Understanding Code Semantics: An Evaluation of Transformer Models in Summarization

This paper delves into the intricacies of code summarization using advanced transformer-based language models. Through empirical studies, we evaluate the efficacy of code summarization by altering function and variable names to explore whether models truly understand code semantics or merely rely on textual cues. We have also introduced adversaries like dead code and commented code across three programming languages (Python, Javascript, and Java) to further scrutinize the model's understanding. Ultimately, our research aims to offer valuable insights into the inner workings of transformer-based LMs, enhancing their ability to understand code and contributing to more efficient software development practices and maintenance workflows.

Editing Commonsense Knowledge in GPT

Memory editing methods for updating encyclopedic knowledge in transformers have received increasing attention for their efficacy, specificity, and generalization advantages. However, it remains unclear if such methods can be adapted for the more nuanced domain of commonsense knowledge. We propose $MEMIT_{CSK}$, an adaptation of MEMIT to edit commonsense mistakes in GPT-2 Large and XL. We extend editing to various token locations and employ a robust layer selection strategy. Models edited by $MEMIT_{CSK}$ outperforms the fine-tuning baselines by 10.97% and 10.73% F1 scores on subsets of PEP3k and 20Q. We further propose a novel evaluation dataset, MEMIT-CSK-PROBE, that contains unaffected neighborhood, affected neighborhood, affected paraphrase, and affected reasoning challenges. $MEMIT_{CSK}$ demonstrates favorable semantic generalization, outperforming fine-tuning baselines by 13.72% and 5.57% overall scores on MEMIT-CSK-PROBE. These results suggest a compelling future direction of incorporating context-specific user feedback concerning commonsense in GPT by direct model editing, rectifying and customizing model behaviors via human-in-the-loop systems.