Can Programming Languages Boost Each Other via Instruction Tuning?

When human programmers have mastered a programming language, it would be easier when they learn a new programming language. In this report, we focus on exploring whether programming languages can boost each other during the instruction fine-tuning phase of code large language models. We conduct extensive experiments of 8 popular programming languages (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C, C++, Java, Go, HTML) on StarCoder. Results demonstrate that programming languages can significantly improve each other. For example, CodeM-Python 15B trained on Python is able to increase Java by an absolute 17.95% pass@1 on HumanEval-X. More surprisingly, we found that CodeM-HTML 7B trained on the HTML corpus can improve Java by an absolute 15.24% pass@1. Our training data is released at https://github.com/NL2Code/CodeM.

SoTaNa: The Open-Source Software Development Assistant

Software development plays a crucial role in driving innovation and efficiency across modern societies. To meet the demands of this dynamic field, there is a growing need for an effective software development assistant. However, existing large language models represented by ChatGPT suffer from limited accessibility, including training data and model weights. Although other large open-source models like LLaMA have shown promise, they still struggle with understanding human intent. In this paper, we present SoTaNa, an open-source software development assistant. SoTaNa utilizes ChatGPT to generate high-quality instruction-based data for the domain of software engineering and employs a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to enhance the open-source foundation model, LLaMA. We evaluate the effectiveness of \our{} in answering Stack Overflow questions and demonstrate its capabilities. Additionally, we discuss its capabilities in code summarization and generation, as well as the impact of varying the volume of generated data on model performance. Notably, SoTaNa can run on a single GPU, making it accessible to a broader range of researchers. Our code, model weights, and data are public at \url{https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/SoTaNa}.

Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions

In this work we try to apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Due to the inherent dynamic nature of the real world, factual questions frequently involve a symbolic constraint: time, solving these questions necessitates not only extensive world knowledge, but also advanced reasoning ability to satisfy the temporal constraints. Despite the remarkable intelligence exhibited by LLMs in various NLP tasks, our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems continue to pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. To solve these time-sensitive factual questions, considering that modern LLMs possess superior ability in both natural language understanding and programming,we endeavor to leverage LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code, and thereby grasp the desired knowledge along with the underlying symbolic constraint.

Skill-Based Few-Shot Selection for In-Context Learning

In-Context learning is the paradigm that adapts large language models to downstream tasks by providing a few examples. Few-shot selection -- selecting appropriate examples for each test instance separately -- is important for in-context learning. In this paper, we propose Skill-KNN, a skill-based few-shot selection method for in-context learning. The key advantages of Skill-KNN include: (1) it addresses the problem that existing methods based on pre-trained embeddings can be easily biased by surface natural language features that are not important for the target task; (2) it does not require training or fine-tuning of any models, making it suitable for frequently expanding or changing example banks. The key insight is to optimize the inputs fed into the embedding model, rather than tuning the model itself. Technically, Skill-KNN generates the skill-based representations for each test case and candidate example by utilizing a pre-processing few-shot prompting, thus eliminating unimportant surface features. Experimental results across four cross-domain semantic parsing tasks and four backbone models show that Skill-KNN significantly outperforms existing methods.

How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?

Compositional generalization--understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives--is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning--the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models--exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.

RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generation

The task of repository-level code completion is to continue writing the unfinished code based on a broader context of the repository. While for automated code completion tools, it is difficult to utilize the useful information scattered in different files. We propose RepoCoder, a simple, generic, and effective framework to address the challenge. It streamlines the repository-level code completion process by incorporating a similarity-based retriever and a pre-trained code language model, which allows for the effective utilization of repository-level information for code completion and grants the ability to generate code at various levels of granularity. Furthermore, RepoCoder utilizes a novel iterative retrieval-generation paradigm that bridges the gap between retrieval context and the intended completion target. We also propose a new benchmark RepoEval, which consists of the latest and high-quality real-world repositories covering line, API invocation, and function body completion scenarios. We test the performance of RepoCoder by using various combinations of code retrievers and generators. Experimental results indicate that RepoCoder significantly improves the zero-shot code completion baseline by over 10% in all settings and consistently outperforms the vanilla retrieval-augmented code completion approach. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of RepoCoder through comprehensive analysis, providing valuable insights for future research.

Does Deep Learning Learn to Abstract? A Systematic Probing Framework

Abstraction is a desirable capability for deep learning models, which means to induce abstract concepts from concrete instances and flexibly apply them beyond the learning context. At the same time, there is a lack of clear understanding about both the presence and further characteristics of this capability in deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce a systematic probing framework to explore the abstraction capability of deep learning models from a transferability perspective. A set of controlled experiments are conducted based on this framework, providing strong evidence that two probed pre-trained language models (PLMs), T5 and GPT2, have the abstraction capability. We also conduct in-depth analysis, thus shedding further light: (1) the whole training phase exhibits a "memorize-then-abstract" two-stage process; (2) the learned abstract concepts are gathered in a few middle-layer attention heads, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the model; (3) the probed abstraction capabilities exhibit robustness against concept mutations, and are more robust to low-level/source-side mutations than high-level/target-side ones; (4) generic pre-training is critical to the emergence of abstraction capability, and PLMs exhibit better abstraction with larger model sizes and data scales.

When Neural Model Meets NL2Code: A Survey

Given a natural language that describes the user's demands, the NL2Code task aims to generate code that addresses the demands. This is a critical but challenging task that mirrors the capabilities of AI-powered programming. The NL2Code task is inherently versatile, diverse and complex. For example, a demand can be described in different languages, in different formats, and at different levels of granularity. This inspired us to do this survey for NL2Code. In this survey, we focus on how does neural network (NN) solves NL2Code. We first propose a comprehensive framework, which is able to cover all studies in this field. Then, we in-depth parse the existing studies into this framework. We create an online website to record the parsing results, which tracks existing and recent NL2Code progress. In addition, we summarize the current challenges of NL2Code as well as its future directions. We hope that this survey can foster the evolution of this field.