Daily Papers

We introduce Differential Performance Evaluation (DPE), a framework designed to reliably evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient code generation. Traditional coding benchmarks often fail to provide reliable insights into code efficiency, due to their reliance on simplistic test inputs and the absence of effective compound metrics. DPE addresses these issues by focusing on efficiency-demanding programming tasks and establishing an insightful compound metric for performance evaluation. DPE operates in two phases: To curate efficiency datasets, it selects efficiency-demanding tasks from existing coding benchmarks and generates computationally expensive inputs to stress the efficiency of LLM solutions. To assess the code efficiency, DPE profiles the new solution and compares it globally against a set of reference solutions that exhibit distinct efficiency levels, where the matched level defines its efficiency score. As a proof of concept, we use DPE to create EvalPerf, a benchmark with 121 performance-challenging coding tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation draws interesting findings on the efficiency impact of model sizes, instruction tuning, and prompting. For example, while the scaling law fails to account for code efficiency, general instruction tuning benefits both code correctness and efficiency. We also evaluate the evaluation by examining the effectiveness of DPE, showing that EvalPerf is reliable and convenient to use even across platforms.

Code generation models have increasingly become integral to aiding software development, offering assistance in tasks such as code completion, debugging, and code translation. Although current research has thoroughly examined the correctness of code produced by code generation models, a vital aspect, i.e., the efficiency of the generated code, has often been neglected. This paper presents EffiBench, a benchmark with 1,000 efficiency-critical coding problems for assessing the efficiency of code generated by code generation models. EffiBench contains a diverse set of LeetCode coding problems. Each problem is paired with an executable human-written canonical solution. With EffiBench, we empirically examine the capability of 21 Large Language Models (13 open-sourced and 8 closed-sourced) in generating efficient code. The results demonstrate that GPT-4-turbo generates the most efficient code, significantly outperforming Palm-2-chat-bison, Claude-instant-1, Gemini-pro, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5. Nevertheless, its code efficiency is still worse than the efficiency of human-written canonical solutions. In particular, the average and worst execution time of GPT-4-turbo generated code is 1.69 and 45.49 times that of the canonical solutions.

Despite advancements in evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) for code synthesis, benchmarks have predominantly focused on functional correctness, overlooking the importance of code efficiency. We present Mercury, the first benchmark designated for assessing the code efficiency of LLM code synthesis tasks. Mercury consists of 1,889 programming tasks covering diverse difficulty levels alongside test case generators generating unlimited cases for comprehensive evaluation. Unlike existing benchmarks, Mercury integrates a novel metric Beyond@K to measure normalized code efficiency based on historical submissions, leading to a new evaluation indicator for code synthesis, which encourages generating functionally correct and computationally efficient code, mirroring the real-world software development standard. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate the remarkable capability to generate functionally correct code, there still exists a substantial gap in their efficiency output, underscoring a new frontier for LLM research and development.

Automated software engineering has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for programming. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can perform various software engineering tasks like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks. Solving challenging and practical programming tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs. To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical programming tasks, we introduce Bench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained programming tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of Bench, Benchi, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.

The waning of Moore's Law has shifted the focus of the tech industry towards alternative methods for continued performance gains. While optimizing compilers are a standard tool to help increase program efficiency, programmers continue to shoulder much responsibility in crafting and refactoring code with better performance characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to suggest functionally correct, performance improving code edits. We hypothesize that language models can suggest such edits in ways that would be impractical for static analysis alone. We investigate these questions by curating a large-scale dataset of Performance-Improving Edits, PIE. PIE contains trajectories of programs, where a programmer begins with an initial, slower version and iteratively makes changes to improve the program's performance. We use PIE to evaluate and improve the capacity of large language models. Specifically, use examples from PIE to fine-tune multiple variants of CODEGEN, a billion-scale Transformer-decoder model. Additionally, we use examples from PIE to prompt OpenAI's CODEX using a few-shot prompting. By leveraging PIE, we find that both CODEX and CODEGEN can generate performance-improving edits, with speedups of more than 2.5x for over 25% of the programs, for C++ and Python, even after the C++ programs were compiled using the O3 optimization level. Crucially, we show that PIE allows CODEGEN, an open-sourced and 10x smaller model than CODEX, to match the performance of CODEX on this challenging task. Overall, this work opens new doors for creating systems and methods that can help programmers write efficient code.

Recent years have seen the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for code generation. Different from existing work that evaluate the correctness of the code generated by LLMs, we propose to further evaluate its efficiency. More efficient code can lead to higher performance and execution efficiency of programs and software completed by LLM-assisted programming. First, we evaluate the efficiency of the code generated by LLMs on two benchmarks, HumanEval and MBPP. Then, we choose a set of programming problems from the online judge platform LeetCode to conduct a more difficult evaluation. Finally, we explore several prompts that would enable LLMs to generate more efficient code.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly pushed the frontiers of program synthesis. Advancement of LLM-based program synthesis calls for a thorough evaluation of LLM-generated code. Most evaluation frameworks focus on the (functional) correctness of generated code; efficiency, as an important measure of code quality, has been overlooked in existing evaluations. In this work, we develop ENAMEL (EfficeNcy AutoMatic EvaLuator), a rigorous and high-standard benchmark for evaluating the capability of LLMs in generating efficient code. Firstly, we propose a new efficiency metric called eff@k, which generalizes the pass@k metric from correctness to efficiency and appropriately handles right-censored execution time. Furthermore, we derive an unbiased and variance-reduced estimator of eff@k via Rao--Blackwellization; we also provide a numerically stable implementation for the new estimator. Secondly, to set a high-standard for efficiency evaluation, we employ a human expert to design best algorithms and implementations as our reference solutions of efficiency, many of which are much more efficient than existing canonical solutions in HumanEval and HumanEval+. Moreover, to ensure a rigorous evaluation, we employ a human expert to curate strong test case generators to filter out wrong code and differentiate suboptimal algorithms. An extensive study across 30 popular LLMs using our benchmark ENAMEL shows that LLMs still fall short of generating expert-level efficient code. Using two subsets of our problem set, we demonstrate that such deficiency is because current LLMs struggle in designing advanced algorithms and are barely aware of implementation optimization. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/q-rz/enamel .

In the evolving landscape of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a unique phenomenon known as emergent abilities, demonstrating adeptness across numerous tasks, from text summarization to code generation. While these abilities open up novel avenues in software design and crafting, their incorporation presents substantial challenges. Developers grapple with decisions surrounding the direct embedding of LLMs within applications versus employing them for code generation. Moreover, effective prompt design becomes a critical concern, given the necessity of data extraction from natural language outputs. To address these intricacies, this paper introduces AskIt, a domain-specific language (DSL) specifically designed for LLMs. AskIt simplifies LLM integration, offering type-guided output control, template-based function definitions, and a unified interface that diminishes the distinction between LLM-based code generation and application integration. Furthermore, through Programming by Example (PBE), AskIt harnesses the power of few-shot learning at the programming language level. Our evaluations underscore AskIt's potency. Across 50 tasks, AskIt generated concise prompts for the given tasks, achieving a 16.14% reduction in prompt length relative to benchmarks. Additionally, by enabling the transition from direct LLM application usage to function generation, AskIt achieved significant speedups, as observed in our GSM8K benchmark experiments. Through these advancements, AskIt streamlines the integration of LLMs in software development, offering a more efficient, versatile approach for leveraging emergent abilities. The implementations of AskIt in TypeScript and Python are available at https://github.com/katsumiok/ts-askit and https://github.com/katsumiok/pyaskit, respectively.

CodeLLMs have demonstrated remarkable advancements in software engineering tasks. However, while these models can generate functionally correct code, they often produce code that is inefficient in terms of runtime. This inefficiency is particularly problematic in resource-constrained environments, impacting software performance and sustainability. Existing approaches for optimizing code efficiency for CodeLLMs like SOAP and PIE exhibit certain limitations. SOAP requires a compatible execution environment and predefined test cases for iterative code modification, while PIE focuses on instruction tuning, improving efficiency but compromising correctness. These shortcomings highlight the need for a fine-tuning framework that optimizes both efficiency and correctness without relying on predefined test cases or specific execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACECode, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning framework that aligns CodeLLMs with dual objectives of efficiency and correctness. ACECode combines three key steps: (1) generating code with an actor CodeLLM, (2) calculating a training-free reward signal derived from code execution feedback for each generated code, and (3) optimizing the CodeLLM via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. This reward signal enables joint assessment of efficiency and correctness without manual labeling. We evaluate ACECode by fine-tuning four SOTA (state-of-the-art) CodeLLMs and comparing their code with three baselines: original, instruction-tuned, and PIE-tuned CodeLLMs. Extensive experiment results suggest that significantly improves the efficiency and correctness of generated code against all baselines for all CodeLLMs. Specifically, CodeLLMs fine-tuned with ACECode improve pass@1 by 1.84% to 14.51% and reduce runtime in 65% to 72% of cases compared to original CodeLLMs.

As the use of large language models (LLMs) for code generation becomes more prevalent in software development, it is critical to enhance both the efficiency and correctness of the generated code. Existing methods and models primarily focus on the correctness of LLM-generated code, ignoring efficiency. In this work, we present Effi-Code, an approach to enhancing code generation in LLMs that can improve both efficiency and correctness. We introduce a Self-Optimization process based on Overhead Profiling that leverages open-source LLMs to generate a high-quality dataset of correct and efficient code samples. This dataset is then used to fine-tune various LLMs. Our method involves the iterative refinement of generated code, guided by runtime performance metrics and correctness checks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on the Effi-Code show significant improvements in both code correctness and efficiency across task types. For example, the pass@1 of DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B-Instruct generated code increases from 43.3\% to 76.8\%, and the average execution time for the same correct tasks decreases by 30.5\%. Effi-Code offers a scalable and generalizable approach to improving code generation in AI systems, with potential applications in software development, algorithm design, and computational problem-solving. The source code of Effi-Code was released in https://github.com/huangd1999/Effi-Code.

Although large language models (LLMs) have been largely successful in generating functionally correct programs, conditioning models to produce efficient solutions while ensuring correctness remains a challenge. Further, unreliability in benchmarking code efficiency is a hurdle across varying hardware specifications for popular interpreted languages such as Python. In this paper, we present ECCO, a reproducible benchmark for evaluating program efficiency via two paradigms: natural language (NL) based code generation and history-based code editing. On ECCO, we adapt and thoroughly investigate the three most promising existing LLM-based approaches: in-context learning, iterative refinement with execution or NL feedback, and fine-tuning conditioned on execution and editing history. While most methods degrade functional correctness and moderately increase program efficiency, we find that adding execution information often helps maintain functional correctness, and NL feedback enhances more on efficiency. We release our benchmark to support future work on LLM-based generation of efficient code.

We present CRUXEval (Code Reasoning, Understanding, and eXecution Evaluation), a benchmark consisting of 800 Python functions (3-13 lines). Each function comes with an input-output pair, leading to two natural tasks: input prediction and output prediction. First, we propose a generic recipe for generating our execution benchmark which can be used to create future variation of the benchmark. Second, we evaluate twenty code models on our benchmark and discover that many recent high-scoring models on HumanEval do not show the same improvements on our benchmark. Third, we show that simple CoT and fine-tuning schemes can improve performance on our benchmark but remain far from solving it. The best setup, GPT-4 with chain of thought (CoT), achieves a pass@1 of 75% and 81% on input and output prediction, respectively. In contrast, Code Llama 34B achieves a pass@1 of 50% and 46% on input and output prediction, highlighting the gap between open and closed source models. As no model is close to acing CRUXEval, we provide examples of consistent GPT-4 failures on simple programs as a lens into its code reasoning capabilities and areas for improvement.

AI for software engineering has made remarkable progress recently, becoming a notable success within generative AI. Despite this, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed before automated software engineering reaches its full potential. It should be possible to reach high levels of automation where humans can focus on the critical decisions of what to build and how to balance difficult tradeoffs while most routine development effort is automated away. Reaching this level of automation will require substantial research and engineering efforts across academia and industry. In this paper, we aim to discuss progress towards this in a threefold manner. First, we provide a structured taxonomy of concrete tasks in AI for software engineering, emphasizing the many other tasks in software engineering beyond code generation and completion. Second, we outline several key bottlenecks that limit current approaches. Finally, we provide an opinionated list of promising research directions toward making progress on these bottlenecks, hoping to inspire future research in this rapidly maturing field.

We introduce WebApp1K, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in test-driven development (TDD) tasks, where test cases serve as both prompt and verification for code generation. Unlike traditional approaches relying on natural language prompts, our benchmark emphasizes the ability of LLMs to interpret and implement functionality directly from test cases, reflecting real-world software development practices. Comprising 1000 diverse challenges across 20 application domains, the benchmark evaluates LLMs on their ability to generate compact, functional code under the constraints of context length and multi-feature complexity. Our findings highlight instruction following and in-context learning as critical capabilities for TDD success, surpassing the importance of general coding proficiency or pretraining knowledge. Through comprehensive evaluation of 19 frontier models, we reveal performance bottlenecks, such as instruction loss in long prompts, and provide a detailed error analysis spanning multiple root causes. This work underscores the practical value of TDD-specific benchmarks and lays the foundation for advancing LLM capabilities in rigorous, application-driven coding scenarios.

Code generation has largely improved development efficiency in the era of large language models (LLMs). With the ability to follow instructions, current LLMs can be prompted to generate code solutions given detailed descriptions in natural language. Many research efforts are being devoted to improving the correctness of LLM-generated code, and many benchmarks are proposed to evaluate the correctness comprehensively. Despite the focus on correctness, the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions is under-explored. Current correctness benchmarks are not suitable for time efficiency evaluation since their test cases cannot well distinguish the time efficiency of different code solutions. Besides, the current execution time measurement is not stable and comprehensive, threatening the validity of the time efficiency evaluation. To address the challenges in the time efficiency evaluation of code generation, we propose COFFE, a code generation benchmark for evaluating the time efficiency of LLM-generated code solutions. COFFE contains 398 and 358 problems for function-level and file-level code generation, respectively. To improve the distinguishability, we design a novel stressful test case generation approach with contracts and two new formats of test cases to improve the accuracy of generation. For the time evaluation metric, we propose efficienct@k based on CPU instruction count to ensure a stable and solid comparison between different solutions. We evaluate 14 popular LLMs on COFFE and identify four findings. Based on the findings, we draw some implications for LLM researchers and software practitioners to facilitate future research and usage of LLMs in code generation.

We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

Recently, an increasing number of AI-driven programming assistants powered by code LLMs have been integrated into various real-world software development environments, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily focus on general-purpose scenarios, leaving the code generation performance of LLMs for specific application domains largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, MultiCodeBench, to fill this gap. MultiCodeBench comprises 2,400 programming tasks, covering 12 popular software development domains and 15 programming languages. Specifically, we perform in-depth research to identify these 12 application domains. Given that each domain may involve multiple technical frameworks, and that different frameworks present distinct challenges in the coding process, we categorize the commonly used frameworks and platforms within each domain. We then sample programming problems from GitHub repositories related to these subdomains. To ensure the quality of the tasks and mitigate data leakage issues, we invite annotators to rewrite the docstrings for each task in MultiCodeBench. Additionally, we build a static analysis-based dependency parsing tool to extract the dependencies in the ground truth for each task, enabling deeper performance analysis. Through extensive experiments on MultiCodeBench with eleven representative mainstream LLMs, we reveal the code generation performance of the LLMs across different application domains, providing practical insights for developers in downstream fields when selecting LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons behind the models' failures in completing software application development tasks, offering guidance for model developers to enhance domain-specific code generation capabilities.

Optimizing scientific software is a difficult task because codebases are often large and complex, and performance can depend upon several factors including the algorithm, its implementation, and hardware among others. Causes of poor performance can originate from disparate sources and be difficult to diagnose. Recent years have seen a multitude of work that use large language models (LLMs) to assist in software development tasks. However, these tools are trained to model the distribution of code as text, and are not specifically designed to understand performance aspects of code. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning based methodology to align the outputs of code LLMs with performance. This allows us to build upon the current code modeling capabilities of LLMs and extend them to generate better performing code. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned model improves the expected speedup of generated code over base models for a set of benchmark tasks from 0.9 to 1.6 for serial code and 1.9 to 4.5 for OpenMP code.

In recent times, a plethora of Large Code Generation Models (LCGMs) have been proposed, showcasing significant potential in assisting developers with complex programming tasks. Benchmarking LCGMs necessitates the creation of a set of diverse programming problems, and each problem comprises the prompt (including the task description), canonical solution, and test inputs. The existing methods for constructing such a problem set can be categorized into two main types: manual methods and perturbation-based methods. However, manual methods demand high effort and lack scalability, while also risking data integrity due to LCGMs' potentially contaminated data collection, and perturbation-based approaches mainly generate semantically homogeneous problems with the same canonical solutions and introduce typos that can be easily auto-corrected by IDE, making them ineffective and unrealistic. In this work, we propose the idea of programming problem merging (PPM) and provide two implementation of this idea, we utilize our tool on two widely-used datasets and compare it against nine baseline methods using eight code generation models. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in generating more challenging, diverse, and natural programming problems, comparing to the baselines.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for robust instruction-following capabilities in code generation tasks has grown significantly. Code generation not only facilitates faster prototyping and automated testing, but also augments developer efficiency through improved maintainability and reusability of code. In this paper, we introduce CodeIF, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess the abilities of LLMs to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. CodeIF encompasses a broad range of tasks, including function synthesis, error debugging, algorithmic refactoring, and code explanation, thereby providing a comprehensive suite to evaluate model performance across varying complexity levels and programming domains. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations in meeting the demands of these tasks. The experimental results offer valuable insights into how well current models align with human instructions, as well as the extent to which they can generate consistent, maintainable, and contextually relevant code. Our findings not only underscore the critical role that instruction-following LLMs can play in modern software development, but also illuminate pathways for future research aimed at enhancing their adaptability, reliability, and overall effectiveness in automated code generation.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation in data science offers substantial potential for enhancing tasks such as data manipulation, statistical analysis, and visualization. However, the effectiveness of these models in the data science domain remains underexplored. This paper presents a controlled experiment that empirically assesses the performance of four leading LLM-based AI assistants-Microsoft Copilot (GPT-4 Turbo), ChatGPT (o1-preview), Claude (3.5 Sonnet), and Perplexity Labs (Llama-3.1-70b-instruct)-on a diverse set of data science coding challenges sourced from the Stratacratch platform. Using the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach, we evaluated each model's effectiveness across task types (Analytical, Algorithm, Visualization) and varying difficulty levels. Our findings reveal that all models exceeded a 50% baseline success rate, confirming their capability beyond random chance. Notably, only ChatGPT and Claude achieved success rates significantly above a 60% baseline, though none of the models reached a 70% threshold, indicating limitations in higher standards. ChatGPT demonstrated consistent performance across varying difficulty levels, while Claude's success rate fluctuated with task complexity. Hypothesis testing indicates that task type does not significantly impact success rate overall. For analytical tasks, efficiency analysis shows no significant differences in execution times, though ChatGPT tended to be slower and less predictable despite high success rates. This study provides a structured, empirical evaluation of LLMs in data science, delivering insights that support informed model selection tailored to specific task demands. Our findings establish a framework for future AI assessments, emphasizing the value of rigorous evaluation beyond basic accuracy measures.

