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Leancode: Understanding Models Better for Code Simplification of Pre-Trained LLM (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jun 4, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: LeanCode speeds up code AI by deleting tokens the model's own attention marks as unimportant, scoring each token in its own context instead of averaging importance across all inputs. It beat two earlier token-dropping tricks, improving code search by 60% over the weaker one.

Abstract · LEANCODE: Understanding Models Better for Code Simplification of Pre-trained Large Language Models

Large Language Models for code often entail significant computational complexity, which grows significantly with the length of the input code sequence. We propose LeanCode for code simplification to reduce training and prediction time, leveraging code contexts in utilizing attention scores to represent the tokens' importance. We advocate for the selective removal of tokens based on the average context-aware attention scores rather than average scores across all inputs. LeanCode uses the attention scores of `CLS' tokens within the encoder for classification tasks, such as code search. It also employs the encoder-decoder attention scores to determine token significance for sequence-to-sequence tasks like code summarization. Our evaluation shows LeanCode's superiority over the SOTAs DietCode and Slimcode, with improvements of 60% and 16% for code search, and 29% and 27% for code summarization, respectively.

Yan Wang, Ling Ding, Tien N Nguyen, Shaohua Wang, Yanan Zheng
arXiv:2505.14759 · cs.SE, cs.LG · submitted May 20, 2025 · updated Feb 5, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · ACL 2025 Main. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/akai-sh/LeanCode

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