approach consistently outperforms traditional code-only retrieval across all metrics, with particularly substantial gains in larger, more complex codebases where understanding function relationships is crucial.

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing out the potential benefits of its application. Natural language processing has shown the potential to process text data regarding a variety of tasks. We argue, that such models can also show similar benefits for software code processing. In this paper, we investigate how models used for natural language processing can be trained upon software code. We introduce a data retrieval pipeline for software code and train a model upon Java software code. The resulting model, JavaBERT, shows a high accuracy on the masked language modeling task showing its potential for software engineering tools.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in numerous fields. This survey focuses on how LLMs empower users, regardless of their technical background, to use human languages to automatically generate executable code. We begin with understanding LLMs' limitations and challenges in automated code generation. Subsequently, we review various fine-tuning techniques designed to enhance both the performance and adaptability of LLMs in code generation tasks. We then review the existing metrics and benchmarks for evaluations to assess model performance based on fine-tuning techniques. Finally, we explore the applications of LLMs (e.g. CodeLlama, GitHub Copilot, ToolGen) in code generation tasks to illustrate their roles and functionalities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of LLMs for code generation, helps researchers in diverse fields better understand the current state-of-the-art technologies, and offers the potential of effectively leveraging LLMs for code generation tasks.

Applying large language models (LLMs) for academic API usage shows promise in reducing researchers' academic information seeking efforts. However, current LLM API-using methods struggle with complex API coupling commonly encountered in academic queries. To address this, we introduce SoAy, a solution-based LLM API-using methodology for academic information seeking. It uses code with a solution as the reasoning method, where a solution is a pre-constructed API calling sequence. The addition of the solution reduces the difficulty for the model to understand the complex relationships between APIs. Code improves the efficiency of reasoning. To evaluate SoAy, we introduce SoAyBench, an evaluation benchmark accompanied by SoAyEval, built upon a cloned environment of APIs from AMiner. Experimental results demonstrate a 34.58-75.99\% performance improvement compared to state-of-the-art LLM API-based baselines. All datasets, codes, tuned models, and deployed online services are publicly accessible at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SoAy.

Code based Language Models (LMs) have shown very promising results in the field of software engineering with applications such as code refinement, code completion and generation. However, the task of time and space complexity classification from code has not been extensively explored due to a lack of datasets, with prior endeavors being limited to Java. In this project, we aim to address these gaps by creating a labelled dataset of code snippets spanning multiple languages (Python and C++ datasets currently, with C, C#, and JavaScript datasets being released shortly). We find that existing time complexity calculation libraries and tools only apply to a limited number of use-cases. The lack of a well-defined rule based system motivates the application of several recently proposed code-based LMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of dead code elimination and increasing the maximum sequence length of LMs. In addition to time complexity, we propose to use LMs to find space complexities from code, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to do so. Furthermore, we introduce a novel code comprehension task, called cross-language transfer, where we fine-tune the LM on one language and run inference on another. Finally, we visualize the activation of the attention fed classification head of our LMs using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to interpret our results.

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and their specialized variants, particularly Code LLMs, have recently delivered impressive performance. However, previous Code LLMs are typically fine-tuned on single-source data with limited quality and diversity, which may insufficiently elicit the potential of pre-trained Code LLMs. In this paper, we present AlchemistCoder, a series of Code LLMs with enhanced code generation and generalization capabilities fine-tuned on multi-source data. To achieve this, we pioneer to unveil inherent conflicts among the various styles and qualities in multi-source code corpora and introduce data-specific prompts with hindsight relabeling, termed AlchemistPrompts, to harmonize different data sources and instruction-response pairs. Additionally, we propose incorporating the data construction process into the fine-tuning data as code comprehension tasks, including instruction evolution, data filtering, and code review. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlchemistCoder holds a clear lead among all models of the same size (6.7B/7B) and rivals or even surpasses larger models (15B/33B/70B), showcasing the efficacy of our method in refining instruction-following capabilities and advancing the boundaries of code intelligence.

Context: Automated code generation using Foundation Models (FMs) offers promising solutions for enhancing software development efficiency. However, challenges remain in ensuring domain specificity, cost-effectiveness, and security - especially when relying on third-party APIs. This paper introduces CodeLSI, a framework that combines low-rank optimization and domain-specific instruction tuning to address these challenges. Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate CodeLSI, a novel approach for generating high-quality code tailored to specific domains, using FMs fine-tuned on company infrastructure without dependence on external APIs. Methods: CodeLSI applies low-rank adaptation techniques to reduce the computational cost of model pre-training and fine-tuning. Domain-specific instruction tuning is employed to align code generation with organizational needs. We implemented and tested the framework on real-world JavaScript coding tasks using datasets drawn from internal software projects. Results: Experimental evaluations show that CodeLSI produces high-quality, context aware code. It outperforms baseline models in terms of relevance, accuracy, and domain fit. The use of low-rank optimization significantly reduced resource requirements, enabling scalable training on company-owned infrastructure. Conclusion: CodeLSI demonstrates that combining low-rank optimization with domain specific tuning can enhance the practicality and performance of FMs for automated code generation. This approach provides a secure, cost-efficient alternative to commercial API based solutions and supports faster, more targeted innovation in software development.