Programming is a powerful and ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Developing systems that can assist programmers or even generate programs independently could make programming more productive and accessible, yet so far incorporating innovations in AI has proven challenging. Recent large-scale language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate code, and are now able to complete simple programming tasks. However, these models still perform poorly when evaluated on more complex, unseen problems that require problem-solving skills beyond simply translating instructions into code. For example, competitive programming problems which require an understanding of algorithms and complex natural language remain extremely challenging. To address this gap, we introduce AlphaCode, a system for code generation that can create novel solutions to these problems that require deeper reasoning. In simulated evaluations on recent programming competitions on the Codeforces platform, AlphaCode achieved on average a ranking of top 54.3% in competitions with more than 5,000 participants. We found that three key components were critical to achieve good and reliable performance: (1) an extensive and clean competitive programming dataset for training and evaluation, (2) large and efficient-to-sample transformer-based architectures, and (3) large-scale model sampling to explore the search space, followed by filtering based on program behavior to a small set of submissions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on coding related tasks, particularly on assisting humans in programming and facilitating programming automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of LLMs suffer from severe limitations. First, most benchmarks are deficient as they focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks, whereas the real-world software development scenarios show dire need to implement systems with multilingual programming environments to satisfy diverse requirements. Practical programming practices also strongly expect multi-task settings for testing coding capabilities of LLMs comprehensively and robustly. Second, most benchmarks also fail to consider the actual executability and the consistency of execution results of the generated code. To bridge these gaps between existing benchmarks and expectations from practical applications, we introduce CodeScope, an execution-based, multilingual, multi-task, multi-dimensional evaluation benchmark for comprehensively gauging LLM capabilities on coding tasks. CodeScope covers 43 programming languages and 8 coding tasks. It evaluates the coding performance of LLMs from three dimensions (perspectives): difficulty, efficiency, and length. To facilitate execution-based evaluations of code generation, we develop MultiCodeEngine, an automated code execution engine that supports 14 programming languages. Finally, we systematically evaluate and analyze 8 mainstream LLMs on CodeScope tasks and demonstrate the superior breadth and challenges of CodeScope for evaluating LLMs on code understanding and generation tasks compared to other benchmarks. The CodeScope benchmark and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeScope.

Large-scale code generation models such as Codex and CodeT5 have achieved impressive performance. However, libraries are upgraded or deprecated very frequently and re-training large-scale language models is computationally expensive. Therefore, Continual Learning (CL) is an important aspect that remains underexplored in the code domain. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called CodeTask-CL that covers a wide range of tasks, including code generation, translation, summarization, and refinement, with different input and output programming languages. Next, on our CodeTask-CL benchmark, we compare popular CL techniques from NLP and Vision domains. We find that effective methods like Prompt Pooling (PP) suffer from catastrophic forgetting due to the unstable training of the prompt selection mechanism caused by stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. We address this issue with our proposed method, Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing (PP-TF), that stabilizes training by enforcing constraints on the prompt selection mechanism and leads to a 21.54% improvement over Prompt Pooling. Along with the benchmark, we establish a training pipeline that can be used for CL on code models, which we believe can motivate further development of CL methods for code models. Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/codetaskcl-pptf

Code-recommendation systems, such as Copilot and CodeWhisperer, have the potential to improve programmer productivity by suggesting and auto-completing code. However, to fully realize their potential, we must understand how programmers interact with these systems and identify ways to improve that interaction. To make progress, we studied GitHub Copilot, a code-recommendation system used by millions of programmers daily. We developed CUPS, a taxonomy of common programmer activities when interacting with Copilot. Our study of 21 programmers, who completed coding tasks and retrospectively labeled their sessions with CUPS, showed that CUPS can help us understand how programmers interact with code-recommendation systems, revealing inefficiencies and time costs. Our insights reveal how programmers interact with Copilot and motivate new interface designs and metrics.

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in reasoning for task planning. However, challenges remain under-explored for parallel schedules. This paper introduces a novel paradigm, plan-over-graph, in which the model first decomposes a real-life textual task into executable subtasks and constructs an abstract task graph. The model then understands this task graph as input and generates a plan for parallel execution. To enhance the planning capability of complex, scalable graphs, we design an automated and controllable pipeline to generate synthetic graphs and propose a two-stage training scheme. Experimental results show that our plan-over-graph method significantly improves task performance on both API-based LLMs and trainable open-sourced LLMs. By normalizing complex tasks as graphs, our method naturally supports parallel execution, demonstrating global efficiency. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/Plan-over-Graph.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks, such as code understanding and code generation. However, an equally important yet underexplored question is whether LLMs can serve as general-purpose surrogate code executors, to predict the output and behavior of a program without actually running it. To systematically investigate this capability, we introduce SURGE, a comprehensive benchmark covering eight key aspects: multi-language programming tasks, competition-level programming problems, repository-level code analysis, high-cost scientific computing, time-complexity-intensive algorithms, buggy code analysis, programs dependent on specific compilers or execution environments, and formal mathematical proof verification. We evaluate multiple open-source and proprietary LLMs on SURGE and conduct a scaling study to analyze the impact of model size and training data scale on surrogate execution accuracy. Additionally, we categorize model prediction errors and explore potential areas for improvement. Our findings indicate that while LLMs can predict code execution results in certain cases, they exhibit limitations in general-purpose surrogate execution. This study provides empirical insights into the feasibility of using LLMs as surrogate code executors. Code and dataset are released at https://github.com/Imbernoulli/SURGE.

Machine learning (ML) has been increasingly used in a variety of domains, while solving ML programming tasks poses unique challenges because of the fundamentally different nature and construction from general programming tasks, especially for developers who do not have ML backgrounds. Automatic code generation that produces a code snippet from a natural language description can be a promising technique to accelerate ML programming tasks. In recent years, although many deep learning-based neural code generation models have been proposed with high accuracy, the fact that most of them are mainly evaluated on general programming tasks calls into question their effectiveness and usefulness in ML programming tasks. In this paper, we set out to investigate the effectiveness of existing neural code generation models on ML programming tasks. For our analysis, we select six state-of-the-art neural code generation models, and evaluate their performance on four widely used ML libraries, with newly-created 83K pairs of natural-language described ML programming tasks. Our empirical study reveals some good, bad, and missing aspects of neural code generation models on ML tasks, with a few major ones listed below. (Good) Neural code generation models perform significantly better on ML tasks than on non-ML tasks. (Bad) Most of the generated code is semantically incorrect. (Bad) Code generation models cannot significantly improve developers' completion time. (Good) The generated code can help developers write more correct code by providing developers with clues for using correct APIs. (Missing) The observation from our user study reveals the missing aspects of code generation for ML tasks, e.g., decomposing code generation for divide-and-conquer into two tasks: API sequence identification and API usage generation.

Code optimization is a daunting task that requires a significant level of expertise from experienced programmers. This level of expertise is not sufficient when compared to the rapid development of new hardware architectures. Towards advancing the whole code optimization process, recent approaches rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper introduces a new framework to decrease the complexity of code optimization. The proposed framework builds on large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) and enables LLMs to receive feedback from their environment (i.e., unit tests) during the fine-tuning process. We compare our framework with existing state-of-the-art models and show that it is more efficient with respect to speed and computational usage, as a result of the decrement in training steps and its applicability to models with fewer parameters. Additionally, our framework reduces the possibility of logical and syntactical errors. Toward evaluating our approach, we run several experiments on the PIE dataset using a CodeT5 language model and RRHF, a new reinforcement learning algorithm. We adopt a variety of evaluation metrics with regards to optimization quality, and speedup. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework has similar results in comparison with existing models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models. In particular, we accomplish an increase of 5.6% and 2.2 over the baseline models concerning the %OP T and SP metrics.

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

Motivated by the increasing popularity of code generation from human descriptions using large language models (LLMs), several benchmarks have been proposed to assess the capabilities of existing and emerging models. This study presents a large-scale human evaluation of HumanEval and MBPP, two widely used benchmarks for Python code generation, focusing on their diversity and difficulty. Our findings reveal a significant bias towards a limited number of programming concepts, with negligible or no representation of most concepts. Additionally, we identify a concerningly high proportion of easy programming questions, potentially leading to an overestimation of model performance on code generation tasks.

The application of large language models (LLMs) in the field of coding is evolving rapidly: from code assistants, to autonomous coding agents, and then to generating complete projects through natural language. Early LLM code benchmarks primarily focused on code generation accuracy, but these benchmarks have gradually become saturated. Benchmark saturation weakens their guiding role for LLMs. For example, HumanEval Pass@1 has reached 99.4% and MBPP 94.2%. Among various attempts to address benchmark saturation, approaches based on software engineering have stood out, but the saturation of existing software engineering benchmarks is rapidly increasing. To address this, we propose a new benchmark, Web-Bench, which contains 50 projects, each consisting of 20 tasks with sequential dependencies. The tasks implement project features in sequence, simulating real-world human development workflows. When designing Web-Bench, we aim to cover the foundational elements of Web development: Web Standards and Web Frameworks. Given the scale and complexity of these projects, which were designed by engineers with 5 to 10 years of experience, each presents a significant challenge. On average, a single project takes 4 to 8 hours for a senior engineer to complete. On our given benchmark agent (Web-Agent), SOTA (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) achieves only 25.1% Pass@1, significantly lower (better) than SWE-Bench's Verified (65.4%) and Full (33.8%) scores. Finally, we discuss that in any development field, Standards and Frameworks represent foundational knowledge and efficiency tools, respectively, and LLMs require optimization tailored to them.

Code LLMs are being rapidly deployed and there is evidence that they can make professional programmers more productive. Current benchmarks for code generation measure whether models generate correct programs given an expert prompt. In this paper, we present a new benchmark containing multiple prompts per problem, written by a specific population of non-expert prompters: beginning programmers. StudentEval contains 1,749 prompts for 48 problems, written by 80 students who have only completed one semester of Python programming. Our students wrote these prompts while working interactively with a Code LLM, and we observed very mixed success rates. We use StudentEval to evaluate 5 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks. We analyze the prompts and find significant variation in students' prompting techniques. We also find that nondeterministic LLM sampling could mislead students into thinking that their prompts are more (or less) effective than they actually are, which has implications for how to teach with Code LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The MathQA-Python dataset, a Python version of the MathQA benchmark, contains 23914 problems that evaluate the ability of the models to synthesize code from more complex text. On both datasets, we find that synthesis performance scales log-linearly with model size. Our largest models, even without finetuning on a code dataset, can synthesize solutions to 59.6 percent of the problems from MBPP using few-shot learning with a well-designed prompt. Fine-tuning on a held-out portion of the dataset improves performance by about 10 percentage points across most model sizes. On the MathQA-Python dataset, the largest fine-tuned model achieves 83.8 percent accuracy. Going further, we study the model's ability to engage in dialog about code, incorporating human feedback to improve its solutions. We find that natural language feedback from a human halves the error rate compared to the model's initial prediction. Additionally, we conduct an error analysis to shed light on where these models fall short and what types of programs are most difficult to generate. Finally, we explore the semantic grounding of these models by fine-tuning them to predict the results of program execution. We find that even our best models are generally unable to predict the output of a program given a specific input.

Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built AppWorld Engine, a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created AppWorld Benchmark (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4o, solves only ~49% of our 'normal' tasks and ~30% of 'challenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark's difficulty and AppWorld's potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents. The project website is available at https://appworld.dev/.

This paper presents a case study of coding tasks by the latest reasoning models of OpenAI, i.e. o1-preview and o1-mini, in comparison with other frontier models. The o1 models deliver SOTA results for WebApp1K, a single-task benchmark. To this end, we introduce WebApp1K-Duo, a harder benchmark doubling number of tasks and test cases. The new benchmark causes the o1 model performances to decline significantly, falling behind Claude 3.5. Moreover, they consistently fail when confronted with atypical yet correct test cases, a trap non-reasoning models occasionally avoid. We hypothesize that the performance variability is due to instruction comprehension. Specifically, the reasoning mechanism boosts performance when all expectations are captured, meanwhile exacerbates errors when key expectations are missed, potentially impacted by input lengths. As such, we argue that the coding success of reasoning models hinges on the top-notch base model and SFT to ensure meticulous adherence to instructions.

We propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization, focusing on task scaling and zero-shot prompting. While previous models are trained on only a few dozen tasks, we scale to 1,000 tasks for the first time using real-world data. This leads to a crucial discovery that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling; i.e., the model size has little impact on performance with an extremely large number of tasks. Our results show that task scaling can substantially improve training efficiency by 30 times in FLOPs. Moreover, we present a prompting method that incorporates a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for unseen tasks, along with a few other improvements. Empirically, ZeroPrompt substantially improves both the efficiency and the performance of zero-shot learning across a variety of academic and production datasets.

Experts in various fields routinely perform methodical writing tasks to plan, organize, and report their work. From a clinician writing a differential diagnosis for a patient, to a teacher writing a lesson plan for students, these tasks are pervasive, requiring to methodically generate structured long-form output for a given input. We develop a typology of methodical tasks structured in the form of a task objective, procedure, input, and output, and introduce DoLoMiTes, a novel benchmark with specifications for 519 such tasks elicited from hundreds of experts from across 25 fields. Our benchmark further contains specific instantiations of methodical tasks with concrete input and output examples (1,857 in total) which we obtain by collecting expert revisions of up to 10 model-generated examples of each task. We use these examples to evaluate contemporary language models highlighting that automating methodical tasks is a challenging long-form generation problem, as it requires performing complex inferences, while drawing upon the given context as well as domain knowledge.

Coding agents powered by large language models have shown impressive capabilities in software engineering tasks, but evaluating their performance across diverse programming languages and real-world scenarios remains challenging. We introduce SWE-PolyBench, a new multi-language benchmark for repository-level, execution-based evaluation of coding agents. SWE-PolyBench contains 2110 instances from 21 repositories and includes tasks in Java (165), JavaScript (1017), TypeScript (729) and Python (199), covering bug fixes, feature additions, and code refactoring. We provide a task and repository-stratified subsample (SWE-PolyBench500) and release an evaluation harness allowing for fully automated evaluation. To enable a more comprehensive comparison of coding agents, this work also presents a novel set of metrics rooted in syntax tree analysis. We evaluate leading open source coding agents on SWE-PolyBench, revealing their strengths and limitations across languages, task types, and complexity classes. Our experiments show that current agents exhibit uneven performances across languages and struggle with complex problems while showing higher performance on simpler tasks. SWE-PolyBench aims to drive progress in developing more versatile and robust AI coding assistants for real-world software engineering. Our datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/amazon-science/SWE-PolyBench

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for complex tasks requiring multiple chained generation calls, advanced prompting techniques, control flow, and interaction with external environments. However, efficient systems for programming and executing these applications are lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce SGLang, a Structured Generation Language for LLMs. SGLang is designed for the efficient programming of LLMs and incorporates primitives for common LLM programming patterns. We have implemented SGLang as a domain-specific language embedded in Python, and we developed an interpreter, a compiler, and a high-performance runtime for SGLang. These components work together to enable optimizations such as parallelism, batching, caching, sharing, and other compilation techniques. Additionally, we propose RadixAttention, a novel technique that maintains a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache of the Key-Value (KV) cache for all requests in a radix tree, enabling automatic KV cache reuse across multiple generation calls at runtime. SGLang simplifies the writing of LLM programs and boosts execution efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that SGLang can speed up common LLM tasks by up to 5x, while reducing code complexity and enhancing control.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve enhanced complex problem-solving through test-time computing scaling, yet this often entails longer contexts and numerous reasoning token costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient test-time scaling method that trains LLMs on code-related reasoning trajectories, facilitating their reduction of excess thinking tokens while maintaining performance. First, we create Z1-Code-Reasoning-107K, a curated dataset of simple and complex coding problems paired with their short and long solution trajectories. Second, we present a novel Shifted Thinking Window to mitigate overthinking overhead by removing context-delimiting tags (e.g., <think>. . . </think>) and capping reasoning tokens. Trained with long and short trajectory data and equipped with Shifted Thinking Window, our model, Z1-7B, demonstrates the ability to adjust its reasoning level as the complexity of problems and exhibits efficient test-time scaling across different reasoning tasks that matches R1-Distill-Qwen-7B performance with about 30% of its average thinking tokens. Notably, fine-tuned with only code trajectories, Z1-7B demonstrates generalization to broader reasoning tasks (47.5% on GPQA Diamond). Our analysis of efficient reasoning elicitation also provides valuable insights for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated unparalleled prowess in mimicking human-like text generation and processing. Among the myriad of applications that benefit from LLMs, automated code generation is increasingly promising. The potential to transform natural language prompts into executable code promises a major shift in software development practices and paves the way for significant reductions in manual coding efforts and the likelihood of human-induced errors. This paper reports the results of a study that evaluates the performance of various LLMs, such as Bard, ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and Claude-2, in generating Python for coding problems. We focus on how levels of prompt specificity impact the accuracy, time efficiency, and space efficiency of the generated code. A benchmark of 104 coding problems, each with four types of prompts with varying degrees of tests and specificity, was employed to examine these aspects comprehensively. Our results indicate significant variations in performance across different LLMs and prompt types, and its key contribution is to reveal the ideal prompting strategy for creating accurate Python functions. This study lays the groundwork for further research in LLM capabilities and suggests practical implications for utilizing LLMs in automated code generation tasks and test-driven development.

