On the Reliability and Explainability of Language Models for Program Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Liu, Yue, Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit, Liu, Yonghui, Li, Li
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909063582842880
author Liu, Yue
Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit
Liu, Yonghui
Li, Li
author_facet Liu, Yue
Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit
Liu, Yonghui
Li, Li
contents Recent studies have adopted pre-trained language models, such as CodeT5 and CodeGPT, for automated program generation tasks like code generation, repair, and translation. Numerous language model-based approaches have been proposed and evaluated on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating promising performance. However, there is still uncertainty about the reliability of these models, particularly their realistic ability to consistently transform code sequences. This raises the question: are these techniques sufficiently trustworthy for automated program generation? Consequently, Further research is needed to understand model logic and assess reliability and explainability. To bridge these research gaps, we conduct a thorough empirical study of eight popular language models on five representative datasets to determine the capabilities and limitations of automated program generation approaches. We further employ advanced explainable AI approaches to highlight the tokens that significantly contribute to the code transformation. We discover that state-of-the-art approaches suffer from inappropriate performance evaluation stemming from severe data duplication, causing over-optimistic results. Our explainability analysis reveals that, in various experimental scenarios, language models can recognize code grammar and structural information, but they exhibit limited robustness to changes in input sequences. Overall, more rigorous evaluation approaches and benchmarks are critical to enhance the reliability and explainability of automated program generation moving forward. Our findings provide important guidelines for this goal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_09587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Reliability and Explainability of Language Models for Program Generation
Liu, Yue
Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit
Liu, Yonghui
Li, Li
Software Engineering
Recent studies have adopted pre-trained language models, such as CodeT5 and CodeGPT, for automated program generation tasks like code generation, repair, and translation. Numerous language model-based approaches have been proposed and evaluated on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating promising performance. However, there is still uncertainty about the reliability of these models, particularly their realistic ability to consistently transform code sequences. This raises the question: are these techniques sufficiently trustworthy for automated program generation? Consequently, Further research is needed to understand model logic and assess reliability and explainability. To bridge these research gaps, we conduct a thorough empirical study of eight popular language models on five representative datasets to determine the capabilities and limitations of automated program generation approaches. We further employ advanced explainable AI approaches to highlight the tokens that significantly contribute to the code transformation. We discover that state-of-the-art approaches suffer from inappropriate performance evaluation stemming from severe data duplication, causing over-optimistic results. Our explainability analysis reveals that, in various experimental scenarios, language models can recognize code grammar and structural information, but they exhibit limited robustness to changes in input sequences. Overall, more rigorous evaluation approaches and benchmarks are critical to enhance the reliability and explainability of automated program generation moving forward. Our findings provide important guidelines for this goal.
title On the Reliability and Explainability of Language Models for Program Generation
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09587