Code generation aims to automatically generate code snippets of specific programming language according to natural language descriptions. The continuous advancements in deep learning, particularly pre-trained models, have empowered the code generation task to achieve remarkable performance. One main challenge of pre-trained models for code generation is the semantic gap between natural language requirements and source code. To address the issue, prior studies typically adopt a retrieval-augmented framework for the task, where the similar code snippets collected by a retrieval process can be leveraged to help understand the requirements and provide guidance for the generation process. However, there is a lack of systematic study on the application of this framework for code generation, including the impact of the final generated results and the specific usage of the framework. In this paper, we choose three popular pre-trained code models, namely CodeGen, UniXcoder, and CodeT5, to assess the impact of the quality and utilization of retrieved code on the retrieval-augmented framework. Our analysis shows that the retrieval-augmented framework is beneficial for improving the performance of the existing pre-trained models. We also provide suggestions on the utilization of the retrieval-augmented code generation framework: BM25 and Sequential Integration Fusion are recommended due to their convenience and superior performance. Sketch Filling Fusion, which extracts a sketch of relevant code, could help the model improve its performance further. Additionally, we conduct experiments to investigate the influence of the retrieval-augmented framework on large language models for code generation, showing the effectiveness of the framework, and we discuss the trade-off between performance improvement and computational costs in each phase within the framework.

We present CodeReef - an open platform to share all the components necessary to enable cross-platform MLOps (MLSysOps), i.e. automating the deployment of ML models across diverse systems in the most efficient way. We also introduce the CodeReef solution - a way to package and share models as non-virtualized, portable, customizable and reproducible archive files. Such ML packages include JSON meta description of models with all dependencies, Python APIs, CLI actions and portable workflows necessary to automatically build, benchmark, test and customize models across diverse platforms, AI frameworks, libraries, compilers and datasets. We demonstrate several CodeReef solutions to automatically build, run and measure object detection based on SSD-Mobilenets, TensorFlow and COCO dataset from the latest MLPerf inference benchmark across a wide range of platforms from Raspberry Pi, Android phones and IoT devices to data centers. Our long-term goal is to help researchers share their new techniques as production-ready packages along with research papers to participate in collaborative and reproducible benchmarking, compare the different ML/software/hardware stacks and select the most efficient ones on a Pareto frontier using online CodeReef dashboards.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code have gained significant attention recently. They can generate code in different programming languages based on provided prompts, fulfilling a long-lasting dream in Software Engineering (SE), i.e., automatic code generation. Similar to human-written code, LLM-generated code is prone to bugs, and these bugs have not yet been thoroughly examined by the community. Given the increasing adoption of LLM-based code generation tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) in SE activities, it is critical to understand the characteristics of bugs contained in code generated by LLMs. This paper examines a sample of 333 bugs collected from code generated using three leading LLMs (i.e., CodeGen, PanGu-Coder, and Codex) and identifies the following 10 distinctive bug patterns: Misinterpretations, Syntax Error, Silly Mistake, Prompt-biased code, Missing Corner Case, Wrong Input Type, Hallucinated Object, Wrong Attribute, Incomplete Generation, and Non-Prompted Consideration. The bug patterns are presented in the form of a taxonomy. The identified bug patterns are validated using an online survey with 34 LLM practitioners and researchers. The surveyed participants generally asserted the significance and prevalence of the bug patterns. Researchers and practitioners can leverage these findings to develop effective quality assurance techniques for LLM-generated code. This study sheds light on the distinctive characteristics of LLM-generated code.

Code large language models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for building efficient and automated coding pipelines. Existing models are typically post-trained using reinforcement learning (RL) from general-purpose LLMs using "human instruction-final answer" pairs, where the instructions are usually from manual annotations. However, collecting high-quality coding instructions is both labor-intensive and difficult to scale. On the other hand, code snippets are abundantly available from various sources. This imbalance presents a major bottleneck in instruction-based post-training. We propose CodeBoost, a post-training framework that enhances code LLMs purely from code snippets, without relying on human-annotated instructions. CodeBoost introduces the following key components: (1) maximum-clique curation, which selects a representative and diverse training corpus from code; (2) bi-directional prediction, which enables the model to learn from both forward and backward prediction objectives; (3) error-aware prediction, which incorporates learning signals from both correct and incorrect outputs; (4) heterogeneous augmentation, which diversifies the training distribution to enrich code semantics; and (5) heterogeneous rewarding, which guides model learning through multiple reward types including format correctness and execution feedback from both successes and failures. Extensive experiments across several code LLMs and benchmarks verify that CodeBoost consistently improves performance, demonstrating its effectiveness as a scalable and effective training pipeline.