Leveraging Reward Models for Guiding Code Review Comment Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sghaier, Oussama Ben, Tufano, Rosalia, Bavota, Gabriele, Sahraoui, Houari
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Sghaier, Oussama Ben
Tufano, Rosalia
Bavota, Gabriele
Sahraoui, Houari
author_facet Sghaier, Oussama Ben
Tufano, Rosalia
Bavota, Gabriele
Sahraoui, Houari
contents Code review is a crucial component of modern software development, involving the evaluation of code quality, providing feedback on potential issues, and refining the code to address identified problems. Despite these benefits, code review can be rather time consuming, and influenced by subjectivity and human factors. For these reasons, techniques to (partially) automate the code review process have been proposed in the literature. Among those, the ones exploiting deep learning (DL) are able to tackle the generative aspect of code review, by commenting on a given code as a human reviewer would do (i.e., comment generation task) or by automatically implementing code changes required to address a reviewer's comment (i.e., code refinement task). In this paper, we introduce CoRAL, a deep learning framework automating review comment generation by exploiting reinforcement learning with a reward mechanism considering both the semantics of the generated comments as well as their usefulness as input for other models automating the code refinement task. The core idea is that if the DL model generates comments that are semantically similar to the expected ones or can be successfully implemented by a second model specialized in code refinement, these comments are likely to be meaningful and useful, thus deserving a high reward in the reinforcement learning framework. We present both quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the comments generated by CoRAL and those produced by the latest baseline techniques, highlighting the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04464
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Reward Models for Guiding Code Review Comment Generation
Sghaier, Oussama Ben
Tufano, Rosalia
Bavota, Gabriele
Sahraoui, Houari
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Code review is a crucial component of modern software development, involving the evaluation of code quality, providing feedback on potential issues, and refining the code to address identified problems. Despite these benefits, code review can be rather time consuming, and influenced by subjectivity and human factors. For these reasons, techniques to (partially) automate the code review process have been proposed in the literature. Among those, the ones exploiting deep learning (DL) are able to tackle the generative aspect of code review, by commenting on a given code as a human reviewer would do (i.e., comment generation task) or by automatically implementing code changes required to address a reviewer's comment (i.e., code refinement task). In this paper, we introduce CoRAL, a deep learning framework automating review comment generation by exploiting reinforcement learning with a reward mechanism considering both the semantics of the generated comments as well as their usefulness as input for other models automating the code refinement task. The core idea is that if the DL model generates comments that are semantically similar to the expected ones or can be successfully implemented by a second model specialized in code refinement, these comments are likely to be meaningful and useful, thus deserving a high reward in the reinforcement learning framework. We present both quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the comments generated by CoRAL and those produced by the latest baseline techniques, highlighting the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.
title Leveraging Reward Models for Guiding Code Review Comment Generation
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04464