Automated Commit Message Generation with Large Language Models: An Empirical Study and Beyond

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xue, Pengyu, Wu, Linhao, Yu, Zhongxing, Jin, Zhi, Yang, Zhen, Li, Xinyi, Yang, Zhenyu, Tan, Yue
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Xue, Pengyu
Wu, Linhao
Yu, Zhongxing
Jin, Zhi
Yang, Zhen
Li, Xinyi
Yang, Zhenyu
Tan, Yue
author_facet Xue, Pengyu
Wu, Linhao
Yu, Zhongxing
Jin, Zhi
Yang, Zhen
Li, Xinyi
Yang, Zhenyu
Tan, Yue
contents Commit Message Generation (CMG) approaches aim to automatically generate commit messages based on given code diffs, which facilitate collaboration among developers and play a critical role in Open-Source Software (OSS). Very recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extensive applicability in diverse code-related task. But few studies systematically explored their effectiveness using LLMs. This paper conducts the first comprehensive experiment to investigate how far we have been in applying LLM to generate high-quality commit messages. Motivated by a pilot analysis, we first clean the most widely-used CMG dataset following practitioners' criteria. Afterward, we re-evaluate diverse state-of-the-art CMG approaches and make comparisons with LLMs, demonstrating the superior performance of LLMs against state-of-the-art CMG approaches. Then, we further propose four manual metrics following the practice of OSS, including Accuracy, Integrity, Applicability, and Readability, and assess various LLMs accordingly. Results reveal that GPT-3.5 performs best overall, but different LLMs carry different advantages. To further boost LLMs' performance in the CMG task, we propose an Efficient Retrieval-based In-Context Learning (ICL) framework, namely ERICommiter, which leverages a two-step filtering to accelerate the retrieval efficiency and introduces semantic/lexical-based retrieval algorithm to construct the ICL examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the substantial performance improvement of ERICommiter on various LLMs for code diffs of different programming languages. Meanwhile, ERICommiter also significantly reduces the retrieval time while keeping almost the same performance. Our research contributes to the understanding of LLMs' capabilities in the CMG field and provides valuable insights for practitioners seeking to leverage these tools in their workflows.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14824
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Commit Message Generation with Large Language Models: An Empirical Study and Beyond
Xue, Pengyu
Wu, Linhao
Yu, Zhongxing
Jin, Zhi
Yang, Zhen
Li, Xinyi
Yang, Zhenyu
Tan, Yue
Software Engineering
Commit Message Generation (CMG) approaches aim to automatically generate commit messages based on given code diffs, which facilitate collaboration among developers and play a critical role in Open-Source Software (OSS). Very recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extensive applicability in diverse code-related task. But few studies systematically explored their effectiveness using LLMs. This paper conducts the first comprehensive experiment to investigate how far we have been in applying LLM to generate high-quality commit messages. Motivated by a pilot analysis, we first clean the most widely-used CMG dataset following practitioners' criteria. Afterward, we re-evaluate diverse state-of-the-art CMG approaches and make comparisons with LLMs, demonstrating the superior performance of LLMs against state-of-the-art CMG approaches. Then, we further propose four manual metrics following the practice of OSS, including Accuracy, Integrity, Applicability, and Readability, and assess various LLMs accordingly. Results reveal that GPT-3.5 performs best overall, but different LLMs carry different advantages. To further boost LLMs' performance in the CMG task, we propose an Efficient Retrieval-based In-Context Learning (ICL) framework, namely ERICommiter, which leverages a two-step filtering to accelerate the retrieval efficiency and introduces semantic/lexical-based retrieval algorithm to construct the ICL examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the substantial performance improvement of ERICommiter on various LLMs for code diffs of different programming languages. Meanwhile, ERICommiter also significantly reduces the retrieval time while keeping almost the same performance. Our research contributes to the understanding of LLMs' capabilities in the CMG field and provides valuable insights for practitioners seeking to leverage these tools in their workflows.
title Automated Commit Message Generation with Large Language Models: An Empirical Study and Beyond
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14824