Breaking the Silence: the Threats of Using LLMs in Software Engineering

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sallou, June, Durieux, Thomas, Panichella, Annibale
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Sallou, June
Durieux, Thomas
Panichella, Annibale
author_facet Sallou, June
Durieux, Thomas
Panichella, Annibale
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable traction within the Software Engineering (SE) community, impacting various SE tasks from code completion to test generation, from program repair to code summarization. Despite their promise, researchers must still be careful as numerous intricate factors can influence the outcomes of experiments involving LLMs. This paper initiates an open discussion on potential threats to the validity of LLM-based research including issues such as closed-source models, possible data leakage between LLM training data and research evaluation, and the reproducibility of LLM-based findings. In response, this paper proposes a set of guidelines tailored for SE researchers and Language Model (LM) providers to mitigate these concerns. The implications of the guidelines are illustrated using existing good practices followed by LLM providers and a practical example for SE researchers in the context of test case generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_08055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking the Silence: the Threats of Using LLMs in Software Engineering
Sallou, June
Durieux, Thomas
Panichella, Annibale
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable traction within the Software Engineering (SE) community, impacting various SE tasks from code completion to test generation, from program repair to code summarization. Despite their promise, researchers must still be careful as numerous intricate factors can influence the outcomes of experiments involving LLMs. This paper initiates an open discussion on potential threats to the validity of LLM-based research including issues such as closed-source models, possible data leakage between LLM training data and research evaluation, and the reproducibility of LLM-based findings. In response, this paper proposes a set of guidelines tailored for SE researchers and Language Model (LM) providers to mitigate these concerns. The implications of the guidelines are illustrated using existing good practices followed by LLM providers and a practical example for SE researchers in the context of test case generation.
title Breaking the Silence: the Threats of Using LLMs in Software Engineering
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08055