Suresh Parthasarathy

Nalin Wadhwa, Jui Pradhan, Atharv Sonwane et al.

As software projects progress, quality of code assumes paramount importance as it affects reliability, maintainability and security of software. For this reason, static analysis tools are used in developer workflows to flag code quality issues. However, developers need to spend extra efforts to revise their code to improve code quality based on the tool findings. In this work, we investigate the use of (instruction-following) large language models (LLMs) to assist developers in revising code to resolve code quality issues. We present a tool, CORE (short for COde REvisions), architected using a pair of LLMs organized as a duo comprised of a proposer and a ranker. Providers of static analysis tools recommend ways to mitigate the tool warnings and developers follow them to revise their code. The \emph{proposer LLM} of CORE takes the same set of recommendations and applies them to generate candidate code revisions. The candidates which pass the static quality checks are retained. However, the LLM may introduce subtle, unintended functionality changes which may go un-detected by the static analysis. The \emph{ranker LLM} evaluates the changes made by the proposer using a rubric that closely follows the acceptance criteria that a developer would enforce. CORE uses the scores assigned by the ranker LLM to rank the candidate revisions before presenting them to the developer. CORE could revise 59.2% Python files (across 52 quality checks) so that they pass scrutiny by both a tool and a human reviewer. The ranker LLM is able to reduce false positives by 25.8% in these cases. CORE produced revisions that passed the static analysis tool in 76.8% Java files (across 10 quality checks) comparable to 78.3% of a specialized program repair tool, with significantly much less engineering efforts.

Ajinkya Deshpande, Anmol Agarwal, Shashank Shet et al.

LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in code generation tasks, achieving promising results at the function or statement level across various benchmarks. However, the complexities associated with creating code artifacts like classes, particularly within the context of real-world software repositories, remain underexplored. Prior research treats class-level generation as an isolated task, neglecting the intricate dependencies & interactions that characterize real-world software environments. To address this gap, we introduce RepoClassBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs in generating complex, class-level code within real-world repositories. RepoClassBench includes "Natural Language to Class generation" tasks across Java, Python & C# from a selection of repositories. We ensure that each class in our dataset not only has cross-file dependencies within the repository but also includes corresponding test cases to verify its functionality. We find that current models struggle with the realistic challenges posed by our benchmark, primarily due to their limited exposure to relevant repository contexts. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Retrieve-Repotools-Reflect (RRR), a novel approach that equips LLMs with static analysis tools to iteratively navigate & reason about repository-level context in an agent-based framework. Our experiments demonstrate that RRR significantly outperforms existing baselines on RepoClassBench, showcasing its effectiveness across programming languages & under various settings. Our findings emphasize the critical need for code-generation benchmarks to incorporate repo-level dependencies to more accurately reflect the complexities of software development. Our work shows the benefits of leveraging specialized tools to enhance LLMs' understanding of repository context. We plan to make our dataset & evaluation harness public.

Shashank Kirtania, Naman Gupta, Priyanshu Gupta et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate incorrect or outdated information, especially in low-resource settings or when dealing with private data. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) uses external knowledge bases (KBs), but these can also suffer from inaccuracies. We introduce STACKFEED, a novel Structured Textual Actor-Critic Knowledge base editing with FEEDback approach that iteratively refines the KB based on expert feedback using a multi-actor, centralized critic reinforcement learning framework. STACKFEED defines a ReACT actor agent on each document to perform structured edits based on document specific targeted instructions. Experimental results showcase that STACKFEED significantly improves KB quality and performance of the RAG system. We evaluate STACKFEED on low-resource programming problems, modified python packaged and factual question-answering tasks.

Naman Jain, Skanda Vaidyanath, Arun Iyer et al.

Large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3, Codex, and Google's language model are now capable of generating code from natural language specifications of programmer intent. We view these developments with a mixture of optimism and caution. On the optimistic side, such large language models have the potential to improve productivity by providing an automated AI pair programmer for every programmer in the world. On the cautionary side, since these large language models do not understand program semantics, they offer no guarantees about quality of the suggested code. In this paper, we present an approach to augment these large language models with post-processing steps based on program analysis and synthesis techniques, that understand the syntax and semantics of programs. Further, we show that such techniques can make use of user feedback and improve with usage. We present our experiences from building and evaluating such a tool jigsaw, targeted at synthesizing code for using Python Pandas API using multi-modal inputs. Our experience suggests that as these large language models evolve for synthesizing code from intent, jigsaw has an important role to play in improving the accuracy of the systems.