Redundancy and Concept Analysis for Code-trained Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Sharma, Arushi, Hu, Zefu, Quinn, Christopher, Jannesari, Ali
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Sharma, Arushi
Hu, Zefu
Quinn, Christopher
Jannesari, Ali
author_facet Sharma, Arushi
Hu, Zefu
Quinn, Christopher
Jannesari, Ali
contents Code-trained language models have proven to be highly effective for various code intelligence tasks. However, they can be challenging to train and deploy for many software engineering applications due to computational bottlenecks and memory constraints. Implementing effective strategies to address these issues requires a better understanding of these 'black box' models. In this paper, we perform the first neuron-level analysis for source code models to identify \textit{important} neurons within latent representations. We achieve this by eliminating neurons that are highly similar or irrelevant to the given task. This approach helps us understand which neurons and layers can be eliminated (redundancy analysis) and where important code properties are located within the network (concept analysis). Using redundancy analysis, we make observations relevant to knowledge transfer and model optimization applications. We find that over 95\% of the neurons are redundant with respect to our code intelligence tasks and can be eliminated without significant loss in accuracy. We also discover several subsets of neurons that can make predictions with baseline accuracy. Through concept analysis, we explore the traceability and distribution of human-recognizable concepts within latent code representations which could be used to influence model predictions. We trace individual and subsets of important neurons to specific code properties and identify 'number' neurons, 'string' neurons, and higher-level 'text' neurons for token-level tasks and higher-level concepts important for sentence-level downstream tasks. This also helps us understand how decomposable and transferable task-related features are and can help devise better techniques for transfer learning, model compression, and the decomposition of deep neural networks into modules.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_00875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Redundancy and Concept Analysis for Code-trained Language Models
Sharma, Arushi
Hu, Zefu
Quinn, Christopher
Jannesari, Ali
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Code-trained language models have proven to be highly effective for various code intelligence tasks. However, they can be challenging to train and deploy for many software engineering applications due to computational bottlenecks and memory constraints. Implementing effective strategies to address these issues requires a better understanding of these 'black box' models. In this paper, we perform the first neuron-level analysis for source code models to identify \textit{important} neurons within latent representations. We achieve this by eliminating neurons that are highly similar or irrelevant to the given task. This approach helps us understand which neurons and layers can be eliminated (redundancy analysis) and where important code properties are located within the network (concept analysis). Using redundancy analysis, we make observations relevant to knowledge transfer and model optimization applications. We find that over 95\% of the neurons are redundant with respect to our code intelligence tasks and can be eliminated without significant loss in accuracy. We also discover several subsets of neurons that can make predictions with baseline accuracy. Through concept analysis, we explore the traceability and distribution of human-recognizable concepts within latent code representations which could be used to influence model predictions. We trace individual and subsets of important neurons to specific code properties and identify 'number' neurons, 'string' neurons, and higher-level 'text' neurons for token-level tasks and higher-level concepts important for sentence-level downstream tasks. This also helps us understand how decomposable and transferable task-related features are and can help devise better techniques for transfer learning, model compression, and the decomposition of deep neural networks into modules.
title Redundancy and Concept Analysis for Code-trained Language Models
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00875