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A Critical Study of What Code-LLMs (Do Not) Learn (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 30, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They inspected the attention and hidden states of code-trained language models, splitting code into syntax tokens and identifiers to see which links each group captures. Models tracked links within each group but missed links between them, and fine-tuning and larger size made this worse.

Abstract

Large Language Models trained on code corpora (code-LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various coding assistance tasks. However, despite their increased size and training dataset, code-LLMs still have limitations such as suggesting codes with syntactic errors, variable misuse etc. Some studies argue that code-LLMs perform well on coding tasks because they use self-attention and hidden representations to encode relations among input tokens. However, previous works have not studied what code properties are not encoded by code-LLMs. In this paper, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of attention maps and hidden representations of code-LLMs. Our study indicates that code-LLMs only encode relations among specific subsets of input tokens. Specifically, by categorizing input tokens into syntactic tokens and identifiers, we found that models encode relations among syntactic tokens and among identifiers, but they fail to encode relations between syntactic tokens and identifiers. We also found that fine-tuned models encode these relations poorly compared to their pre-trained counterparts. Additionally, larger models with billions of parameters encode significantly less information about code than models with only a few hundred million parameters.

Abhinav Anand, Shweta Verma, Krishna Narasimhan, Mira Mezini
arXiv:2406.11930 · cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Jun 17, 2024
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