GiFT: Gibbs Fine-Tuning for Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Haochen, Feng, Wanjin, Zhou, Xin, Shen, Zhiqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909617748967424
author Li, Haochen
Feng, Wanjin
Zhou, Xin
Shen, Zhiqi
author_facet Li, Haochen
Feng, Wanjin
Zhou, Xin
Shen, Zhiqi
contents Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with synthetic data is a prevalent practice in code generation. A key approach is self-training, where LLMs are iteratively trained on self-generated correct code snippets. In this case, the self-generated codes are drawn from a conditional distribution, conditioned on a specific seed description. However, the seed description is not the only valid representation that aligns with its intended meaning. With all valid descriptions and codes forming a joint space, codes drawn from the conditional distribution would lead to an underrepresentation of the full description-code space. As such, we propose Gibbs Fine-Tuning (GiFT), a novel self-training method inspired by Gibbs sampling. GiFT allows self-generated data to be drawn from the marginal distribution of the joint space, thereby mitigating the biases inherent in conditional sampling. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating the potential benefits of fine-tuning LLMs with code derived from the marginal distribution. Furthermore, we propose a perplexity-based code selection method to mitigate the imbalanced long-tail distribution of the self-generated codes. Empirical evaluation of two LLMs across four datasets demonstrates that GiFT achieves superior performance, particularly on more challenging benchmarks. Source code is available at https://github.com/Alex-HaochenLi/GiFT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11466
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GiFT: Gibbs Fine-Tuning for Code Generation
Li, Haochen
Feng, Wanjin
Zhou, Xin
Shen, Zhiqi
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Software Engineering
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with synthetic data is a prevalent practice in code generation. A key approach is self-training, where LLMs are iteratively trained on self-generated correct code snippets. In this case, the self-generated codes are drawn from a conditional distribution, conditioned on a specific seed description. However, the seed description is not the only valid representation that aligns with its intended meaning. With all valid descriptions and codes forming a joint space, codes drawn from the conditional distribution would lead to an underrepresentation of the full description-code space. As such, we propose Gibbs Fine-Tuning (GiFT), a novel self-training method inspired by Gibbs sampling. GiFT allows self-generated data to be drawn from the marginal distribution of the joint space, thereby mitigating the biases inherent in conditional sampling. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating the potential benefits of fine-tuning LLMs with code derived from the marginal distribution. Furthermore, we propose a perplexity-based code selection method to mitigate the imbalanced long-tail distribution of the self-generated codes. Empirical evaluation of two LLMs across four datasets demonstrates that GiFT achieves superior performance, particularly on more challenging benchmarks. Source code is available at https://github.com/Alex-HaochenLi/GiFT.
title GiFT: Gibbs Fine-Tuning for Code Generation
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11466