Compositional API Recommendation for Library-Oriented Code Generation
This addresses the challenge for developers in generating code that uses libraries not in LLM training data, representing an incremental improvement over existing API recommendation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating library-oriented code with large language models (LLMs) by proposing CAPIR, a compositional API recommendation method that improves recall@5 from 18.7% to 43.2% and precision@5 from 15.5% to 37.1% on a benchmark dataset, and boosts pass@100 from 16.0% to 28.0% on a code generation task.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance in code generation. However, the performance remains unsatisfactory in generating library-oriented code, especially for the libraries not present in the training data of LLMs. Previous work utilizes API recommendation technology to help LLMs use libraries: it retrieves APIs related to the user requirements, then leverages them as context to prompt LLMs. However, developmental requirements can be coarse-grained, requiring a combination of multiple fine-grained APIs. This granularity inconsistency makes API recommendation a challenging task. To address this, we propose CAPIR (Compositional API Recommendation), which adopts a "divide-and-conquer" strategy to recommend APIs for coarse-grained requirements. Specifically, CAPIR employs an LLM-based Decomposer to break down a coarse-grained task description into several detailed subtasks. Then, CAPIR applies an embedding-based Retriever to identify relevant APIs corresponding to each subtask. Moreover, CAPIR leverages an LLM-based Reranker to filter out redundant APIs and provides the final recommendation. To facilitate the evaluation of API recommendation methods on coarse-grained requirements, we present two challenging benchmarks, RAPID (Recommend APIs based on Documentation) and LOCG (Library-Oriented Code Generation). Experimental results on these benchmarks, demonstrate the effectiveness of CAPIR in comparison to existing baselines. Specifically, on RAPID's Torchdata-AR dataset, compared to the state-of-the-art API recommendation approach, CAPIR improves recall@5 from 18.7% to 43.2% and precision@5 from 15.5% to 37.1%. On LOCG's Torchdata-Code dataset, compared to code generation without API recommendation, CAPIR improves pass@100 from 16.0% to 28.0%.