Alex Xie

Yiqing Xie, Alex Xie, Divyanshu Sheth et al.

To adequately test modern code generation systems, evaluation benchmarks must execute and test the code generated by the system. However, these execution and testing requirements have largely limited benchmarks to settings where code is easily executable or has human-written tests. To facilitate evaluation of code generation systems across diverse scenarios, we present CodeBenchGen, a framework to create scalable execution-based benchmarks from naturally occurring code sources. Specifically, we leverage a large language model (LLM) to sandbox arbitrary pieces of code into evaluation examples, including test cases for execution-based evaluation. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework by creating a dataset, Exec-CSN, which includes 1,931 examples involving 293 libraries converted from code in 367 GitHub repositories taken from the Code- SearchNet dataset. To demonstrate the solvability of examples in Exec-CSN, we present a human study demonstrating that 81.3% of the examples can be solved by humans and 61% are rated as "requires effort to solve". We conduct code generation experiments on open-source and proprietary models and analyze the performance of both humans and models. We provide code and data at: https://github.com/yiqingxyq/CodeBenchGen.

Mert İnan, Anthony Sicilia, Alex Xie et al.

Establishing shared goals is a fundamental step in human-AI communication. However, ambiguities can lead to outputs that seem correct but fail to reflect the speaker's intent. In this paper, we explore this issue with a focus on the data visualization domain, where ambiguities in natural language impact the generation of code that visualizes data. The availability of multiple views on the contextual (e.g., the intended plot and the code rendering the plot) allows for a unique and comprehensive analysis of diverse ambiguity types. We develop a taxonomy of types of ambiguity that arise in this task and propose metrics to quantify them. Using Matplotlib problems from the DS-1000 dataset, we demonstrate that our ambiguity metrics better correlate with human annotations than uncertainty baselines. Our work also explores how multi-turn dialogue can reduce ambiguity, therefore, improve code accuracy by better matching user goals. We evaluate three pragmatic models to inform our dialogue strategies: Gricean Cooperativity, Discourse Representation Theory, and Questions under Discussion. A simulated user study reveals how pragmatic dialogues reduce ambiguity and enhance code accuracy, highlighting the value of multi-turn exchanges in code generation.