In the evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) tailored for software engineering, the need for benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world development scenarios is paramount. Current benchmarks are either too simplistic or fail to capture the multi-tasking nature of software development. To address this, we introduce CoderUJB, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across diverse Java programming tasks that are executable and reflective of actual development scenarios, acknowledging Java's prevalence in real-world software production. CoderUJB comprises 2,239 programming questions derived from 17 real open-source Java projects and spans five practical programming tasks. Our empirical study on this benchmark investigates the coding abilities of various open-source and closed-source LLMs, examining the effects of continued pre-training in specific programming languages code and instruction fine-tuning on their performance. The findings indicate that while LLMs exhibit strong potential, challenges remain, particularly in non-functional code generation (e.g., test generation and defect detection). Importantly, our results advise caution in the specific programming languages continued pre-training and instruction fine-tuning, as these techniques could hinder model performance on certain tasks, suggesting the need for more nuanced strategies. CoderUJB thus marks a significant step towards more realistic evaluations of programming capabilities in LLMs, and our study provides valuable insights for the future development of these models in software engineering.

Pretrained code language models have enabled great progress towards program synthesis. However, common approaches only consider in-file local context and thus miss information and constraints imposed by other parts of the codebase and its external dependencies. Existing code completion benchmarks also lack such context. To resolve these restrictions we curate a new dataset of permissively licensed Python packages that includes full projects and their dependencies and provide tools to extract non-local information with the help of program analyzers. We then focus on the task of function call argument completion which requires predicting the arguments to function calls. We show that existing code completion models do not yield good results on our completion task. To better solve this task, we query a program analyzer for information relevant to a given function call, and consider ways to provide the analyzer results to different code completion models during inference and training. Our experiments show that providing access to the function implementation and function usages greatly improves the argument completion performance. Our ablation study provides further insights on how different types of information available from the program analyzer and different ways of incorporating the information affect the model performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable results on various complex reasoning benchmarks. The reasoning capabilities of LLMs enable them to execute function calls, using user-provided functions to overcome their inherent limitations, such as knowledge cutoffs, poor arithmetic skills, or lack of access to private data. This development has expanded LLMs' scope to include multi-function calling, where LLMs are equipped with a variety of functions and select the proper functions based on the context. Multi-function calling abilities of LLMs have catalyzed LLM-based software development, allowing them to tackle more complex problems. However, current methods for multi-function calling often require sequential reasoning and acting for each function which can result in high latency, cost, and sometimes inaccurate behavior. To address this, we introduce LLMCompiler, which executes functions in parallel to efficiently orchestrate multi-function calling. Drawing from the principles of classical compilers, LLMCompiler streamlines parallel function calling with three components: (i) an LLM Planner, formulating execution strategies and dependencies; (ii) a Task Fetching Unit, dispatching function calling tasks; and (iii) an Executor, executing these tasks in parallel. LLMCompiler automatically computes an optimized orchestration for the function calls and can be used with open-source models such as LLaMA-2. We have benchmarked LLMCompiler on a range of tasks including cases with non-trivial inter-dependency between function calls, as well as cases that require dynamic replanning based on intermediate results. We observe consistent latency speedup of up to 3.7x, cost savings of up to 6.7x, and accuracy improvement of up to ~9% as compared to ReAct. Additionally, LLMCompiler achieves up to 1.35x latency gain over OpenAI's recent parallel function calling, while achieving similar accuracy.

Much is promised in relation to AI-supported software development. However, there has been limited evaluation effort in the research domain aimed at validating the true utility of such techniques, especially when compared to human coding outputs. We bridge this gap, where a benchmark dataset comprising 72 distinct software engineering tasks is used to compare the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) and human programmers in producing Python software code. GPT-4 is used as a representative LLM, where for the code generated by humans and this LLM, we evaluate code quality and adherence to Python coding standards, code security and vulnerabilities, code complexity and functional correctness. We use various static analysis benchmarks, including Pylint, Radon, Bandit and test cases. Among the notable outcomes, results show that human-generated code recorded higher ratings for adhering to coding standards than GPT-4. We observe security flaws in code generated by both humans and GPT-4, however, code generated by humans shows a greater variety of problems, but GPT-4 code included more severe outliers. Our results show that although GPT-4 is capable of producing coding solutions, it frequently produces more complex code that may need more reworking to ensure maintainability. On the contrary however, our outcomes show that a higher number of test cases passed for code generated by GPT-4 across a range of tasks than code that was generated by humans. That said, GPT-4 frequently struggles with complex problem-solving that involve in-depth domain knowledge. This study highlights the potential utility of LLMs for supporting software development, however, tasks requiring comprehensive, innovative or unconventional solutions, and careful debugging and error correction seem to be better developed by human programmers. We plot an agenda for the software engineering community.

Agents, as user-centric tools, are increasingly deployed for human task delegation, assisting with a broad spectrum of requests by generating thoughts, engaging with user proxies, and producing action plans. However, agents based on large language models (LLMs) often face substantial planning latency due to two primary factors: the efficiency limitations of the underlying LLMs due to their large size and high demand, and the structural complexity of the agents due to the extensive generation of intermediate thoughts to produce the final output. Given that inefficiency in service provision can undermine the value of automation for users, this paper presents a human-centered efficient agent planning method -- Interactive Speculative Planning -- aiming at enhancing the efficiency of agent planning through both system design and human-AI interaction. Our approach advocates for the co-design of the agent system and user interface, underscoring the importance of an agent system that can fluidly manage user interactions and interruptions. By integrating human interruptions as a fundamental component of the system, we not only make it more user-centric but also expedite the entire process by leveraging human-in-the-loop interactions to provide accurate intermediate steps. Code and data will be released.

Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple programming problems. Nevertheless, it is expensive to perform the same evaluation on complex real-world projects considering the execution cost. On the contrary, static analysis tools such as linters, which can detect errors without running the program, haven't been well explored for evaluating code generation models. In this work, we propose a static evaluation framework to quantify static errors in Python code completions, by leveraging Abstract Syntax Trees. Compared with execution-based evaluation, our method is not only more efficient, but also applicable to code in the wild. For experiments, we collect code context from open source repos to generate one million function bodies using public models. Our static analysis reveals that Undefined Name and Unused Variable are the most common errors among others made by language models. Through extensive studies, we also show the impact of sampling temperature, model size, and context on static errors in code completions.

Large Language Models are becoming an increasingly popular tool for software development. Their ability to model and generate source code has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts, including code completion, summarization, translation, and lookup. However, they often struggle to generate code for more complex tasks. In this paper, we explore the ability of state-of-the-art language models to generate parallel code. We propose a benchmark, PCGBench, consisting of a set of 420 tasks for evaluating the ability of language models to generate parallel code, and we evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art open- and closed-source language models on these tasks. We introduce novel metrics for comparing parallel code generation performance and use them to explore how well each LLM performs on various parallel programming models and computational problem types.

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, a natural question is the extent to which these models can be utilized for source code optimization. This paper presents methodologically stringent case studies applied to well-known open source python libraries pillow and numpy. We find that contemporary LLM ChatGPT-4 (state September and October 2023) is surprisingly adept at optimizing energy and compute efficiency. However, this is only the case in interactive use, with a human expert in the loop. Aware of experimenter bias, we document our qualitative approach in detail, and provide transcript and source code. We start by providing a detailed description of our approach in conversing with the LLM to optimize the _getextrema function in the pillow library, and a quantitative evaluation of the performance improvement. To demonstrate qualitative replicability, we report further attempts on another locus in the pillow library, and one code locus in the numpy library, to demonstrate generalization within and beyond a library. In all attempts, the performance improvement is significant (factor up to 38). We have also not omitted reporting of failed attempts (there were none). We conclude that LLMs are a promising tool for code optimization in open source libraries, but that the human expert in the loop is essential for success. Nonetheless, we were surprised by how few iterations were required to achieve substantial performance improvements that were not obvious to the expert in the loop. We would like bring attention to the qualitative nature of this study, more robust quantitative studies would need to introduce a layer of selecting experts in a representative sample -- we invite the community to collaborate.

We present MBXP, an execution-based code completion benchmark in 10+ programming languages. This collection of datasets is generated by our conversion framework that translates prompts and test cases from the original MBPP dataset to the corresponding data in a target language. Based on this benchmark, we are able to evaluate code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and in particular discover generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of large multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, benefits of few-shot prompting, and zero-shot translation abilities. In addition, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages. These solutions can be used for other code-related evaluations such as insertion-based, summarization, or code translation tasks where we demonstrate results and release as part of our benchmark.

Large language models (LLMs) have manifested strong ability to generate codes for productive activities. However, current benchmarks for code synthesis, such as HumanEval, MBPP, and DS-1000, are predominantly oriented towards introductory tasks on algorithm and data science, insufficiently satisfying challenging requirements prevalent in real-world coding. To fill this gap, we propose NaturalCodeBench (NCB), a challenging code benchmark designed to mirror the complexity and variety of scenarios in real coding tasks. NCB comprises 402 high-quality problems in Python and Java, meticulously selected from natural user queries from online coding services, covering 6 different domains. Noting the extraordinary difficulty in creating testing cases for real-world queries, we also introduce a semi-automated pipeline to enhance the efficiency of test case construction. Comparing with manual solutions, it achieves an efficiency increase of more than 4 times. Our systematic experiments on 39 LLMs find that performance gaps on NCB between models with close HumanEval scores could still be significant, indicating a lack of focus on practical code synthesis scenarios or over-specified optimization on HumanEval. On the other hand, even the best-performing GPT-4 is still far from satisfying on NCB. The evaluation toolkit and development set are available at https://github.com/THUDM/NaturalCodeBench.

Code coverage is a widely used metric for quantifying the extent to which program elements, such as statements or branches, are executed during testing. Calculating code coverage is resource-intensive, requiring code building and execution with additional overhead for the instrumentation. Furthermore, computing coverage of any snippet of code requires the whole program context. Using Machine Learning to amortize this expensive process could lower the cost of code coverage by requiring only the source code context, and the task of code coverage prediction can be a novel benchmark for judging the ability of models to understand code. We propose a novel benchmark task called Code Coverage Prediction for Large Language Models (LLMs). We formalize this task to evaluate the capability of LLMs in understanding code execution by determining which lines of a method are executed by a given test case and inputs. We curate and release a dataset we call COVERAGEEVAL by executing tests and code from the HumanEval dataset and collecting code coverage information. We report the performance of four state-of-the-art LLMs used for code-related tasks, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-Turbo, Google's BARD, and Anthropic's Claude, on the Code Coverage Prediction task. Finally, we argue that code coverage as a metric and pre-training data source are valuable for overall LLM performance on software engineering tasks.

While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating code generation, and it can be difficult to accurately assess code generation performance rigorously. To meet this challenge, we introduce APPS, a benchmark for code generation. Unlike prior work in more restricted settings, our benchmark measures the ability of models to take an arbitrary natural language specification and generate satisfactory Python code. Similar to how companies assess candidate software developers, we then evaluate models by checking their generated code on test cases. Our benchmark includes 10,000 problems, which range from having simple one-line solutions to being substantial algorithmic challenges. We fine-tune large language models on both GitHub and our training set, and we find that the prevalence of syntax errors is decreasing exponentially as models improve. Recent models such as GPT-Neo can pass approximately 20% of the test cases of introductory problems, so we find that machine learning models are now beginning to learn how to code. As the social significance of automatic code generation increases over the coming years, our benchmark can provide an important measure for tracking advancements.

This paper presents the latest progress of GPTutor: a ChatGPT-powered programming tool extension in Visual Studio Code. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved software development efficiency, but their performance can be hindered by training data limitations and prompt design issues. Existing LLM development tools often operate as black boxes, with users unable to view the prompts used and unable to improve performance by correcting prompts when errors occur. To address the aforementioned issues, GPTutor was introduced as an open-source AI pair programming tool, offering an alternative to Copilot. GPTutor empowers users to customize prompts for various programming languages and scenarios, with support for 120+ human languages and 50+ programming languages. Users can fine-tune prompts to correct the errors from LLM for precision and efficient code generation. At the end of the paper, we underscore GPTutor's potential through examples, including demonstrating its proficiency in interpreting and generating Sui-Move, a newly introduced smart contract language, using prompt engineering.

Competitive programming benchmarks are widely used in scenarios such as programming contests and large language model assessments. However, the growing presence of duplicate or highly similar problems raises concerns not only about competition fairness, but also about the validity of competitive programming as a benchmark for model evaluation. In this paper, we propose a new problem -- similar question retrieval -- to address this issue. Due to the lack of both data and models, solving this problem is challenging. To this end, we introduce CPRet, a retrieval-oriented benchmark suite for competitive programming, covering four retrieval tasks: two code-centric (i.e., Text-to-Code and Code-to-Code) and two newly proposed problem-centric tasks (i.e., Problem-to-Duplicate and Simplified-to-Full), built from a combination of automatically crawled problem-solution data and manually curated annotations. Our contribution includes both high-quality training data and temporally separated test sets for reliable evaluation. In addition, we develop two task-specialized retrievers based on this dataset: CPRetriever-Code, trained with a novel Group-InfoNCE loss for problem-code alignment, and CPRetriever-Prob, fine-tuned for identifying problem-level similarity. Both models achieve strong results and are open-sourced for local use. Finally, we analyze LiveCodeBench and find that high-similarity problems inflate model pass rates and reduce differentiation, underscoring the need for similarity-aware evaluation in future benchmarks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/coldchair/CPRet

Current approaches to automated code generation often rely on monolithic models that lack real-time adaptability and scalability. This limitation is particularly evident in complex programming tasks that require dynamic adjustment and efficiency. The integration of neuroscience principles into Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to revolutionize automated code generation. This paper presents CortexCompile, a novel modular system inspired by the specialized functions of the human brain's cortical regions. By emulating the distinct roles of the Prefrontal Cortex, Parietal Cortex, Temporal Lobe, and Motor Cortex, CortexCompile achieves significant advancements in scalability, efficiency, and adaptability compared to traditional monolithic models like GPT-4o. The system's architecture features a Task Orchestration Agent that manages dynamic task delegation and parallel processing, facilitating the generation of highly accurate and optimized code across increasingly complex programming tasks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CortexCompile consistently outperforms GPT-4o in development time, accuracy, and user satisfaction, particularly in tasks involving real-time strategy games and first-person shooters. These findings underscore the viability of neuroscience-inspired architectures in addressing the limitations of current NLP models, paving the way for more efficient and human-like AI systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used by software engineers for code generation. However, limitations of LLMs such as irrelevant or incorrect code have highlighted the need for prompt programming (or prompt engineering) where engineers apply specific prompt techniques (e.g., chain-of-thought or input-output examples) to improve the generated code. Despite this, the impact of different prompt techniques -- and their combinations -- on code generation remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce CodePromptEval, a dataset of 7072 prompts designed to evaluate five prompt techniques (few-shot, persona, chain-of-thought, function signature, list of packages) and their effect on the correctness, similarity, and quality of complete functions generated by three LLMs (GPT-4o, Llama3, and Mistral). Our findings show that while certain prompt techniques significantly influence the generated code, combining multiple techniques does not necessarily improve the outcome. Additionally, we observed a trade-off between correctness and quality when using prompt techniques. Our dataset and replication package enable future research on improving LLM-generated code and evaluating new prompt techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already become quite proficient at solving simpler programming tasks like those in HumanEval or MBPP benchmarks. However, solving more complex and competitive programming tasks is still quite challenging for these models - possibly due to their tendency to generate solutions as monolithic code blocks instead of decomposing them into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. On the other hand, experienced programmers instinctively write modularized code with abstraction for solving complex tasks, often reusing previously developed modules. To address this gap, we propose CodeChain, a novel framework for inference that elicits modularized code generation through a chain of self-revisions, each being guided by some representative sub-modules generated in previous iterations. Concretely, CodeChain first instructs the LLM to generate modularized codes through chain-of-thought prompting. Then it applies a chain of self-revisions by iterating the two steps: 1) extracting and clustering the generated sub-modules and selecting the cluster representatives as the more generic and re-usable implementations, and 2) augmenting the original chain-of-thought prompt with these selected module-implementations and instructing the LLM to re-generate new modularized solutions. We find that by naturally encouraging the LLM to reuse the previously developed and verified sub-modules, CodeChain can significantly boost both modularity as well as correctness of the generated solutions, achieving relative pass@1 improvements of 35% on APPS and 76% on CodeContests. It is shown to be effective on both OpenAI LLMs as well as open-sourced LLMs like WizardCoder. We also conduct comprehensive ablation studies with different methods of prompting, number of clusters, model sizes, program qualities, etc., to provide useful insights that underpin CodeChain's success.

The rapid evolution of software libraries presents a significant challenge for code generation models, which must adapt to frequent version updates while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. Existing code completion benchmarks often overlook this dynamic aspect, and the one that does consider it relies on static code prediction tasks without execution-based evaluation, offering a limited perspective on a model's practical usability. To address this gap, we introduce \GitChameleon{}, a novel, manually curated dataset comprising 116 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. is designed to rigorously assess the ability of modern large language models (LLMs) to generate version-specific code that is not only syntactically correct but also functionally accurate upon execution. Our comprehensive evaluations reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with this task; for instance, GPT-4o achieves a pass@10 of only 39.9\% (43.7\% when provided with error feedback), highlighting the complexity of the problem and the limitations of current models. By providing an execution-based benchmark that emphasizes the dynamic nature of code libraries, serves as a critical tool to advance the development of more adaptable and reliable code generation models. For facilitation for further exploration of version-conditioned code generation, we make our code repository publicly accessible at https://github.com/NizarIslah/GitChameleon.

Software engineering activities such as package migration, fixing errors reports from static analysis or testing, and adding type annotations or other specifications to a codebase, involve pervasively editing the entire repository of code. We formulate these activities as repository-level coding tasks. Recent tools like GitHub Copilot, which are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), have succeeded in offering high-quality solutions to localized coding problems. Repository-level coding tasks are more involved and cannot be solved directly using LLMs, since code within a repository is inter-dependent and the entire repository may be too large to fit into the prompt. We frame repository-level coding as a planning problem and present a task-agnostic framework, called CodePlan to solve it. CodePlan synthesizes a multi-step chain of edits (plan), where each step results in a call to an LLM on a code location with context derived from the entire repository, previous code changes and task-specific instructions. CodePlan is based on a novel combination of an incremental dependency analysis, a change may-impact analysis and an adaptive planning algorithm. We evaluate the effectiveness of CodePlan on two repository-level tasks: package migration (C#) and temporal code edits (Python). Each task is evaluated on multiple code repositories, each of which requires inter-dependent changes to many files (between 2-97 files). Coding tasks of this level of complexity have not been automated using LLMs before. Our results show that CodePlan has better match with the ground truth compared to baselines. CodePlan is able to get 5/6 repositories to pass the validity checks (e.g., to build without errors and make correct code edits) whereas the baselines (without planning but with the same type of contextual information as CodePlan) cannot get any of the repositories to pass them.

