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Large Language Models of Code Fail at Completing Code with Potential Bugs (arxiv.org)
1 point by 0xedb on Jun 7, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested code-completion models on programs whose unfinished code contained a potential bug, using both planted mistakes and real student submissions. With just one such bug in view, a model's passing rate fell by more than half, and cleanup tricks did not recover it.

Abstract

Large language models of code (Code-LLMs) have recently brought tremendous advances to code completion, a fundamental feature of programming assistance and code intelligence. However, most existing works ignore the possible presence of bugs in the code context for generation, which are inevitable in software development. Therefore, we introduce and study the buggy-code completion problem, inspired by the realistic scenario of real-time code suggestion where the code context contains potential bugs -- anti-patterns that can become bugs in the completed program. To systematically study the task, we introduce two datasets: one with synthetic bugs derived from semantics-altering operator changes (buggy-HumanEval) and one with realistic bugs derived from user submissions to coding problems (buggy-FixEval). We find that the presence of potential bugs significantly degrades the generation performance of the high-performing Code-LLMs. For instance, the passing rates of CODEGEN-2B-MONO on test cases of buggy-HumanEval drop more than 50% given a single potential bug in the context. Finally, we investigate several post-hoc methods for mitigating the adverse effect of potential bugs and find that there remains a significant gap in post-mitigation performance.

Tuan Dinh, Jinman Zhao, Samson Tan, Renato Negrinho, Leonard Lausen, Sheng Zha, George Karypis
arXiv:2306.03438 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SE · submitted Jun 6, 2023 · updated Dec 1, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · 27 pages, accepted to NeurIPS 2023

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