Code summarization and generation empower conversion between programming language (PL) and natural language (NL), while code translation avails the migration of legacy code from one PL to another. This paper introduces PLBART, a sequence-to-sequence model capable of performing a broad spectrum of program and language understanding and generation tasks. PLBART is pre-trained on an extensive collection of Java and Python functions and associated NL text via denoising autoencoding. Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models. Moreover, experiments on discriminative tasks, e.g., program repair, clone detection, and vulnerable code detection, demonstrate PLBART's effectiveness in program understanding. Furthermore, analysis reveals that PLBART learns program syntax, style (e.g., identifier naming convention), logical flow (e.g., if block inside an else block is equivalent to else if block) that are crucial to program semantics and thus excels even with limited annotations.
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance in both natural language processing and program understanding, which represent the input as a token sequence without explicitly modeling its structure. Some prior works show that pre-trained language models can capture the syntactic rules of natural languages without finetuning on syntax understanding tasks. However, there is limited understanding of how well pre-trained models understand the code structure so far. In this work, we perform the first thorough benchmarking of the state-of-the-art pre-trained models for identify…
Towards Better Understanding of Program-of-Thought Reasoning in Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Environments
School of Information Science and Technology, VISTEC（信息科学与技术学院，VISTEC）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Cohere；SCB 10X；AI Singapore（AI新加坡）；Department of Computer Engineering, Chulalongkorn University（朱拉隆梭大学计算机工程系）
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem（希伯来大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Large-scale natural language understanding (NLU) systems have made impressive progress: they can be applied flexibly across a variety of tasks, and employ minimal structural assumptions. However, extensive empirical research has shown this to be a double-edged sword, coming at the cost of shallow understanding: inferior generalization, grounding and explainability. Grounded language learning approaches offer the promise of deeper understanding by situating learning in richer, more structured training environments, but are limited in scale to relatively narrow, predefined domains. How might we …
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Programming-based Pre-trained Language Models (PPLMs) such as CodeBERT have achieved great success in many downstream code-related tasks. Since the memory and computational complexity of self-attention in the Transformer grow quadratically with the sequence length, PPLMs typically limit the code length to 512. However, codes in real-world applications are generally long, such as code searches, which cannot be processed efficiently by existing PPLMs. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present SASA, a Structure-Aware Sparse Attention mechanism, which reduces the complexity and improves per…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；DeepMind（深度思维）
We marry two powerful ideas: deep representation learning for visual recognition and language understanding, and symbolic program execution for reasoning. Our neural-symbolic visual question answering (NS-VQA) system first recovers a structural scene representation from the image and a program trace from the question. It then executes the program on the scene representation to obtain an answer. Incorporating symbolic structure as prior knowledge offers three unique advantages. First, executing programs on a symbolic space is more robust to long program traces; our model can solve complex reaso…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing Innovation Center for Future Chip, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京未来芯片创新中心）
We propose Object-oriented Neural Programming (OONP), a framework for semantically parsing documents in specific domains. Basically, OONP reads a document and parses it into a predesigned object-oriented data structure (referred to as ontology in this paper) that reflects the domain-specific semantics of the document. An OONP parser models semantic parsing as a decision process: a neural net-based Reader sequentially goes through the document, and during the process it builds and updates an intermediate ontology to summarize its partial understanding of the text it covers. OONP supports a rich…
Peking University（北京大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Benchmark datasets have a significant impact on accelerating research in programming language tasks. In this paper, we introduce CodeXGLUE, a benchmark dataset to foster machine learning research for program understanding and generation. CodeXGLUE includes a collection of 10 tasks across 14 datasets and a platform for model evaluation and comparison. CodeXGLUE also features three baseline systems, including the BERT-style, GPT-style, and Encoder-Decoder models, to make it easy for researchers to use the platform. The availability of such data and baselines can help the development and validati…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Inha University（仁荷大学）；Voithru Co Ltd（沃思鲁有限公司）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；Odd Concepts Inc（奥德概念公司）
Modern dialog managers face the challenge of having to fulfill human-level conversational skills as part of common user expectations, including but not limited to discourse with no clear objective. Along with these requirements, agents are expected to extrapolate intent from the user's dialogue even when subjected to non-canonical forms of speech. This depends on the agent's comprehension of paraphrased forms of such utterances. Especially in low-resource languages, the lack of data is a bottleneck that prevents advancements of the comprehension performance for these types of agents. In this r…
CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）；School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；TU Wien（维也纳技术大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Despite the success of large pre-trained language models (LMs) such as Codex, they show below-par performance on the larger and more complicated programming related questions. We show that LMs benefit from the summarized version of complicated questions. Our findings show that superfluous information often present in problem description such as human characters, background stories, and names (which are included to help humans in understanding a task) does not help models in understanding a task. To this extent, we create a meta-dataset from the frequently used APPS dataset and the newly create…