We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by a short Python program f, and the goal is to find an input which makes f return True. The puzzles are objective in that each one is specified entirely by the source code of its verifier f, so evaluating f is all that is needed to test a candidate solution. They do not require an answer key or input/output examples, nor do they depend on natural language understanding. The dataset is comprehensive in that it spans problems of a range of difficulties and domains, ranging from trivial string manipulation problems, to classic programming puzzles (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), to interview/competitive-programming problems (e.g., dynamic programming), to longstanding open problems in algorithms and mathematics (e.g., factoring). We develop baseline enumerative program synthesis, GPT-3 and Codex solvers that are capable of solving puzzles -- even without access to any reference solutions -- by learning from their own past solutions. Codex performs best, solving up to 18% of 397 test problems with a single try and 80% of the problems with 1,000 tries per problem. In a small user study, we find a positive correlation between puzzle-solving performance and coding experience, and between the puzzle difficulty for humans and AI solvers. Therefore, further improvements on P3 could have a significant impact on many program synthesis areas.

Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to the AI pair programmer, completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Observed heterogenous effects show promise for AI pair programmers to help people transition into software development careers.

Among the most important properties of algorithms investigated in computer science are soundness, completeness, and complexity. These properties, however, are rarely analyzed for the vast collection of recently proposed methods for planning with large language models. In this work, we alleviate this gap. We analyse these properties of using LLMs for planning and highlight that recent trends abandon both soundness and completeness for the sake of inefficiency. We propose a significantly more efficient approach that can, at the same time, maintain both soundness and completeness. We exemplify on four representative search problems, comparing to the LLM-based solutions from the literature that attempt to solve these problems. We show that by using LLMs to produce the code for the search components we can solve the entire datasets with 100\% accuracy with only a few calls to the LLM. We argue for a responsible use of compute resources; urging research community to investigate sound and complete LLM-based approaches that uphold efficiency.

The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide array of tasks involving both structured and unstructured textual data. Recent results on various benchmarks for code generation, repair, or completion suggest that certain models have programming abilities comparable to or even surpass humans. In this work, we demonstrate that high performance on such benchmarks does not correlate to humans' innate ability to understand structural control flow in code. To this end, we extract solutions from the HumanEval benchmark, which the relevant models perform strongly on, and trace their execution path using function calls sampled from the respective test set. Using this dataset, we investigate the ability of seven state-of-the-art LLMs to match the execution trace and find that, despite their ability to generate semantically identical code, they possess limited ability to trace execution paths, especially for longer traces and specific control structures. We find that even the top-performing model, Gemini, can fully and correctly generate only 47% of HumanEval task traces. Additionally, we introduce a subset for three key structures not contained in HumanEval: Recursion, Parallel Processing, and Object-Oriented Programming, including concepts like Inheritance and Polymorphism. Besides OOP, we show that none of the investigated models achieve an accuracy over 5% on the relevant traces. Aggregating these specialized parts with HumanEval tasks, we present Benchmark CoCoNUT: Code Control Flow for Navigation Understanding and Testing, which measures a model's ability to trace execution of code upon relevant calls, including advanced structural components. We conclude that current LLMs need significant improvement to enhance code reasoning abilities. We hope our dataset helps researchers bridge this gap.

Large models represent a groundbreaking advancement in multiple application fields, enabling remarkable achievements across various tasks. However, their unprecedented scale comes with significant computational costs. These models, often consisting of billions of parameters, require vast amounts of computational resources for execution. Especially, the expansive scale and computational demands pose considerable challenges when customizing them for particular downstream tasks, particularly over the hardware platforms constrained by computational capabilities. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides a practical solution by efficiently adapt the large models over the various downstream tasks. In particular, PEFT refers to the process of adjusting the parameters of a pre-trained large models to adapt it to a specific task while minimizing the number of additional parameters introduced or computational resources required. This approach is particularly important when dealing with large language models with high parameter counts, as fine-tuning these models from scratch can be computationally expensive and resource-intensive, posing considerable challenges in the supporting system platform design. In this survey, we present comprehensive studies of various PEFT algorithms, examining their performance and computational overhead. Moreover, we provide an overview of applications developed using different PEFT algorithms and discuss common techniques employed to mitigate computation costs for PEFT. In addition to the algorithmic perspective, we overview various real-world system designs to investigate the implementation costs associated with different PEFT algorithms. This survey serves as an indispensable resource for researchers aiming to understand both the PEFT algorithm and its system implementation, offering detailed insights into recent advancements and practical applications.

The advent of automation in particular Software Engineering (SE) tasks has transitioned from theory to reality. Numerous scholarly articles have documented the successful application of Artificial Intelligence to address issues in areas such as project management, modeling, testing, and development. A recent innovation is the introduction of ChatGPT, an ML-infused chatbot, touted as a resource proficient in generating programming codes and formulating software testing strategies for developers and testers respectively. Although there is speculation that AI-based computation can increase productivity and even substitute software engineers in software development, there is currently a lack of empirical evidence to verify this. Moreover, despite the primary focus on enhancing the accuracy of AI systems, non-functional requirements including energy efficiency, vulnerability, fairness (i.e., human bias), and safety frequently receive insufficient attention. This paper posits that a comprehensive comparison of software engineers and AI-based solutions, considering various evaluation criteria, is pivotal in fostering human-machine collaboration, enhancing the reliability of AI-based methods, and understanding task suitability for humans or AI. Furthermore, it facilitates the effective implementation of cooperative work structures and human-in-the-loop processes. This paper conducts an empirical investigation, contrasting the performance of software engineers and AI systems, like ChatGPT, across different evaluation metrics. The empirical study includes a case of assessing ChatGPT-generated code versus code produced by developers and uploaded in Leetcode.

Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for code has primarily relied on static benchmarks, including HumanEval (Chen et al., 2021), which measure the ability of LLMs to generate complete code that passes unit tests. As LLMs are increasingly used as programmer assistants, we study whether gains on existing benchmarks translate to gains in programmer productivity when coding with LLMs, including time spent coding. In addition to static benchmarks, we investigate the utility of preference metrics that might be used as proxies to measure LLM helpfulness, such as code acceptance or copy rates. To do so, we introduce RealHumanEval, a web interface to measure the ability of LLMs to assist programmers, through either autocomplete or chat support. We conducted a user study (N=213) using RealHumanEval in which users interacted with six LLMs of varying base model performance. Despite static benchmarks not incorporating humans-in-the-loop, we find that improvements in benchmark performance lead to increased programmer productivity; however gaps in benchmark versus human performance are not proportional -- a trend that holds across both forms of LLM support. In contrast, we find that programmer preferences do not correlate with their actual performance, motivating the need for better, human-centric proxy signals. We also open-source RealHumanEval to enable human-centric evaluation of new models and the study data to facilitate efforts to improve code models.

Fine-tuning language models on tasks with instructions has demonstrated potential in facilitating zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective method for enhancing instruction tuning by employing symbolic tasks. Compared to crowdsourced human tasks or model-generated tasks, symbolic tasks present a unique advantage as they can be easily generated in vast quantities, theoretically providing an infinite supply of high-quality training instances. To explore the potential of symbolic tasks, we carry out an extensive case study on the representative symbolic task of SQL execution. Empirical results on various benchmarks validate that the integration of SQL execution leads to significant improvements in zero-shot scenarios, particularly in table reasoning. Notably, our 3B model surpasses both the 175B GPT-3 and ChatGPT in zero-shot table reasoning across four benchmarks. Furthermore, experimental results on BBH (27 tasks) and MMLU (57 tasks) reveal that language models can be enhanced through symbolic tasks without compromising their generality. We hope that our paper serves as a catalyst, inspiring increased efforts to incorporate symbolic tasks in instruction tuning.

Large pre-trained code generation models, such as OpenAI Codex, can generate syntax- and function-correct code, making the coding of programmers more productive and our pursuit of artificial general intelligence closer. In this paper, we introduce CodeGeeX, a multilingual model with 13 billion parameters for code generation. CodeGeeX is pre-trained on 850 billion tokens of 23 programming languages as of June 2022. Our extensive experiments suggest that CodeGeeX outperforms multilingual code models of similar scale for both the tasks of code generation and translation on HumanEval-X. Building upon HumanEval (Python only), we develop the HumanEval-X benchmark for evaluating multilingual models by hand-writing the solutions in C++, Java, JavaScript, and Go. In addition, we build CodeGeeX-based extensions on Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Cloud Studio, generating 4.7 billion tokens for tens of thousands of active users per week. Our user study demonstrates that CodeGeeX can help to increase coding efficiency for 83.4% of its users. Finally, CodeGeeX is publicly accessible and in Sep. 2022, we open-sourced its code, model weights (the version of 850B tokens), API, extensions, and HumanEval-X at https://github.com/THUDM/CodeGeeX.

The software engineering community recently has witnessed widespread deployment of AI programming assistants, such as GitHub Copilot. However, in practice, developers do not accept AI programming assistants' initial suggestions at a high frequency. This leaves a number of open questions related to the usability of these tools. To understand developers' practices while using these tools and the important usability challenges they face, we administered a survey to a large population of developers and received responses from a diverse set of 410 developers. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we found that developers are most motivated to use AI programming assistants because they help developers reduce key-strokes, finish programming tasks quickly, and recall syntax, but resonate less with using them to help brainstorm potential solutions. We also found the most important reasons why developers do not use these tools are because these tools do not output code that addresses certain functional or non-functional requirements and because developers have trouble controlling the tool to generate the desired output. Our findings have implications for both creators and users of AI programming assistants, such as designing minimal cognitive effort interactions with these tools to reduce distractions for users while they are programming.

Computationally intensive decoding procedures--including search, reranking, and self-critique--can improve the quality of language model (LM) outputs in problems spanning code generation, numerical reasoning, and dialog. Existing work typically applies the same decoding procedure for every input to an LM. But not all inputs require the same amount of computation to process. Can we allocate decoding computation adaptively, using more resources to answer questions whose answers will be harder to compute? We present an approach that predicts the distribution of rewards given an input and computation budget, then allocates additional computation to inputs for which it is predicted to be most useful. We apply this approach in two decoding procedures: first, an adaptive best-of-k procedure that dynamically selects the number of samples to generate as input to a reranker; second, a routing procedure that dynamically responds to a query using a decoding procedure that is expensive but accurate, or one that is cheaper but less capable. Across a suite of programming, mathematics, and dialog tasks, we show that accurate computation-allocation procedures can be learned, and reduce computation by up to 50% at no cost to response quality, or improve quality by up to 10% at a fixed computational budget.

The LLM Agent, equipped with a code interpreter, is capable of automatically solving real-world coding tasks, such as data analysis and image editing. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on either simplistic tasks, such as completing a few lines of code, or on extremely complex and specific tasks at the repository level, neither of which are representative of various daily coding tasks. To address this gap, we introduce PyBench, a benchmark encompassing five main categories of real-world tasks, covering more than 10 types of files. Given a high-level user query and related files, the LLM Agent needs to reason and execute Python code via a code interpreter for a few turns before making a formal response to fulfill the user's requirements. Successfully addressing tasks in PyBench demands a robust understanding of various Python packages, superior reasoning capabilities, and the ability to incorporate feedback from executed code. Our evaluations indicate that current open-source LLMs are struggling with these tasks. Hence, we conduct analysis and experiments on four kinds of datasets proving that comprehensive abilities are needed for PyBench. Our fine-tuned 8B size model: PyLlama3 achieves an exciting performance on PyBench which surpasses many 33B and 70B size models. Our Benchmark, Training Dataset, and Model are available at: https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench{https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench}

Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) coding capabilities. However, there is an unignorable programming language bias in existing code benchmarks -- over 95% code generation benchmarks are dominated by Python, leaving the LLMs' capabilities in other programming languages such as Java and C/C++ unknown. Moreover, coding task bias is also crucial. Most benchmarks focus on code generation capability, while benchmarks for code reasoning (given input, reasoning output; and given output, reasoning input), an essential coding capability, are insufficient. Yet, constructing multi-lingual benchmarks can be expensive and labor-intensive, and codes in contest websites such as Leetcode suffer from data contamination during training. To fill this gap, we propose CRUXEVAL-X, a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages. It comprises at least 600 subjects for each language, along with 19K content-consistent tests in total. In particular, the construction pipeline of CRUXEVAL-X works in a fully automated and test-guided manner, which iteratively generates and repairs based on execution feedback. Also, to cross language barriers (e.g., dynamic/static type systems in Python/C++), we formulated various transition rules between language pairs to facilitate translation. Our intensive evaluation of 24 representative LLMs reveals the correlation between language pairs. For example, TypeScript and JavaScript show a significant positive correlation, while Racket has less correlation with other languages. More interestingly, even a model trained solely on Python can achieve at most 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs.

Large language models have been successfully applied to programming assistance tasks, such as code completion, code insertion, and instructional code editing. However, these applications remain insufficiently automated and struggle to effectively integrate various types of information during the programming process, including coding history, current code, and user instructions. In this work, we propose a new conversational framework that comprehensively integrates these information sources, collect data to train our models and evaluate their performance. Firstly, to thoroughly evaluate how well models align with different types of information and the quality of their outputs, we introduce a new benchmark, APEval (Assist Programming Eval), to comprehensively assess the performance of models in programming assistance tasks. Then, for data collection, we develop a data generation pipeline, Programming-Instruct, which synthesizes training data from diverse sources, such as GitHub and online judge platforms. This pipeline can automatically generate various types of messages throughout the programming process. Finally, using this pipeline, we generate 219K samples, fine-tune multiple models, and develop the CursorCore series. We show that CursorCore outperforms other models of comparable size. This framework unifies applications such as inline chat and automated editing, contributes to the advancement of coding assistants. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/TechxGenus/CursorCore.

In recent years, researchers have proposed numerous benchmarks to evaluate the impressive coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on assessing the correctness of code generated by LLMs, while neglecting other critical dimensions that also significantly impact code quality. Therefore, this paper proposes the RACE benchmark, which comprehensively evaluates the quality of code generated by LLMs across 4 dimensions: Readability, mAintainability, Correctness, and Efficiency. Specifically, considering the demand-dependent nature of dimensions beyond correctness, we design various types of user requirements for each dimension to assess the model's ability to generate correct code that also meets user demands. We evaluate 18 representative LLMs on RACE and find that: 1) the current LLMs' ability to generate high-quality code on demand does not yet meet the requirements of software development; 2) readability serves as a critical indicator of the overall quality of generated code; 3) most LLMs exhibit an inherent preference for specific coding style. These findings can help researchers gain a deeper understanding of the coding capabilities of current LLMs and shed light on future directions for model improvement.

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.

Existing LMs struggle with proof-oriented programming due to data scarcity, which manifest in two key ways: (1) a lack of sufficient corpora for proof-oriented programming languages such as F*, and (2) the absence of large-scale, project-level proof-oriented implementations that can teach the model the intricate reasoning process when performing proof-oriented programming. We present the first on synthetic data augmentation for project level proof oriented programming for both generation and repair. Our method addresses data scarcity by synthesizing basic proof-oriented programming problems for proficiency in that language; incorporating diverse coding data for reasoning capability elicitation and creating new proofs and repair data within existing repositories. This approach enables language models to both synthesize and repair proofs for function- and repository-level code. We show that our fine-tuned 14B parameter model, PoPilot, can exceed the performance of the models that outperforms GPT-4o in project-level proof-oriented programming by 64% relative margin, and can improve GPT-4o's performance by 54% by repairing its outputs over GPT-4o's self-repair.

This study explores Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous agents for real-world tasks, including freelance software development. This work presents a new benchmark that evaluates LLMs on freelance programming and data analysis tasks derived from economic data. We construct the benchmark using synthetic tasks created from a Kaggle Freelancer dataset of job postings, with all job prices standardized to USD (median fixed-project price around 250, and an average of 306). Each task is accompanied by structured input-output test cases and an estimated price tag, enabling automated correctness checking and a monetary performance valuation. This approach is inspired by OpenAI's recent SWE-Lancer benchmark (1,400 real Upwork tasks worth 1M total). Still, our framework simplifies evaluation using programmatically testable tasks and predicted price values, making it highly scalable and repeatable. On this benchmark, we evaluate four modern LLMs - Claude 3.5 Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, Qwen 2.5, and Mistral. We report each model's accuracy (task success rate and test-case pass rate) and the total "freelance earnings" it achieves (sum of prices of solved tasks). Our results show that Claude 3.5 Haiku performs best, earning approximately 1.52 million USD, followed closely by GPT-4o-mini at 1.49 million, then Qwen 2.5 (1.33M) and Mistral ($0.70M). We analyze the distribution of errors per task and observe that the strongest models solve the most tasks and rarely fail completely on any project. We discuss the implications of these results for the feasibility of AI as a freelance developer, the advantages and limitations of our automated benchmark approach, and the gap between performance on structured tasks versus the true complexity of real-world freelance jobs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting scalability and generalizability. Recent research has sought to automate the generation and optimization of these workflows, but existing methods still rely on initial manual setup and fall short of achieving fully automated and effective workflow generation. To address this challenge, we reformulate workflow optimization as a search problem over code-represented workflows, where LLM-invoking nodes are connected by edges. We introduce AFlow, an automated framework that efficiently explores this space using Monte Carlo Tree Search, iteratively refining workflows through code modification, tree-structured experience, and execution feedback. Empirical evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate AFlow's efficacy, yielding a 5.7% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, AFlow enables smaller models to outperform GPT-4o on specific tasks at 4.55% of its inference cost in dollars. The code will be available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

Machine learning as a discipline has seen an incredible surge of interest in recent years due in large part to a perfect storm of new theory, superior tooling, renewed interest in its capabilities. We present in this paper a framework named Flux that shows how further refinement of the core ideas of machine learning, built upon the foundation of the Julia programming language, can yield an environment that is simple, easily modifiable, and performant. We detail the fundamental principles of Flux as a framework for differentiable programming, give examples of models that are implemented within Flux to display many of the language and framework-level features that contribute to its ease of use and high productivity, display internal compiler techniques used to enable the acceleration and performance that lies at the heart of Flux, and finally give an overview of the larger ecosystem that Flux fits inside of.

Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance on a wide range of tasks such as question answering and code generation. On a high level, given an input, a language model can be used to automatically complete the sequence in a statistically-likely way. Based on this, users prompt these models with language instructions or examples, to implement a variety of downstream tasks. Advanced prompting methods can even imply interaction between the language model, a user, and external tools such as calculators. However, to obtain state-of-the-art performance or adapt language models for specific tasks, complex task- and model-specific programs have to be implemented, which may still require ad-hoc interaction. Based on this, we present the novel idea of Language Model Programming (LMP). LMP generalizes language model prompting from pure text prompts to an intuitive combination of text prompting and scripting. Additionally, LMP allows constraints to be specified over the language model output. This enables easy adaption to many tasks while abstracting language model internals and providing high-level semantics. To enable LMP, we implement LMQL(short for Language Model Query Language), which leverages the constraints and control flow from an LMP prompt to generate an efficient inference procedure that minimizes the number of expensive calls to the underlying language model. We show that LMQL can capture a wide range of state-of-the-art prompting methods in an intuitive way, especially facilitating interactive flows that are challenging to implement with existing high-level APIs. Our evaluation shows that we retain or increase the accuracy on several downstream tasks, while also significantly reducing the required amount of computation or cost in the case of pay-to-use APIs (26-85% cost savings).

Code generation techniques generate code snippets automatically based on the problem requirements in natural language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) achieve the SOTA performance on code generation. However, LLMs still struggle at times to generate accurate code, which diminishes their promised efficiency as developers must spend significant effort evaluating and debugging the generated code. To improve the reliability and quality of the generated codes, researchers propose to leverage Consistency to obtain a better code based on generating and ranking multiple candidates. The existing approach is problematic as Consistency thinks a code is better when (1) the code pass more tests (inter-consistency) (2) more codes share the same behavior (intra-consistency). However, because the tests are also generated by LLMs, they could be wrong as well. As a result, majority voting based on testing results is unreliable. Relying solely on consistency is insufficient to address this issue; integrating user feedback is essential for effectively guiding consistency. We show that with minimal human effort, performance can be significantly enhanced. We propose Consistency-Augmented Iterative Interaction Framework to Enhance the Reliability of Code Generation, ConAIR, which is an approach that aims to improve the performance of a code generator through two distinctive ingredients, i.e., (1) lightweight user effort for validating the correctness of selected tests; and (2) a dynamic strategy for ranking, localizing and correcting multiple tests and codes. Overall, we propose a lightweight interaction framework that incorporates user feedback to correct identified tests and guide the iterative process. The iteration rounds are only 4 in average with the help of consistency. With only lightweight human efforts, we can achieve an improvement of 33% towards the base model.

Advances in natural language processing, such as transfer learning from pre-trained language models, have impacted how models are trained for programming language tasks too. Previous research primarily explored code pre-training and expanded it through multi-modality and multi-tasking, yet the data for downstream tasks remain modest in size. Focusing on data utilization for downstream tasks, we propose and adapt augmentation methods that yield consistent improvements in code translation and summarization by up to 6.9% and 7.5% respectively. Further analysis suggests that our methods work orthogonally and show benefits in output code style and numeric consistency. We also discuss test data imperfections.

Code synthesis, which requires a deep understanding of complex natural language problem descriptions, generation of code instructions for complex algorithms and data structures, and the successful execution of comprehensive unit tests, presents a significant challenge. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in natural language processing, their performance in code generation tasks remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to code generation tasks leveraging multi-agent prompting that uniquely replicates the full cycle of program synthesis as observed in human developers. Our framework, MapCoder, consists of four LLM agents specifically designed to emulate the stages of this cycle: recalling relevant examples, planning, code generation, and debugging. After conducting thorough experiments, with multiple LLM ablations and analyses across eight challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks, MapCoder showcases remarkable code generation capabilities, achieving new state-of-the-art results (pass@1) on HumanEval (93.9%), MBPP (83.1%), APPS (22.0%), CodeContests (28.5%), and xCodeEval (45.3%). Moreover, our method consistently delivers superior performance across various programming languages and varying problem difficulties. We open-source our framework at https://github.com/Md-Ashraful-Pramanik/MapCoder.

In recent years, the use of automated source code generation utilizing transformer-based generative models has expanded, and these models can generate functional code according to the requirements of the developers. However, recent research revealed that these automatically generated source codes can contain vulnerabilities and other quality issues. Despite researchers' and practitioners' attempts to enhance code generation models, retraining and fine-tuning large language models is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Thus, we describe FRANC, a lightweight framework for recommending more secure and high-quality source code derived from transformer-based code generation models. FRANC includes a static filter to make the generated code compilable with heuristics and a quality-aware ranker to sort the code snippets based on a quality score. Moreover, the framework uses prompt engineering to fix persistent quality issues. We evaluated the framework with five Python and Java code generation models and six prompt datasets, including a newly created one in this work (SOEval). The static filter improves 9% to 46% Java suggestions and 10% to 43% Python suggestions regarding compilability. The average improvement over the NDCG@10 score for the ranking system is 0.0763, and the repairing techniques repair the highest 80% of prompts. FRANC takes, on average, 1.98 seconds for Java; for Python, it takes 0.08 seconds.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code are rapidly evolving, with code editing emerging as a critical capability. We introduce CodeEditorBench, an evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess the performance of LLMs in code editing tasks, including debugging, translating, polishing, and requirement switching. Unlike existing benchmarks focusing solely on code generation, CodeEditorBench emphasizes real-world scenarios and practical aspects of software development. We curate diverse coding challenges and scenarios from five sources, covering various programming languages, complexity levels, and editing tasks. Evaluation of 19 LLMs reveals that closed-source models (particularly Gemini-Ultra and GPT-4), outperform open-source models in CodeEditorBench, highlighting differences in model performance based on problem types and prompt sensitivities. CodeEditorBench aims to catalyze advancements in LLMs by providing a robust platform for assessing code editing capabilities. We will release all prompts and datasets to enable the community to expand the dataset and benchmark emerging LLMs. By introducing CodeEditorBench, we contribute to the advancement of LLMs in code editing and provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners.

Program synthesis with language models (LMs) has unlocked a large set of reasoning abilities; code-tuned LMs have proven adept at generating programs that solve a wide variety of algorithmic symbolic manipulation tasks (e.g. word concatenation). However, not all reasoning tasks are easily expressible as code, e.g. tasks involving commonsense reasoning, moral decision-making, and sarcasm understanding. Our goal is to extend an LM's program synthesis skills to such tasks and evaluate the results via pseudo-programs, namely Python programs where some leaf function calls are left undefined. To that end, we propose, Code Generation and Emulated EXecution (CoGEX). CoGEX works by (1) training LMs to generate their own pseudo-programs, (2) teaching them to emulate their generated program's execution, including those leaf functions, allowing the LM's knowledge to fill in the execution gaps; and (3) using them to search over many programs to find an optimal one. To adapt the CoGEX model to a new task, we introduce a method for performing program search to find a single program whose pseudo-execution yields optimal performance when applied to all the instances of a given dataset. We show that our approach yields large improvements compared to standard in-context learning approaches on a battery of tasks, both algorithmic and soft reasoning. This result thus demonstrates that code synthesis can be applied to a much broader class of problems than previously considered. Our released dataset, fine-tuned models, and implementation can be found at https://github.com/nweir127/CoGEX.

Recent advances in language model (LM) agents and function calling have enabled autonomous, feedback-driven systems to solve problems across various digital domains. To better understand the unique limitations of LM agents, we introduce RefactorBench, a benchmark consisting of 100 large handcrafted multi-file refactoring tasks in popular open-source repositories. Solving tasks within RefactorBench requires thorough exploration of dependencies across multiple files and strong adherence to relevant instructions. Every task is defined by 3 natural language instructions of varying specificity and is mutually exclusive, allowing for the creation of longer combined tasks on the same repository. Baselines on RefactorBench reveal that current LM agents struggle with simple compositional tasks, solving only 22% of tasks with base instructions, in contrast to a human developer with short time constraints solving 87%. Through trajectory analysis, we identify various unique failure modes of LM agents, and further explore the failure mode of tracking past actions. By adapting a baseline agent to condition on representations of state, we achieve a 43.9% improvement in solving RefactorBench tasks. We further extend our state-aware approach to encompass entire digital environments and outline potential directions for future research. RefactorBench aims to support the study of LM agents by providing a set of real-world, multi-hop tasks within the realm of code.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with complex tasks. In real-world software development, humans usually tackle complex tasks through collaborative teamwork, a strategy that significantly controls development complexity and enhances software quality. Inspired by this, we present a self-collaboration framework for code generation employing LLMs, exemplified by ChatGPT. Specifically, through role instructions, 1) Multiple LLMs act as distinct ``experts'', each responsible for a specific subtask within a complex task; 2) Specify the way to collaborate and interact, so that different roles form a virtual team to facilitate each other's work, ultimately the virtual team addresses code generation tasks collaboratively without the need for human intervention. To effectively organize and manage this virtual team, we incorporate software-development methodology into the framework. Thus, we assemble an elementary team consisting of three ChatGPT roles (i.e., analyst, coder, and tester) responsible for software development's analysis, coding, and testing stages. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various code-generation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that self-collaboration code generation relatively improves 29.9%-47.1% Pass@1 compared to direct code generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance and even surpassing GPT-4. Moreover, we showcase that self-collaboration could potentially enable LLMs to efficiently handle complex real-world tasks that are not readily solved by direct code generation, as evidenced in case study.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents solve user-specified tasks over multiple steps while keeping the required manual engagement to a minimum. Crucially, such LLMs need to ground their generations in any feedback obtained to reliably achieve desired outcomes. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning method for teaching models to leverage execution feedback in the realm of code synthesis, where state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to improve code iteratively compared to independent sampling. We benchmark on competitive programming tasks, where we achieve new start-of-the art results with both small (8B parameters) and large (70B) models while reducing the amount of samples required by an order of magnitude. Our analysis of inference-time behavior demonstrates that our method produces LLMs that effectively leverage automatic feedback over multiple steps.

Recent advancements in integrating large language models (LLMs) with application programming interfaces (APIs) have gained significant interest in both academia and industry. These API-based agents, leveraging the strong autonomy and planning capabilities of LLMs, can efficiently solve problems requiring multi-step actions. However, their ability to handle multi-dimensional difficulty levels, diverse task types, and real-world demands through APIs remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce ShortcutsBench, a large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of API-based agents in solving tasks with varying levels of difficulty, diverse task types, and real-world demands. ShortcutsBench includes a wealth of real APIs from Apple Inc.'s operating systems, refined user queries from shortcuts, human-annotated high-quality action sequences from shortcut developers, and accurate parameter filling values about primitive parameter types, enum parameter types, outputs from previous actions, and parameters that need to request necessary information from the system or user. Our extensive evaluation of agents built with 5 leading open-source (size >= 57B) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g. Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-3.5) reveals significant limitations in handling complex queries related to API selection, parameter filling, and requesting necessary information from systems and users. These findings highlight the challenges that API-based agents face in effectively fulfilling real and complex user queries. All datasets, code, and experimental results will be available at https://github.com/eachsheep/shortcutsbench.

Code generation has emerged as a key task to automate software development by converting high-level descriptions into executable code. Large language models (LLMs) excel at this but depend heavily on input prompt quality.Manual prompt engineering can be time-consuming and inconsistent, limiting LLM effectiveness. This paper introduces Prochemy, an innovative method for automatically refining prompts to boost code generation. Prochemy overcomes manual prompt limitations by automating optimization, ensuring consistency during inference, and supporting multi-agent systems.It iteratively refines prompts based on model performance, using an optimized final prompt for improved consistency across tasks. We tested Prochemy on natural language-based code generation and translation tasks using three LLM series. Results indicate Prochemy enhances existing methods, improving performance by 5.0% for GPT-3.5-Turbo and 1.9% for GPT-4o over zero-shot baselines on HumanEval. In state-of-the-art LDB, Prochemy + LDB surpasses standalone methods by 1.2-1.8%. For code translation, Prochemy boosts GPT-4o's Java-to-Python (AVATAR) performance from 74.5 to 84.1 (+12.9%) and Python-to-Java from 66.8 to 78.2 (+17.1%). Moreover, Prochemy maintains strong performance when integrated with the o1-mini model, validating its efficacy in code tasks. Designed as plug-and-play, Prochemy optimizes prompts with minimal human input, bridging the gap between simple prompts and complex frameworks.

This study evaluates the efficiency of code generation by Large Language Models (LLMs) and measures their performance against human-crafted solutions using a dataset from Leetcode. We compare 18 LLMs, considering factors such as model temperature and success rate, and their impact on code performance. This research introduces a novel method for measuring and comparing the speed of LLM-generated code, revealing that LLMs produce code with comparable performance, irrespective of the adopted LLM. We also find that LLMs are capable of generating code that is, on average, more efficient than the code written by humans. The paper further discusses the use of Leetcode as a benchmarking dataset, the limitations imposed by potential data contamination, and the platform's measurement reliability. We believe that our findings contribute to a better understanding of LLM capabilities in code generation and set the stage for future optimizations in the field.

We introduce BigO(Bench), a novel coding benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of generative language models in understanding and generating code with specified time and space complexities. This benchmark addresses the gap in current evaluations that often overlook the ability of models to comprehend and produce code constrained by computational complexity. BigO(Bench) includes tooling to infer the algorithmic complexity of any Python function from profiling measurements, including human- or LLM-generated solutions. BigO(Bench) also includes of set of 3,105 coding problems and 1,190,250 solutions from Code Contests annotated with inferred (synthetic) time and space complexity labels from the complexity framework, as well as corresponding runtime and memory footprint values for a large set of input sizes. We present results from evaluating multiple state-of-the-art language models on this benchmark, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in handling complexity requirements. In particular, token-space reasoning models are unrivaled in code generation but not in complexity understanding, hinting that they may not generalize well to tasks for which no reward was given at training time.

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

We introduce SWE-Lancer, a benchmark of over 1,400 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, valued at \1 million USD total in real-world payouts. SWE-Lancer encompasses both independent engineering tasks--ranging from 50 bug fixes to \$32,000 feature implementations--and managerial tasks, where models choose between technical implementation proposals. Independent tasks are graded with end-to-end tests triple-verified by experienced software engineers, while managerial decisions are assessed against the choices of the original hired engineering managers. We evaluate model performance and find that frontier models are still unable to solve the majority of tasks. To facilitate future research, we open-source a unified Docker image and a public evaluation split, SWE-Lancer Diamond (https://github.com/openai/SWELancer-Benchmark). By mapping model performance to monetary value, we hope SWE-Lancer enables greater research into the economic impact of AI model development.

We introduce Codex, a GPT language model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub, and study its Python code-writing capabilities. A distinct production version of Codex powers GitHub Copilot. On HumanEval, a new evaluation set we release to measure functional correctness for synthesizing programs from docstrings, our model solves 28.8% of the problems, while GPT-3 solves 0% and GPT-J solves 11.4%. Furthermore, we find that repeated sampling from the model is a surprisingly effective strategy for producing working solutions to difficult prompts. Using this method, we solve 70.2% of our problems with 100 samples per problem. Careful investigation of our model reveals its limitations, including difficulty with docstrings describing long chains of operations and with binding operations to variables. Finally, we discuss the potential broader impacts of deploying powerful code generation technologies, covering safety, security, and economics.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to daily life, showcasing their vast potential across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Beyond NLP, LLMs are increasingly used in software development tasks, such as code completion, modification, bug fixing, and code translation. Software engineers widely use tools like GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q, streamlining workflows and automating tasks with high accuracy. While the resource and energy intensity of LLM training is often highlighted, inference can be even more resource-intensive over time, as it's a continuous process with a high number of invocations. Therefore, developing resource-efficient alternatives for LLM inference is crucial for sustainability. This work proposes GREEN-CODE, a framework for energy-aware code generation in LLMs. GREEN-CODE performs dynamic early exit during LLM inference. We train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that learns to balance the trade-offs between accuracy, latency, and energy consumption. Our approach is evaluated on two open-source LLMs, Llama 3.2 3B and OPT 2.7B, using the JavaCorpus and PY150 datasets. Results show that our method reduces the energy consumption between 23-50 % on average for code generation tasks without significantly affecting accuracy.

Despite rapid progress on AI benchmarks, the real-world meaning of benchmark performance remains unclear. To quantify the capabilities of AI systems in terms of human capabilities, we propose a new metric: 50%-task-completion time horizon. This is the time humans typically take to complete tasks that AI models can complete with 50% success rate. We first timed humans with relevant domain expertise on a combination of RE-Bench, HCAST, and 66 novel shorter tasks. On these tasks, current frontier AI models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet have a 50% time horizon of around 50 minutes. Furthermore, frontier AI time horizon has been doubling approximately every seven months since 2019, though the trend may have accelerated in 2024. The increase in AI models' time horizons seems to be primarily driven by greater reliability and ability to adapt to mistakes, combined with better logical reasoning and tool use capabilities. We discuss the limitations of our results -- including their degree of external validity -- and the implications of increased autonomy for dangerous capabilities. If these results generalize to real-world software tasks, extrapolation of this trend predicts that within 5 years, AI systems will be capable of automating many software tasks that currently take humans a month.

