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Unsupervised Evaluation of Code LLMs with Round-Trip Correctness (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Feb 21, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Score a code model by asking it to describe code in words, then turning that description back into code and checking if the result behaves the same — no hand-written test problems needed. These scores tracked model rankings on human-made benchmarks while covering more domains.

Abstract

To evaluate code large language models (LLMs), research has relied on a few small manually curated benchmarks, such as HumanEval and MBPP, which represent a narrow part of the real-world software domains. In this work, we introduce round-trip correctness (RTC) as an alternative evaluation method. RTC allows Code LLM evaluation on a broader spectrum of real-world software domains without the need for costly human curation. RTC rests on the idea that we can ask a model to make a prediction (e.g., describe some code using natural language), feed that prediction back (e.g., synthesize code from the predicted description), and check if this round-trip leads to code that is semantically equivalent to the original input. We show how to employ RTC to evaluate code synthesis and editing. We find that RTC strongly correlates with model performance on existing narrow-domain code synthesis benchmarks while allowing us to expand to a much broader set of domains and tasks which was not previously possible without costly human annotations.

Miltiadis Allamanis, Sheena Panthaplackel, Pengcheng Yin
arXiv:2402.08699 · cs.SE, cs.LG · submitted Feb 13, 2024 · updated May 27, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Published in ICML 2024

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