Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of requirements and code semantics. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two code LMs. Our finding is that they generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We will release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at https://aka.ms/NoFunEval.
As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality issues. However, developers need to spend extra efforts to revise their code to improve code quality based on the tool findings. In this work, we investigate the use of (instruction-following) large language models (LLMs) to assist developers in revising code to resolve code quality issues. We present a tool, CORE (short for COde REvisions), architected using a pair of LLMs organized as a duo comprised of a proposer and a ranker. Providers of static analysis tools recommend ways to mitigate the tool warnings and developers follow them to revise their code. The \emph{proposer LLM} of CORE takes the same set of recommendations and applies them to generate candidate code revisions. The candidates which pass the static quality checks are retained. However, the LLM may introduce subtle, unintended functionality changes which may go un-detected by the static analysis. The \emph{ranker LLM} evaluates the changes made by the proposer using a rubric that closely follows the acceptance criteria that a developer would enforce. CORE uses the scores assigned by the ranker LLM to rank the candidate revisions before presenting them to the developer. CORE could revise 59.2% Python files (across 52 quality checks) so that they pass scrutiny by both a tool and a human reviewer. The ranker LLM is able to reduce false positives by 25.8% in these cases. CORE produced revisions that passed the static analysis tool in 76.8% Java files (across 10 quality checks) comparable to 78.3% of a specialized program repair tool, with significantly much less engineering efforts.
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 .
Developers expend a significant amount of time in editing code for a variety of reasons such as bug fixing or adding new features. Designing effective methods to predict code edits has been an active yet challenging area of research due to the diversity of code edits and the difficulty of capturing the developer intent. In this work, we address these challenges by endowing pre-trained large language models (LLMs) of code with the knowledge of prior, relevant edits. The generative capability of the LLMs helps address the diversity in code changes and conditioning code generation on prior edits helps capture the latent developer intent. We evaluate two well-known LLMs, Codex and CodeT5, in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings respectively. In our experiments with two datasets, the knowledge of prior edits boosts the performance of the LLMs significantly and enables them to generate 29% and 54% more correctly edited code in top-1 suggestions relative to the current state-of-the-art symbolic and neural approaches, respectively.
The widespread use of spreadsheet environments by billions of users presents a unique opportunity for formula-authoring assistance. Although large language models, such as Codex, can assist in general-purpose languages, they are expensive to train and challenging to deploy due to their large model sizes (up to billions of parameters). Moreover, they require hundreds of gigabytes of training data. We present FLAME, a T5-based model trained on Excel formulas that leverages domain insights to achieve competitive performance with a substantially smaller model (60M parameters) and two orders of magnitude less training data. We curate a training dataset using sketch deduplication, introduce an Excel-specific formula tokenizer for our model, and use domain-specific versions of masked span prediction and noisy auto-encoding as pretraining objectives. We evaluate FLAME on formula repair, formula auto-completion, and a novel task called syntax reconstruction. FLAME (60M) can outperform much larger models, such as Codex-Davinci (175B), Codex-Cushman (12B), and CodeT5 (220M), in 6 out of 10 settings.
The automated synthesis of correct-by-construction Boolean functions from logical specifications is known as the Boolean Functional Synthesis (BFS) problem. BFS has many application areas that range from software engineering to circuit design. In this paper, we introduce a tool BNSynth, that is the first to solve the BFS problem under a given bound on the solution space. Bounding the solution space induces the synthesis of smaller functions that benefit resource constrained areas such as circuit design. BNSynth uses a counter-example guided, neural approach to solve the bounded BFS problem. Initial results show promise in synthesizing smaller solutions; we observe at least \textbf{3.2X} (and up to \textbf{24X}) improvement in the reduction of solution size on average, as compared to state of the art tools on our benchmarks. BNSynth is available on GitHub under an open source license.
During software development, developers need answers to queries about semantic aspects of code. Even though extractive question-answering using neural approaches has been studied widely in natural languages, the problem of answering semantic queries over code using neural networks has not yet been explored. This is mainly because there is no existing dataset with extractive question and answer pairs over code involving complex concepts and long chains of reasoning. We bridge this gap by building a new, curated dataset called CodeQueries, and proposing a neural question-answering methodology over code. We build upon state-of-the-art pre-trained models of code to predict answer and supporting-fact spans. Given a query and code, only some of the code may be relevant to answer the query. We first experiment under an ideal setting where only the relevant code is given to the model and show that our models do well. We then experiment under three pragmatic considerations: (1) scaling to large-size code, (2) learning from a limited number of examples and (3) robustness to minor syntax errors in code. Our results show that while a neural model can be resilient to minor syntax errors in code, increasing size of code, presence of code that is not relevant to the query, and reduced number of training examples limit the model performance. We are releasing our data and models to facilitate future work on the proposed problem of answering semantic queries over code.
Physical rehabilitation programs frequently begin with a brief stay in the hospital and continue with home-based rehabilitation. Lack of feedback on exercise correctness is a significant issue in home-based rehabilitation. Automated movement quality assessment (MQA) using skeletal movement data (hereafter referred to as skeletal data) collected via depth imaging devices can assist with home-based rehabilitation by providing the necessary quantitative feedback. This paper aims to use recent advances in deep learning to address the problem of MQA. Movement quality score generation is an essential component of MQA. We propose three novel skeletal data augmentation schemes. We show that using the proposed augmentations for generating movement quality scores result in significant performance boosts over existing methods. Finally, we propose a novel transformer based architecture for MQA. Four novel feature extractors are proposed and studied that allow the transformer network to operate on skeletal data. We show that adding the attention mechanism in the design of the proposed feature extractor allows the transformer network to pay attention to specific body parts that make a significant contribution towards executing a movement. We report an improvement in movement quality score prediction of 12% on UI-PRMD dataset and 21% on KIMORE dataset compared to the existing methods.
Technology has an important role to play in the field of Rehabilitation, improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. However, existing approaches lack clinical validation, robustness and ease of use. We propose Tele-EvalNet, a novel system consisting of two components: a live feedback model and an overall performance evaluation model. The live feedback model demonstrates feedback on exercise correctness with easy to understand instructions highlighted using color markers. The overall performance evaluation model learns a mapping of joint data to scores, given to the performance by clinicians. The model does this by extracting clinically approved features from joint data. Further, these features are encoded to a lower dimensional space with an autoencoder. A novel multi-scale CNN-LSTM network is proposed to learn a mapping of performance data to the scores by leveraging features extracted at multiple scales. The proposed system shows a high degree of improvement in score predictions and outperforms the state-of-the-art rehabilitation models.