This paper studies close-loop task planning, which refers to the process of generating a sequence of skills (a plan) to accomplish a specific goal while adapting the plan based on real-time observations. Recently, prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate actions iteratively has become a prevalent paradigm due to its superior performance and user-friendliness. However, this paradigm is plagued by two inefficiencies: high token consumption and redundant error correction, both of which hinder its scalability for large-scale testing and applications. To address these issues, we propose Tree-Planner, which reframes task planning with LLMs into three distinct phases: plan sampling, action tree construction, and grounded deciding. Tree-Planner starts by using an LLM to sample a set of potential plans before execution, followed by the aggregation of them to form an action tree. Finally, the LLM performs a top-down decision-making process on the tree, taking into account real-time environmental information. Experiments show that Tree-Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency. By decomposing LLM queries into a single plan-sampling call and multiple grounded-deciding calls, a considerable part of the prompt are less likely to be repeatedly consumed. As a result, token consumption is reduced by 92.2% compared to the previously best-performing model. Additionally, by enabling backtracking on the action tree as needed, the correction process becomes more flexible, leading to a 40.5% decrease in error corrections. Project page: https://tree-planner.github.io/

Multi-task learning (MTL) encapsulates multiple learned tasks in a single model and often lets those tasks learn better jointly. However, when deploying MTL onto those real-world systems that are often resource-constrained or latency-sensitive, two prominent challenges arise: (i) during training, simultaneously optimizing all tasks is often difficult due to gradient conflicts across tasks; (ii) at inference, current MTL regimes have to activate nearly the entire model even to just execute a single task. Yet most real systems demand only one or two tasks at each moment, and switch between tasks as needed: therefore such all tasks activated inference is also highly inefficient and non-scalable. In this paper, we present a model-accelerator co-design framework to enable efficient on-device MTL. Our framework, dubbed M^3ViT, customizes mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers into a vision transformer (ViT) backbone for MTL, and sparsely activates task-specific experts during training. Then at inference with any task of interest, the same design allows for activating only the task-corresponding sparse expert pathway, instead of the full model. Our new model design is further enhanced by hardware-level innovations, in particular, a novel computation reordering scheme tailored for memory-constrained MTL that achieves zero-overhead switching between tasks and can scale to any number of experts. When executing single-task inference, M^{3}ViT achieves higher accuracies than encoder-focused MTL methods, while significantly reducing 88% inference FLOPs. When implemented on a hardware platform of one Xilinx ZCU104 FPGA, our co-design framework reduces the memory requirement by 2.4 times, while achieving energy efficiency up to 9.23 times higher than a comparable FPGA baseline. Code is available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/M3ViT.

We evaluate AI-assisted generative capabilities on fundamental numerical kernels in high-performance computing (HPC), including AXPY, GEMV, GEMM, SpMV, Jacobi Stencil, and CG. We test the generated kernel codes for a variety of language-supported programming models, including (1) C++ (e.g., OpenMP [including offload], OpenACC, Kokkos, SyCL, CUDA, and HIP), (2) Fortran (e.g., OpenMP [including offload] and OpenACC), (3) Python (e.g., numba, Numba, cuPy, and pyCUDA), and (4) Julia (e.g., Threads, CUDA.jl, AMDGPU.jl, and KernelAbstractions.jl). We use the GitHub Copilot capabilities powered by OpenAI Codex available in Visual Studio Code as of April 2023 to generate a vast amount of implementations given simple <kernel> + <programming model> + <optional hints> prompt variants. To quantify and compare the results, we propose a proficiency metric around the initial 10 suggestions given for each prompt. Results suggest that the OpenAI Codex outputs for C++ correlate with the adoption and maturity of programming models. For example, OpenMP and CUDA score really high, whereas HIP is still lacking. We found that prompts from either a targeted language such as Fortran or the more general-purpose Python can benefit from adding code keywords, while Julia prompts perform acceptably well for its mature programming models (e.g., Threads and CUDA.jl). We expect for these benchmarks to provide a point of reference for each programming model's community. Overall, understanding the convergence of large language models, AI, and HPC is crucial due to its rapidly evolving nature and how it is redefining human-computer interactions.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: user-friendly interaction, controllable generation, and wide applicability. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this framework, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. The code, prompts, and experimental details are available at https://github.com/moymix/TaskMatrix/tree/main/LowCodeLLM. A system demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2C1vaeO3E.

We introduce {rm C{small LEVER}}, a high-quality, curated benchmark of 161 problems for end-to-end verified code generation in Lean. Each problem consists of (1) the task of generating a specification that matches a held-out ground-truth specification, and (2) the task of generating a Lean implementation that provably satisfies this specification. Unlike prior benchmarks, {rm C{small LEVER}} avoids test-case supervision, LLM-generated annotations, and specifications that leak implementation logic or allow vacuous solutions. All outputs are verified post-hoc using Lean's type checker to ensure machine-checkable correctness. We use {rm C{small LEVER}} to evaluate several few-shot and agentic approaches based on state-of-the-art language models. These methods all struggle to achieve full verification, establishing it as a challenging frontier benchmark for program synthesis and formal reasoning. Our benchmark can be found on GitHub(https://github.com/trishullab/clever) as well as HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/datasets/amitayusht/clever). All our evaluation code is also available online(https://github.com/trishullab/clever-prover).

The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Orientation of modern software systems towards data-intensive processing raises new difficulties in software engineering on how to build and maintain such systems. Some of the important challenges concern the design of software architecture. In this article, we survey the fundamental challenges when designing data-intensive computing systems and present some of the most popular software architectural styles together with their potential to tackle these challenges.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in software engineering tasks. However, improving their accuracy in generating correct and reliable code remains challenging. Numerous prompt engineering techniques (PETs) have been developed to address this, but no single approach is universally optimal. Selecting the right PET for each query is difficult for two primary reasons: (1) interactive prompting techniques may not consistently deliver the expected benefits, especially for simpler queries, and (2) current automated prompt engineering methods lack adaptability and fail to fully utilize multi-stage responses. To overcome these challenges, we propose PET-Select, a PET-agnostic selection model that uses code complexity as a proxy to classify queries and select the most appropriate PET. By incorporating contrastive learning, PET-Select effectively distinguishes between simple and complex problems, allowing it to choose PETs that are best suited for each query's complexity level. Our evaluations on the MBPP and HumanEval benchmarks using GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o show up to a 1.9% improvement in pass@1 accuracy, along with a 74.8% reduction in token usage. Additionally, we provide both quantitative and qualitative results to demonstrate how PET-Select effectively selects the most appropriate techniques for each code generation query, further showcasing its efficiency in optimizing PET selection.

A less complex and more straightforward program is a crucial factor that enhances its maintainability and makes writing secure and bug-free programs easier. However, due to its heavy workload and the risks of breaking the working programs, programmers are reluctant to do code refactoring, and thus, it also causes the loss of potential learning experiences. To mitigate this, we demonstrate the application of using a large language model (LLM), GPT-3.5, to suggest less complex versions of the user-written Python program, aiming to encourage users to learn how to write better programs. We propose a method to leverage the prompting with few-shot examples of the LLM by selecting the best-suited code refactoring examples for each target programming problem based on the prior evaluation of prompting with the one-shot example. The quantitative evaluation shows that 95.68% of programs can be refactored by generating 10 candidates each, resulting in a 17.35% reduction in the average cyclomatic complexity and a 25.84% decrease in the average number of lines after filtering only generated programs that are semantically correct. Furthermore, the qualitative evaluation shows outstanding capability in code formatting, while unnecessary behaviors such as deleting or translating comments are also observed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable capabilities in various software engineering tasks, spurring the rapid growth of the Large Language Models for Software Engineering (LLM4SE) area. However, limited attention has been paid to developing efficient LLM4SE techniques that demand minimal computational cost, time, and memory resources, as well as green LLM4SE solutions that reduce energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. This paper aims to redirect the focus of the research community towards the efficiency and greenness of LLM4SE, while also sharing potential research directions to achieve this goal. It commences with a brief overview of the significance of LLM4SE and highlights the need for efficient and green LLM4SE solutions. Subsequently, the paper presents a vision for a future where efficient and green LLM4SE revolutionizes the LLM-based software engineering tool landscape, benefiting various stakeholders, including industry, individual practitioners, and society. The paper then delineates a roadmap for future research, outlining specific research paths and potential solutions for the research community to pursue. While not intended to be a definitive guide, the paper aims to inspire further progress, with the ultimate goal of establishing efficient and green LLM4SE as a central element in the future of software engineering.

Code completion, a key downstream task in code generation, is one of the most frequent and impactful methods for enhancing developer productivity in software development. As intelligent completion tools evolve, we need a robust evaluation benchmark that enables meaningful comparisons between products and guides future advancements. However, existing benchmarks focus more on coarse-grained tasks without industrial analysis resembling general code generation rather than the real-world scenarios developers encounter. Moreover, these benchmarks often rely on costly and time-consuming human annotation, and the standalone test cases fail to leverage minimal tests for maximum repository-level understanding and code coverage. To address these limitations, we first analyze business data from an industrial code completion tool and redefine the evaluation criteria to better align with the developer's intent and desired completion behavior throughout the coding process. Based on these insights, we introduce Codev-Agent, an agent-based system that automates repository crawling, constructs execution environments, extracts dynamic calling chains from existing unit tests, and generates new test samples to avoid data leakage, ensuring fair and effective comparisons. Using Codev-Agent, we present the Code-Development Benchmark (Codev-Bench), a fine-grained, real-world, repository-level, and developer-centric evaluation framework. Codev-Bench assesses whether a code completion tool can capture a developer's immediate intent and suggest appropriate code across diverse contexts, providing a more realistic benchmark for code completion in modern software development.

We introduce the Formally Verified Automated Programming Progress Standards, or FVAPPS, a benchmark of 4715 samples for writing programs and proving their correctness, the largest formal verification benchmark, including 1083 curated and quality controlled samples. Previously, APPS provided a benchmark and dataset for programming puzzles to be completed in Python and checked against unit tests, of the kind seen in technical assessments in the software engineering industry. Building upon recent approaches for benchmarks in interactive theorem proving, we generalize the unit tests to Lean 4 theorems given without proof (i.e., using Lean's "sorry" keyword). On the 406 theorems of 100 randomly selected samples, Sonnet correctly proves 30% and Gemini correctly proves 18%. We challenge the machine learning and program synthesis communities to solve both each general purpose programming problem and its associated correctness specifications. The benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/quinn-dougherty/fvapps.

Code completion has become an essential tool for daily software development. Existing evaluation benchmarks often employ static methods that do not fully capture the dynamic nature of real-world coding environments and face significant challenges, including limited context length, reliance on superficial evaluation metrics, and potential overfitting to training datasets. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for enhancing code completion in software development through the creation of a repository-level benchmark ExecRepoBench and the instruction corpora Repo-Instruct, aim at improving the functionality of open-source large language models (LLMs) in real-world coding scenarios that involve complex interdependencies across multiple files. ExecRepoBench includes 1.2K samples from active Python repositories. Plus, we present a multi-level grammar-based completion methodology conditioned on the abstract syntax tree to mask code fragments at various logical units (e.g. statements, expressions, and functions). Then, we fine-tune the open-source LLM with 7B parameters on Repo-Instruct to produce a strong code completion baseline model Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C based on the open-source model. Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C is rigorously evaluated against existing benchmarks, including MultiPL-E and ExecRepoBench, which consistently outperforms prior baselines across all programming languages. The deployment of can be used as a high-performance, local service for programming development\url{https://execrepobench.github.io/}.

Recent work shows Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to understand natural language constraints for various text generation tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. While, in the code domain, there is wide usage of constraints in code format to maintain the integrity of code written in Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) like JSON and YAML which are widely used for system-level programming tasks in enterprises. Given that LLMs are increasingly used for system-level code tasks, evaluating if they can comprehend these code constraints is crucial. However, no work has been done to evaluate their controllability over code constraints. Hence, we introduce ConCodeEval, a first-of-its-kind benchmark having two novel tasks for code constraints across five representations. Our findings suggest that language models struggle with code constraints. Code languages that perform excellently for normal code tasks do not perform well when the same languages represent fine-grained constraints.

Large language models (LLMs), as epitomized by models like ChatGPT, have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). Along with this trend, code-based large language models such as StarCoder, WizardCoder, and CodeLlama have emerged, trained extensively on vast repositories of code data. Yet, inherent in their design, these models primarily focus on generative tasks like code generation, code completion, and comment generation, and general support for multiple programming languages. While the generic abilities of code LLMs are useful for many programmers, the area of high-performance computing (HPC) has a narrower set of requirements that make a smaller and more domain-specific LM a smarter choice. This paper introduces OMPGPT, a novel model meticulously designed to harness the inherent strengths of language models for OpenMP pragma generation. Furthermore, we adopt and adapt prompt engineering techniques from the NLP domain to create chain-of-OMP, an innovative strategy designed to enhance OMPGPT's effectiveness. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that OMPGPT outperforms existing large language models specialized in OpenMP tasks and maintains a notably smaller size, aligning it more closely with the typical hardware constraints of HPC environments. We consider our contribution as a pivotal bridge, connecting the advantage of language models with the specific demands of HPC tasks. The success of OMPGPT lays a solid foundation, suggesting its potential applicability and adaptability to a wider range of HPC tasks, thereby opening new avenues in the field of computational efficiency and effectiveness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in handling straightforward programming tasks. However, their performance tends to falter when confronted with more challenging programming problems. We observe that conventional models often generate solutions as monolithic code blocks, restricting their effectiveness in tackling intricate questions. To overcome this limitation, we present Modular-of-Thought Coder (MoTCoder). We introduce a pioneering framework for MoT instruction tuning, designed to promote the decomposition of tasks into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. Our investigations reveal that, through the cultivation and utilization of sub-modules, MoTCoder significantly improves both the modularity and correctness of the generated solutions, leading to substantial relative pass@1 improvements of 12.9% on APPS and 9.43% on CodeContests. Our codes are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/MoTCoder.

The field of Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) has recently attained impressive results, including the discovery of state-of-the-art machine learning solutions, such as neural image classifiers. This is often done by applying an evolutionary search method, which samples multiple candidate solutions from a large space and evaluates the quality of each candidate through a long training process. As a result, the search tends to be slow. In this paper, we show that large efficiency gains can be obtained by employing a fast unified functional hash, especially through the functional equivalence caching technique, which we also present. The central idea is to detect by hashing when the search method produces equivalent candidates, which occurs very frequently, and this way avoid their costly re-evaluation. Our hash is "functional" in that it identifies equivalent candidates even if they were represented or coded differently, and it is "unified" in that the same algorithm can hash arbitrary representations; e.g. compute graphs, imperative code, or lambda functions. As evidence, we show dramatic improvements on multiple AutoML domains, including neural architecture search and algorithm discovery. Finally, we consider the effect of hash collisions, evaluation noise, and search distribution through empirical analysis. Altogether, we hope this paper may serve as a guide to hashing techniques in AutoML.

Existing evaluation benchmarks of language models of code (code LMs) focus almost exclusively on whether the LMs can generate functionally-correct code. In real-world software engineering, developers think beyond functional correctness. They have requirements on "how" a functionality should be implemented to meet overall system design objectives like efficiency, security, and maintainability. They would also trust the code LMs more if the LMs demonstrate robust understanding of requirements and code semantics. We propose a new benchmark NoFunEval to evaluate code LMs on non-functional requirements and simple classification instances for both functional and non-functional requirements. We propose a prompting method, Coding Concepts (CoCo), as a way for a developer to communicate the domain knowledge to the LMs. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two code LMs. Our finding is that they generally falter when tested on our benchmark, hinting at fundamental blindspots in their training setups. Surprisingly, even the classification accuracy on functional-correctness instances derived from the popular HumanEval benchmark is low, calling in question the depth of their comprehension and the source of their success in generating functionally-correct code in the first place. We will release our benchmark and evaluation scripts publicly at https://aka.ms/NoFunEval.

Code large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advances in code understanding, completion, and generation tasks. Programming benchmarks, comprised of a selection of code challenges and corresponding test cases, serve as a standard to evaluate the capability of different LLMs in such tasks. However, most existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are still restricted to a limited number of languages, where other languages are translated from the Python samples (e.g. MultiPL-E) degrading the data diversity. To further facilitate the research of code LLMs, we propose a massively multilingual code benchmark covering 40 programming languages (McEval) with 16K test samples, which substantially pushes the limits of code LLMs in multilingual scenarios. The benchmark contains challenging code completion, understanding, and generation evaluation tasks with finely curated massively multilingual instruction corpora McEval-Instruct. In addition, we introduce an effective multilingual coder mCoder trained on McEval-Instruct to support multilingual programming language generation. Extensive experimental results on McEval show that there is still a difficult journey between open-source models and closed-source LLMs (e.g. GPT-series models) in numerous languages. The instruction corpora, evaluation benchmark, and leaderboard are available at https://mceval.github.io/.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GitHub Copilot has significantly enhanced programmers' productivity, particularly in code generation. However, these models often struggle with real-world tasks without fine-tuning. As LLMs grow larger and more performant, fine-tuning for specialized tasks becomes increasingly expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, which fine-tune only a subset of model parameters, offer a promising solution by reducing the computational costs of tuning LLMs while maintaining their performance. Existing studies have explored using PEFT and LLMs for various code-related tasks and found that the effectiveness of PEFT techniques is task-dependent. The application of PEFT techniques in unit test generation remains underexplored. The state-of-the-art is limited to using LLMs with full fine-tuning to generate unit tests. This paper investigates both full fine-tuning and various PEFT methods, including LoRA, (IA)^3, and prompt tuning, across different model architectures and sizes. We use well-established benchmark datasets to evaluate their effectiveness in unit test generation. Our findings show that PEFT methods can deliver performance comparable to full fine-tuning for unit test generation, making specialized fine-tuning more accessible and cost-effective. Notably, prompt tuning is the most effective in terms of cost and resource utilization, while LoRA approaches the effectiveness of full fine-tuning in several cases.

The study on GitHub Copilot by GovTech Singapore's Engineering Productivity Programme (EPP) reveals significant potential for AI Code Assistant tools to boost developer productivity and improve application quality in the public sector. Highlighting the substantial benefits for the public sector, the study observed an increased productivity (coding / tasks speed increased by 21-28%), which translates into accelerated development, and quicker go-to-market, with a notable consensus (95%) that the tool increases developer satisfaction. Particularly, junior developers experienced considerable efficiency gains and reduced coding times, illustrating Copilot's capability to enhance job satisfaction by easing routine tasks. This advancement allows for a sharper focus on complex projects, faster learning, and improved code quality. Recognising the strategic importance of these tools, the study recommends the development of an AI Framework to maximise such benefits while cautioning against potential over-reliance without solid foundational programming skills. It also advises public sector developers to classify their code as "Open" to use Gen-AI Coding Assistant tools on the Cloud like GitHub Copilot and to consider self-hosted tools like Codeium or Code Llama for confidential code to leverage technology efficiently within the public sector framework. With up to 8,000 developers, comprising both public officers and vendors developing applications for the public sector and its customers, there is significant potential to enhance productivity.

Prompt engineering can significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), with automated prompt optimization (APO) gaining significant attention due to the time-consuming and laborious nature of manual prompt design. However, much of the existing work in APO overlooks task-specific characteristics, resulting in prompts that lack domain specificity and are not well-suited for task-specific optimization. In this paper, we introduce TAPO, a multitask-aware prompt optimization framework composed of three key modules. First, a task-aware metric selection module is proposed to enhance task-specific prompt generation capabilities. Second, we present a multi-metrics evaluation module to jointly evaluate prompts from multiple perspectives. Third, an evolution-based optimization framework is introduced for automatic prompt refinement, which improves adaptability across various tasks. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and our code is publicly available.

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for program synthesis, they lack the global view needed to develop useful abstractions; they generally predict programs one at a time, often repeating the same functionality. Generating redundant code from scratch is both inefficient and error-prone. To address this, we propose Refactoring for Generalizable Abstraction Learning (ReGAL), a gradient-free method for learning a library of reusable functions via code refactorization, i.e. restructuring code without changing its execution output. ReGAL learns from a small set of existing programs, iteratively verifying and refining its abstractions via execution. We find that the shared function libraries discovered by ReGAL make programs easier to predict across diverse domains. On three datasets (LOGO graphics generation, Date reasoning, and TextCraft, a Minecraft-based text game), both open-source and proprietary LLMs improve in accuracy when predicting programs with ReGAL functions. For CodeLlama-13B, ReGAL results in absolute accuracy increases of 11.5% on graphics, 26.1% on date understanding, and 8.1% on TextCraft, outperforming GPT-3.5 in two of three domains. Our analysis reveals ReGAL's abstractions encapsulate frequently-used subroutines as well as environment dynamics.

Transformer-based language models are highly effective for code completion, with much research dedicated to enhancing the content of these completions. Despite their effectiveness, these models come with high operational costs and can be intrusive, especially when they suggest too often and interrupt developers who are concentrating on their work. Current research largely overlooks how these models interact with developers in practice and neglects to address when a developer should receive completion suggestions. To tackle this issue, we developed a machine learning model that can accurately predict when to invoke a code completion tool given the code context and available telemetry data. To do so, we collect a dataset of 200k developer interactions with our cross-IDE code completion plugin and train several invocation filtering models. Our results indicate that our small-scale transformer model significantly outperforms the baseline while maintaining low enough latency. We further explore the search space for integrating additional telemetry data into a pre-trained transformer directly and obtain promising results. To further demonstrate our approach's practical potential, we deployed the model in an online environment with 34 developers and provided real-world insights based on 74k actual invocations.

Transformer-based language models for automatic code completion have shown great promise so far, yet the evaluation of these models rarely uses real data. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative assessments of three public code language models when completing real-world code. We first developed an open-source IDE extension, Code4Me, for the online evaluation of the models. We collected real auto-completion usage data for over a year from more than 1200 users, resulting in over 600K valid completions. These models were then evaluated using six standard metrics across twelve programming languages. Next, we conducted a qualitative study of 1690 real-world completion requests to identify the reasons behind the poor model performance. A comparative analysis of the models' performance in online and offline settings was also performed, using benchmark synthetic datasets and two masking strategies. Our findings suggest that while developers utilize code completion across various languages, the best results are achieved for mainstream languages such as Python and Java. InCoder outperformed the other models across all programming languages, highlighting the significance of training data and objectives. Our study also revealed that offline evaluations do not accurately reflect real-world scenarios. Upon qualitative analysis of the model's predictions, we found that 66.3% of failures were due to the models' limitations, 24.4% occurred due to inappropriate model usage in a development context, and 9.3% were valid requests that developers overwrote. Given these findings, we propose several strategies to overcome the current limitations. These include refining training objectives, improving resilience to typographical errors, adopting hybrid approaches, and enhancing implementations and usability.

Code is seldom written in a single left-to-right pass and is instead repeatedly edited and refined. We introduce InCoder, a unified generative model that can perform program synthesis (via left-to-right generation) as well as editing (via infilling). InCoder is trained to generate code files from a large corpus of permissively licensed code, where regions of code have been randomly masked and moved to the end of each file, allowing code infilling with bidirectional context. Our model is the first generative model that is able to directly perform zero-shot code infilling, which we evaluate on challenging tasks such as type inference, comment generation, and variable re-naming. We find that the ability to condition on bidirectional context substantially improves performance on these tasks, while still performing comparably on standard program synthesis benchmarks in comparison to left-to-right only models pretrained at similar scale. The InCoder models and code are publicly released. https://sites.google.com/view/incoder-code-models

Equipped with the capability to call functions, modern large language models (LLMs) can leverage external tools for addressing a range of tasks unattainable through language skills alone. However, the effective execution of these tools relies heavily not just on the advanced capabilities of LLMs but also on precise user instructions, which often cannot be ensured in the real world. To evaluate the performance of LLMs tool-use under imperfect instructions, we meticulously examine the real-world instructions queried from users, analyze the error patterns, and build a challenging tool-use benchmark called Noisy ToolBench (NoisyToolBench). We find that due to the next-token prediction training objective, LLMs tend to arbitrarily generate the missed argument, which may lead to hallucinations and risks. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Ask-when-Needed (AwN), which prompts LLMs to ask questions to users whenever they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions. Moreover, to reduce the manual labor involved in user-LLM interaction and assess LLMs performance in tool utilization from both accuracy and efficiency perspectives, we design an automated evaluation tool named ToolEvaluator. Our experiments demonstrate that the AwN significantly outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the NoisyToolBench. We will release all related code and datasets to support future research.

Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.

Recent advancements in code-fluent Large Language Models (LLMs) enabled the research on repository-level code editing. In such tasks, the model navigates and modifies the entire codebase of a project according to request. Hence, such tasks require efficient context retrieval, i.e., navigating vast codebases to gather relevant context. Despite the recognized importance of context retrieval, existing studies tend to approach repository-level coding tasks in an end-to-end manner, rendering the impact of individual components within these complicated systems unclear. In this work, we decouple the task of context retrieval from the other components of the repository-level code editing pipelines. We lay the groundwork to define the strengths and weaknesses of this component and the role that reasoning plays in it by conducting experiments that focus solely on context retrieval. We conclude that while the reasoning helps to improve the precision of the gathered context, it still lacks the ability to identify its sufficiency. We also outline the ultimate role of the specialized tools in the process of context gathering. The code supplementing this paper is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/ai-agents-code-editing.

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of various large language models (LLMs) in performing tasks common among undergraduate computer science students. Although a number of research studies in the computing education community have explored the possibility of using LLMs for a variety of tasks, there is a lack of comprehensive research comparing different LLMs and evaluating which LLMs are most effective for different tasks. Our research systematically assesses some of the publicly available LLMs such as Google Bard, ChatGPT(3.5), GitHub Copilot Chat, and Microsoft Copilot across diverse tasks commonly encountered by undergraduate computer science students in India. These tasks include code explanation and documentation, solving class assignments, technical interview preparation, learning new concepts and frameworks, and email writing. Evaluation for these tasks was carried out by pre-final year and final year undergraduate computer science students and provides insights into the models' strengths and limitations. This study aims to guide students as well as instructors in selecting suitable LLMs for any specific task and offers valuable insights on how LLMs can be used constructively by students and instructors.

Transferring learned patterns from pretrained neural language models has been shown to significantly improve effectiveness across a variety of language-based tasks, meanwhile further tuning on intermediate tasks has been demonstrated to provide additional performance benefits, provided the intermediate task is sufficiently related to the target task. However, how to identify related tasks is an open problem, and brute-force searching effective task combinations is prohibitively expensive. Hence, the question arises, are we able to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of tasks with no training examples through selective fine-tuning? In this paper, we explore statistical measures that approximate the divergence between domain representations as a means to estimate whether tuning using one task pair will exhibit performance benefits over tuning another. This estimation can then be used to reduce the number of task pairs that need to be tested by eliminating pairs that are unlikely to provide benefits. Through experimentation over 58 tasks and over 6,600 task pair combinations, we demonstrate that statistical measures can distinguish effective task pairs, and the resulting estimates can reduce end-to-end runtime by up to 40%.

The utilization of programming language (PL) models, pre-trained on large-scale code corpora, as a means of automating software engineering processes has demonstrated considerable potential in streamlining various code generation tasks such as code completion, code translation, and program synthesis. However, current approaches mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning objectives borrowed from text generation, neglecting unique sequence-level characteristics of code, including but not limited to compilability as well as syntactic and functional correctness. To address this limitation, we propose PPOCoder, a new framework for code generation that synergistically combines pre-trained PL models with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) which is a widely used deep reinforcement learning technique. By utilizing non-differentiable feedback from code execution and structure alignment, PPOCoder seamlessly integrates external code-specific knowledge into the model optimization process. It's important to note that PPOCoder is a task-agnostic and model-agnostic framework that can be used across different code generation tasks and PLs. Extensive experiments on three code generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared to SOTA methods, achieving significant improvements in compilation success rates and functional correctness across different PLs.

CONTEXT The R programming language has a huge and active community, especially in the area of statistical computing. Its interpreted nature allows for several interesting constructs, like the manipulation of functions at run-time, that hinder the static analysis of R programs. At the same time, there is a lack of existing research regarding how these features, or even the R language as a whole are used in practice. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we conduct a large-scale, static analysis of more than 50 million lines of real-world R programs and packages to identify their characteristics and the features that are actually used. Moreover, we compare the similarities and differences between the scripts of R users and the implementations of package authors. We provide insights for static analysis tools like the lintr package as well as potential interpreter optimizations and uncover areas for future research. METHOD We analyze 4230 R scripts submitted alongside publications and the sources of 19450 CRAN packages for over 350000 R files, collecting and summarizing quantitative information for features of interest. RESULTS We find a high frequency of name-based indexing operations, assignments, and loops, but a low frequency for most of R's reflective functions. Furthermore, we find neither testing functions nor many calls to R's foreign function interface (FFI) in the publication submissions. CONCLUSION R scripts and package sources differ, for example, in their size, the way they include other packages, and their usage of R's reflective capabilities. We provide features that are used frequently and should be prioritized by static analysis tools, like operator assignments, function calls, and certain reflective functions like load.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate codes on competitive programming tasks. However, with limited sample numbers, LLMs still suffer from poor accuracy. Inspired by the process of human programming, we propose a generate-and-edit approach named Self-Edit that utilizes execution results of the generated code from LLMs to improve the code quality on the competitive programming task. We execute the generated code on the example test case provided in the question and wrap execution results into a supplementary comment. Utilizing this comment as guidance, our fault-aware code editor is employed to correct errors in the generated code. We perform extensive evaluations across two competitive programming datasets with nine different LLMs. Compared to directly generating from LLMs, our approach can improve the average of pass@1 by 89\% on APPS-dev, 31\% on APPS-test, and 48\% on HumanEval over nine popular code generation LLMs with parameter sizes ranging from 110M to 175B. Compared to other post-processing methods, our method demonstrates superior accuracy and efficiency.

Current benchmarks for evaluating neural code models focus on only a small subset of programming languages, excluding many popular languages such as Go or Rust. To ameliorate this issue, we present the BabelCode framework for execution-based evaluation of any benchmark in any language. BabelCode enables new investigations into the qualitative performance of models' memory, runtime, and individual test case results. Additionally, we present a new code translation dataset called Translating Python Programming Puzzles (TP3) from the Python Programming Puzzles (Schuster et al. 2021) benchmark that involves translating expert-level python functions to any language. With both BabelCode and the TP3 benchmark, we investigate if balancing the distributions of 14 languages in a training dataset improves a large language model's performance on low-resource languages. Training a model on a balanced corpus results in, on average, 12.34% higher pass@k across all tasks and languages compared to the baseline. We find that this strategy achieves 66.48% better pass@k on low-resource languages at the cost of only a 12.94% decrease to high-resource languages. In our three translation tasks, this strategy yields, on average, 30.77% better low-resource pass@k while having 19.58% worse high-resource pass@k.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their utilization in code generation tasks have significantly reshaped the field of software development. Despite the remarkable efficacy of code completion solutions in mainstream programming languages, their performance lags when applied to less ubiquitous formats such as OpenAPI definitions. This study evaluates the OpenAPI completion performance of GitHub Copilot, a prevalent commercial code completion tool, and proposes a set of task-specific optimizations leveraging Meta's open-source model Code Llama. A semantics-aware OpenAPI completion benchmark proposed in this research is used to perform a series of experiments through which the impact of various prompt-engineering and fine-tuning techniques on the Code Llama model's performance is analyzed. The fine-tuned Code Llama model reaches a peak correctness improvement of 55.2% over GitHub Copilot despite utilizing 25 times fewer parameters than the commercial solution's underlying Codex model. Additionally, this research proposes an enhancement to a widely used code infilling training technique, addressing the issue of underperformance when the model is prompted with context sizes smaller than those used during training. The dataset, the benchmark, and the model fine-tuning code are made publicly available.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their exceptional abilities across various tasks, such as code generation, problem-solving and reasoning. Existing benchmarks evaluate tasks in isolation, yet the extent to which LLMs can understand prose-style tasks, identify the underlying problems, and then generate appropriate code solutions is still unexplored. Addressing this gap, we introduce PECC, a novel benchmark derived from Advent Of Code (AoC) challenges and Project Euler, including 2396 problems. Unlike conventional benchmarks, PECC requires LLMs to interpret narrative-embedded problems, extract requirements, and generate executable code. A key feature of our dataset is the complexity added by natural language prompting in chat-based evaluations, mirroring real-world instruction ambiguities. Results show varying model performance between narrative and neutral problems, with specific challenges in the Euler math-based subset with GPT-3.5-Turbo passing 50% of the AoC challenges and only 8% on the Euler problems. By probing the limits of LLMs' capabilities, our benchmark provides a framework to monitor and assess the subsequent progress of LLMs as a universal problem solver.

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the 'Automate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in tool-making, yet existing frameworks often struggle to efficiently construct reliable toolsets and are limited to single-task settings. To address these challenges, we propose GATE (Graph-based Adaptive Tool Evolution), an adaptive framework that dynamically constructs and evolves a hierarchical graph of reusable tools across multiple scenarios. We evaluate GATE on open-ended tasks (Minecraft), agent-based tasks (TextCraft, DABench), and code generation tasks (MATH, Date, TabMWP). Our results show that GATE achieves up to 4.3x faster milestone completion in Minecraft compared to the previous SOTA, and provides an average improvement of 9.23% over existing tool-making methods in code generation tasks and 10.03% in agent tasks. GATE demonstrates the power of adaptive evolution, balancing tool quantity, complexity, and functionality while maintaining high efficiency. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ayanami2003/GATE.

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Program synthesis is challenging largely because of the difficulty of search in a large space of programs. Human programmers routinely tackle the task of writing complex programs by writing sub-programs and then analyzing their intermediate results to compose them in appropriate ways. Motivated by this intuition, we present a new synthesis approach that leverages learning to guide a bottom-up search over programs. In particular, we train a model to prioritize compositions of intermediate values during search conditioned on a given set of input-output examples. This is a powerful combination because of several emergent properties. First, in bottom-up search, intermediate programs can be executed, providing semantic information to the neural network. Second, given the concrete values from those executions, we can exploit rich features based on recent work on property signatures. Finally, bottom-up search allows the system substantial flexibility in what order to generate the solution, allowing the synthesizer to build up a program from multiple smaller sub-programs. Overall, our empirical evaluation finds that the combination of learning and bottom-up search is remarkably effective, even with simple supervised learning approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on two datasets, one from the SyGuS competition and one of our own creation.

State-of-the-art neural algorithmic reasoners make use of message passing in graph neural networks (GNNs). But typical GNNs blur the distinction between the definition and invocation of the message function, forcing a node to send messages to its neighbours at every layer, synchronously. When applying GNNs to learn to execute dynamic programming algorithms, however, on most steps only a handful of the nodes would have meaningful updates to send. One, hence, runs the risk of inefficiencies by sending too much irrelevant data across the graph -- with many intermediate GNN steps having to learn identity functions. In this work, we explicitly separate the concepts of node state update and message function invocation. With this separation, we obtain a mathematical formulation that allows us to reason about asynchronous computation in both algorithms and neural networks.

Language models (LMs) built upon deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently demonstrated breakthrough effectiveness in software engineering tasks such as code generation, completion, and repair. This has paved the way for the emergence of LM-based code optimization techniques, which are crucial for enhancing the performance of existing programs, such as accelerating program execution time. However, a comprehensive survey dedicated to this specific application has been lacking. To fill this gap, we present a systematic literature review of over 50 primary studies, identifying emerging trends and addressing 11 specialized questions. Our findings reveal five critical open challenges, such as balancing model complexity with practical usability, cross-language/performance generalizability, and building trust in AI-driven solutions. Furthermore, we provide eight future research directions to facilitate more efficient, robust, and reliable LM-based code optimization. Thereby, this study aims to provide actionable insights and foundational references for both researchers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving field.

Despite recent progress in Language Models (LMs) for software engineering, collecting training data remains a significant pain point. Existing datasets are small, with at most 1,000s of training instances from 11 or fewer GitHub repositories. The procedures to curate such datasets are often complex, necessitating hundreds of hours of human labor; companion execution environments also take up several terabytes of storage, severely limiting their scalability and usability. To address this pain point, we introduce SWE-smith, a novel pipeline for generating software engineering training data at scale. Given any Python codebase, SWE-smith constructs a corresponding execution environment, then automatically synthesizes 100s to 1,000s of task instances that break existing test(s) in the codebase. Using SWE-smith, we create a dataset of 50k instances sourced from 128 GitHub repositories, an order of magnitude larger than all previous works. We train SWE-agent-LM-32B, achieving 40.2% Pass@1 resolve rate on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, state of the art among open source models. We open source SWE-smith (collection procedure, task instances, trajectories, models) to lower the barrier of entry for research in LM systems for automated software engineering. All assets available at https://swesmith.com.

Code translation aims to convert source code from one programming language (PL) to another. Given the promising abilities of large language models (LLMs) in code synthesis, researchers are exploring their potential to automate code translation. The prerequisite for advancing the state of LLM-based code translation is to understand their promises and limitations over existing techniques. To that end, we present a large-scale empirical study to investigate the ability of general LLMs and code LLMs for code translation across pairs of different languages, including C, C++, Go, Java, and Python. Our study, which involves the translation of 1,700 code samples from three benchmarks and two real-world projects, reveals that LLMs are yet to be reliably used to automate code translation -- with correct translations ranging from 2.1% to 47.3% for the studied LLMs. Further manual investigation of unsuccessful translations identifies 15 categories of translation bugs. We also compare LLM-based code translation with traditional non-LLM-based approaches. Our analysis shows that these two classes of techniques have their own strengths and weaknesses. Finally, insights from our study suggest that providing more context to LLMs during translation can help them produce better results. To that end, we propose a prompt-crafting approach based on the symptoms of erroneous translations; this improves the performance of LLM-based code translation by 5.5% on average. Our study is the first of its kind, in terms of scale and breadth, that provides insights into the current limitations of LLMs in code translation and opportunities for improving them. Our dataset -- consisting of 1,700 code samples in five PLs with 10K+ tests, 43K+ translated code, 1,725 manually labeled bugs, and 1,365 bug-fix pairs -- can help drive research in this area.

We introduce DS-1000, a code generation benchmark with a thousand data science problems spanning seven Python libraries, such as NumPy and Pandas. Compared to prior works, DS-1000 incorporates three core features. First, our problems reflect diverse, realistic, and practical use cases since we collected them from StackOverflow. Second, our automatic evaluation is highly specific (reliable) -- across all Codex-002-predicted solutions that our evaluation accept, only 1.8% of them are incorrect; we achieve this with multi-criteria metrics, checking both functional correctness by running test cases and surface-form constraints by restricting API usages or keywords. Finally, we proactively defend against memorization by slightly modifying our problems to be different from the original StackOverflow source; consequently, models cannot answer them correctly by memorizing the solutions from pre-training. The current best public system (Codex-002) achieves 43.3% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://ds1000-code-gen.github.io.

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 large gap in post-mitigation performance.

Deep learning frameworks have often focused on either usability or speed, but not both. PyTorch is a machine learning library that shows that these two goals are in fact compatible: it provides an imperative and Pythonic programming style that supports code as a model, makes debugging easy and is consistent with other popular scientific computing libraries, while remaining efficient and supporting hardware accelerators such as GPUs. In this paper, we detail the principles that drove the implementation of PyTorch and how they are reflected in its architecture. We emphasize that every aspect of PyTorch is a regular Python program under the full control of its user. We also explain how the careful and pragmatic implementation of the key components of its runtime enables them to work together to achieve compelling performance. We demonstrate the efficiency of individual subsystems, as well as the overall speed of PyTorch on several common benchmarks.

Competition-level code generation tasks pose significant challenges for current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). For example, on the LiveCodeBench-Hard dataset, models such as O1-Mini and O1-Preview achieve pass@1 rates of only 0.366 and 0.143, respectively. While tree search techniques have proven effective in domains like mathematics and general coding, their potential in competition-level code generation remains under-explored. In this work, we propose a novel token-level tree search method specifically designed for code generation. Leveraging Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, our approach achieves a pass rate of 0.305 on LiveCodeBench-Hard, surpassing the pass@100 performance of GPT4o-0513 (0.245). Furthermore, by integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, we improve our method's performance to 0.351, approaching O1-Mini's pass@1 rate. To ensure reproducibility, we report the average number of generations required per problem by our tree search method on the test set. Our findings underscore the potential of tree search to significantly enhance performance on competition-level code generation tasks. This opens up new possibilities for large-scale synthesis of challenging code problems supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data, advancing competition-level code generation tasks.

Large language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Such models open up the possibility of multi-language code generation: could code generation models generalize knowledge from one language to another? Although contemporary code generation models can generate semantically correct Python code, little is known about their abilities with other languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages. We create the first massively multilingual code generation benchmark by using MultiPL-E to translate two popular Python code generation benchmarks to 18 additional programming languages. We use MultiPL-E to extend the HumanEval benchmark and MBPP benchmark to 18 languages that encompass a range of programming paradigms and popularity. Using these new parallel benchmarks, we evaluate the multi-language performance of three state-of-the-art code generation models: Codex, CodeGen, and InCoder. We find that Codex matches or even exceeds its performance on Python for several other languages. The range of programming languages represented in MultiPL-E allow us to explore the impact of language frequency and language features on model performance. Finally, the MultiPL-E approach of compiling code generation benchmarks to new programming languages is both scalable and extensible, making it straightforward to evaluate new models, benchmarks, and languages.

The ability of large language models to solve complex mathematical problems has progressed significantly, particularly for tasks requiring advanced reasoning. However, the scarcity of sufficiently challenging problems, particularly at the Olympiad level, hinders further advancements. In this work, we introduce PromptCoT, a novel approach for automatically generating high-quality Olympiad-level math problems. The proposed method synthesizes complex problems based on mathematical concepts and the rationale behind problem construction, emulating the thought processes of experienced problem designers. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that an optimal rationale should maximize both the likelihood of rationale generation given the associated concepts and the likelihood of problem generation conditioned on both the rationale and the concepts. Our method is evaluated on standard benchmarks including GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME2024, where it consistently outperforms existing problem generation methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PromptCoT exhibits superior data scalability, consistently maintaining high performance as the dataset size increases, outperforming the baselines. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/PromptCoT.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce TaskMatrix.AI as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, TaskMatrix.AI focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their coding capabilities. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focused on simplified or isolated aspects of programming, such as single-file code generation or repository issue debugging, falling short of measuring the full spectrum of challenges raised by real-world programming activities. To this end, we propose DevBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates LLMs across various stages of the software development lifecycle, including software design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. DevBench features a wide range of programming languages and domains, high-quality data collection, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. Empirical studies show that current LLMs, including GPT-4-Turbo, fail to solve the challenges presented within DevBench. Analyses reveal that models struggle with understanding the complex structures in the repository, managing the compilation process, and grasping advanced programming concepts. Our findings offer actionable insights for the future development of LLMs toward real-world programming applications. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/open-compass/DevBench

Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity among software engineers. A crucial aspect of developing effective code generation LLMs is to evaluate these models using a robust benchmark. Evaluation benchmarks with quality issues can provide a false sense of performance. In this work, we conduct the first-of-its-kind study of the quality of prompts within benchmarks used to compare the performance of different code generation models. To conduct this study, we analyzed 3,566 prompts from 9 code generation benchmarks to identify quality issues in them. We also investigated whether fixing the identified quality issues in the benchmarks' prompts affects a model's performance. We also studied memorization issues of the evaluation dataset, which can put into question a benchmark's trustworthiness. We found that code generation evaluation benchmarks mainly focused on Python and coding exercises and had very limited contextual dependencies to challenge the model. These datasets and the developers' prompts suffer from quality issues like spelling and grammatical errors, unclear sentences to express developers' intent, and not using proper documentation style. Fixing all these issues in the benchmarks can lead to a better performance for Python code generation, but not a significant improvement was observed for Java code generation. We also found evidence that GPT-3.5-Turbo and CodeGen-2.5 models may have data contamination issues.

Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) augments large language models (LLMs) with the ability to invoke external tools, such as search engines and code interpreters, to solve tasks beyond the capabilities of language-only reasoning. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in improving TIR by optimizing final answer correctness, existing approaches often overlook the efficiency and cost associated with tool usage. This can lead to suboptimal behavior, including excessive tool calls that increase computational and financial overhead, or insufficient tool use that compromises answer quality. In this work, we propose Optimal Tool Call-controlled Policy Optimization (OTC-PO), a simple yet effective RL-based framework that encourages models to produce accurate answers with minimal tool calls. Our method introduces a tool-integrated reward that jointly considers correctness and tool efficiency, promoting high tool productivity. We instantiate this framework within both Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO), resulting in OTC-PPO and OTC-GRPO. Experiments with Qwen-2.5 and Qwen-Math across multiple QA benchmarks show that our approach reduces tool calls by up to 73.1\% and improves tool productivity by up to 229.4\%, while maintaining comparable answer accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first RL-based framework that explicitly optimizes tool-use efficiency in TIR.

Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent's flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved code generation, specifically at the function level. For instance, GPT-4 has achieved an 88.4% pass rate on HumanEval. However, this draws into question the adequacy of existing benchmarks in thoroughly assessing function-level code generation capabilities. Our study analyzed two common benchmarks, HumanEval and MBPP, and found that these might not thoroughly evaluate LLMs' code generation capacities due to limitations in quality, difficulty, and granularity. To resolve this, we introduce the Mostly Hard Python Problems (MHPP) dataset, consisting of 140 unique human-curated problems. By focusing on the combination of natural language and code reasoning, MHPP gauges LLMs' abilities to comprehend specifications and restrictions, engage in multi-step reasoning, and apply coding knowledge effectively. Initial evaluations of 22 LLMs using MHPP showed many high-performing models on HumanEval failed to achieve similar success on MHPP. Moreover, MHPP highlighted various previously undiscovered limitations within various LLMs, leading us to believe that it could pave the way for a better understanding of LLMs' capabilities and limitations. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SparksofAGI/MHPP.

The emergence of large-language models (LLMs) that excel at code generation and commercial products such as GitHub's Copilot has sparked interest in human-AI pair programming (referred to as "pAIr programming") where an AI system collaborates with a human programmer. While traditional pair programming between humans has been extensively studied, it remains uncertain whether its findings can be applied to human-AI pair programming. We compare human-human and human-AI pair programming, exploring their similarities and differences in interaction, measures, benefits, and challenges. We find that the effectiveness of both approaches is mixed in the literature (though the measures used for pAIr programming are not as comprehensive). We summarize moderating factors on the success of human-human pair programming, which provides opportunities for pAIr programming research. For example, mismatched expertise makes pair programming less productive, therefore well-designed AI programming assistants may adapt to differences in expertise levels.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated a remarkable ability to generate code from natural language (NL) prompts. However, in the real world, NL is often too ambiguous to capture the true intent behind programming problems, requiring additional input-output (I/O) specifications. Unfortunately, LLMs can have difficulty aligning their outputs with both the NL prompt and the I/O specification. In this paper, we give a way to mitigate this issue in the context of data science programming, where tasks require explicit I/O specifications for clarity. Specifically, we propose GIFT4Code, a novel approach for the instruction fine-tuning of LLMs with respect to I/O specifications. Our method leverages synthetic data produced by the LLM itself and utilizes execution-derived feedback as a key learning signal. This feedback, in the form of program I/O specifications, is provided to the LLM to facilitate instruction fine-tuning. We evaluated our approach on two challenging data science benchmarks, Arcade and DS-1000. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in the LLM's ability to generate code that is not only executable but also accurately aligned with user specifications, substantially improving the quality of code generation for complex data science tasks.

We present ControlLLM, a novel framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to utilize multi-modal tools for solving complex real-world tasks. Despite the remarkable performance of LLMs, they still struggle with tool invocation due to ambiguous user prompts, inaccurate tool selection and parameterization, and inefficient tool scheduling. To overcome these challenges, our framework comprises three key components: (1) a task decomposer that breaks down a complex task into clear subtasks with well-defined inputs and outputs; (2) a Thoughts-on-Graph (ToG) paradigm that searches the optimal solution path on a pre-built tool graph, which specifies the parameter and dependency relations among different tools; and (3) an execution engine with a rich toolbox that interprets the solution path and runs the tools efficiently on different computational devices. We evaluate our framework on diverse tasks involving image, audio, and video processing, demonstrating its superior accuracy, efficiency, and versatility compared to existing methods.

Task planning for robotic cooking involves generating a sequence of actions for a robot to prepare a meal successfully. This paper introduces a novel task tree generation pipeline producing correct planning and efficient execution for cooking tasks. Our method first uses a large language model (LLM) to retrieve recipe instructions and then utilizes a fine-tuned GPT-3 to convert them into a task tree, capturing sequential and parallel dependencies among subtasks. The pipeline then mitigates the uncertainty and unreliable features of LLM outputs using task tree retrieval. We combine multiple LLM task tree outputs into a graph and perform a task tree retrieval to avoid questionable nodes and high-cost nodes to improve planning correctness and improve execution efficiency. Our evaluation results show its superior performance compared to previous works in task planning accuracy and efficiency.

The imperative need to scale computation across numerous nodes highlights the significance of efficient parallel computing, particularly in the realm of Message Passing Interface (MPI) integration. The challenging parallel programming task of generating MPI-based parallel programs has remained unexplored. This study first investigates the performance of state-of-the-art language models in generating MPI-based parallel programs. Findings reveal that widely used models such as GPT-3.5 and PolyCoder (specialized multi-lingual code models) exhibit notable performance degradation, when generating MPI-based programs compared to general-purpose programs. In contrast, domain-specific models such as MonoCoder, which are pretrained on MPI-related programming languages of C and C++, outperform larger models. Subsequently, we introduce a dedicated downstream task of MPI-based program generation by fine-tuning MonoCoder on HPCorpusMPI. We call the resulting model as MPIrigen. We propose an innovative preprocessing for completion only after observing the whole code, thus enabling better completion with a wider context. Comparative analysis against GPT-3.5 zero-shot performance, using a novel HPC-oriented evaluation method, demonstrates that MPIrigen excels in generating accurate MPI functions up to 0.8 accuracy in location and function predictions, and with more than 0.9 accuracy for argument predictions. The success of this tailored solution underscores the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning in optimizing language models for parallel computing code generation, paving the way for a new generation of automatic parallelization tools. The sources of this work are available at our GitHub MPIrigen repository: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen

We introduce Dynatask: an open source system for setting up custom NLP tasks that aims to greatly lower the technical knowledge and effort required for hosting and evaluating state-of-the-art NLP models, as well as for conducting model in the loop data collection with crowdworkers. Dynatask is integrated with Dynabench, a research platform for rethinking benchmarking in AI that facilitates human and model in the loop data collection and evaluation. To create a task, users only need to write a short task configuration file from which the relevant web interfaces and model hosting infrastructure are automatically generated. The system is available at https://dynabench.org/ and the full library can be found at https://github.com/facebookresearch/dynabench.

Chaining language model (LM) calls as composable modules is fueling a new powerful way of programming. However, ensuring that LMs adhere to important constraints remains a key challenge, one often addressed with heuristic "prompt engineering". We introduce LM Assertions, a new programming construct for expressing computational constraints that LMs should satisfy. We integrate our constructs into the recent DSPy programming model for LMs, and present new strategies that allow DSPy to compile programs with arbitrary LM Assertions into systems that are more reliable and more accurate. In DSPy, LM Assertions can be integrated at compile time, via automatic prompt optimization, and/or at inference time, via automatic selfrefinement and backtracking. We report on two early case studies for complex question answering (QA), in which the LM program must iteratively retrieve information in multiple hops and synthesize a long-form answer with citations. We find that LM Assertions improve not only compliance with imposed rules and guidelines but also enhance downstream task performance, delivering intrinsic and extrinsic gains up to 35.7% and 13.3%, respectively. Our reference implementation of LM Assertions is integrated into DSPy at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

Code Executing Reasoning is becoming a new non-functional metric that assesses the ability of large language models (LLMs) in programming tasks. State-of-the-art frameworks (CodeMind or REval) and benchmarks (CruxEval) usually focus on LLM's prediction of a given code's input/output or intermediate variable states/values on limited programs. However, there is no tool for more in-depth analysis of the results. Without such a tool, the observations about LLM's code execution reasoning cannot be generalized to more datasets, preventing the research community and practitioners from devising the next generation of LLMs with better code execution reasoning abilities. This paper introduces ExeRScope, a series of tools and heuristics to analyze the result of code execution reasoning frameworks to understand better the impact of code properties in the studied benchmarks on the code execution reasoning. With such tooling, analysis can be generalized to code with similar properties without the urgent need to design more benchmarks, which is a cumbersome effort.

This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) in generating code from algorithm descriptions from recent NLP papers. The task requires two key competencies: (1) algorithm comprehension: synthesizing information from papers and academic literature to understand implementation logic, and (2) coding expertise: identifying dependencies and correctly implementing necessary APIs. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciReplicate-Bench, a benchmark of 100 tasks from 36 NLP papers published in 2024, featuring detailed annotations and comprehensive test cases. Building on SciReplicate-Bench, we propose Sci-Reproducer, a multi-agent framework consisting of a Paper Agent that interprets algorithmic concepts from literature and a Code Agent that retrieves dependencies from repositories and implement solutions. To assess algorithm understanding, we introduce reasoning graph accuracy, which quantifies similarity between generated and reference reasoning graphs derived from code comments and structure. For evaluating implementation quality, we employ execution accuracy, CodeBLEU, and repository dependency/API recall metrics. In our experiments, we evaluate various powerful Non-Reasoning LLMs and Reasoning LLMs as foundational models. The best-performing LLM using Sci-Reproducer achieves only 39% execution accuracy, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty.Our analysis identifies missing or inconsistent algorithm descriptions as key barriers to successful reproduction. We will open-source our benchmark, and code at https://github.com/xyzCS/SciReplicate-Bench.

Large Language Models have demonstrated exceptional proficiency on coding tasks, but it is challenging to precisely evaluate their code reasoning ability. Existing benchmarks are insufficient as they are unrealistic and conflate semantic reasoning ability with performance on software engineering tasks. We introduce CRQBench, a benchmark of 100 C++ code reasoning questions and answers derived from contextualized code review comments. To curate CRQBench, we use an LLM assistant alongside human inspection, reducing manual effort. We conduct an evaluation of GPT-4 on CRQBench and find that it produces correct responses grounded in the given context for 65 of the 100 questions.

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

Recent advancements in the field of natural language generation have facilitated the use of large language models to assess the quality of generated text. Although these models have shown promising results in tasks such as machine translation and summarization, their applicability in code generation tasks remains limited without human involvement. The complexity of programming concepts required for such tasks makes it difficult to develop evaluation metrics that align with human judgment. Token-matching-based metrics, such as BLEU, have demonstrated weak correlations with human practitioners in code generation tasks. Moreover, the utilization of human-written test suites to evaluate functional correctness can be challenging in domains with low resources. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a new evaluation framework based on the GPT-3.5 (GPT-3.5-turbo), for code generation assessments. Our framework addresses the limitations of existing approaches by achieving superior correlations with functional correctness and human preferences, without the need for test oracles or references. We evaluate the efficacy of our framework on two different tasks and four programming languages, comparing its performance with the state-of-the-art CodeBERTScore metric, which relies on a pre-trained model. Our results demonstrate that our framework surpasses CodeBERTScore, delivering high levels of accuracy and consistency across various programming languages and tasks. We also make our evaluation framework and datasets available to the public at https://github.com/terryyz/llm-code-eval, encouraging further research in the evaluation of code generation.