Automatic Programming
Chain-of-Programming (CoP) : Empowering Large Language Models for Geospatial Code Generation
Hou, Shuyang, Jiao, Haoyue, Shen, Zhangxiao, Liang, Jianyuan, Zhao, Anqi, Zhang, Xiaopu, Wang, Jianxun, Wu, Huayi
With the rapid growth of interdisciplinary demands for geospatial modeling and the rise of large language models (LLMs), geospatial code generation technology has seen significant advancements. However, existing LLMs often face challenges in the geospatial code generation process due to incomplete or unclear user requirements and insufficient knowledge of specific platform syntax rules, leading to the generation of non-executable code, a phenomenon known as "code hallucination." To address this issue, this paper proposes a Chain of Programming (CoP) framework, which decomposes the code generation process into five steps: requirement analysis, algorithm design, code implementation, code debugging, and code annotation. The framework incorporates a shared information pool, knowledge base retrieval, and user feedback mechanisms, forming an end-to-end code generation flow from requirements to code, without the need for model fine-tuning. Based on a geospatial problem classification framework and evaluation benchmarks, the CoP strategy significantly improves the logical clarity, syntactical correctness, and executability of the generated code, with improvements ranging from 3.0% to 48.8%. Comparative and ablation experiments further validate the superiority of the CoP strategy over other optimization approaches and confirm the rationality and necessity of its key components. Through case studies on building data visualization and fire data analysis, this paper demonstrates the application and effectiveness of CoP in various geospatial scenarios. The CoP framework offers a systematic, step-by-step approach to LLM-based geospatial code generation tasks, significantly enhancing code generation performance in geospatial tasks and providing valuable insights for code generation in other vertical domains.
A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Advancements and Techniques in Automated Program Repair and Code Generation
Anand, Avinash, Gupta, Akshit, Yadav, Nishchay, Bajaj, Shaurya
Bug fixing and code generation have been core research topics in software development for many years. The recent explosive growth in Large Language Models has completely transformed these spaces, putting in reach incredibly powerful tools for both. In this survey, 27 recent papers have been reviewed and split into two groups: one dedicated to Automated Program Repair (APR) and LLM integration and the other to code generation using LLMs. The first group consists of new methods for bug detection and repair, which include locating semantic errors, security vulnerabilities, and runtime failure bugs. The place of LLMs in reducing manual debugging efforts is emphasized in this work by APR toward context-aware fixes, with innovations that boost accuracy and efficiency in automatic debugging. The second group dwells on code generation, providing an overview of both general-purpose LLMs fine-tuned for programming and task-specific models. It also presents methods to improve code generation, such as identifier-aware training, fine-tuning at the instruction level, and incorporating semantic code structures. This survey work contrasts the methodologies in APR and code generation to identify trends such as using LLMs, feedback loops to enable iterative code improvement and open-source models. It also discusses the challenges of achieving functional correctness and security and outlines future directions for research in LLM-based software development.
Assured Automatic Programming via Large Language Models
Mirchev, Martin, Costea, Andreea, Singh, Abhishek Kr, Roychoudhury, Abhik
With the advent of AI-based coding engines, it is possible to convert natural language requirements to executable code in standard programming languages. However, AI-generated code can be unreliable, and the natural language requirements driving this code may be ambiguous. In other words, the intent may not be accurately captured in the code generated from AI-coding engines like Copilot. The goal of our work is to discover the programmer intent, while generating code which conforms to the intent and a proof of this conformance. Our approach to intent discovery is powered by a novel repair engine called program-proof co-evolution, where the object of repair is a tuple (code, logical specification, test) generated by an LLM from the same natural language description. The program and the specification capture the initial operational and declarative description of intent, while the test represents a concrete, albeit partial, understanding of the intent. Our objective is to achieve consistency between the program, the specification, and the test by incrementally refining our understanding of the user intent. Reaching consistency through this repair process provides us with a formal, logical description of the intent, which is then translated back into natural language for the developer's inspection. The resultant intent description is now unambiguous, though expressed in natural language. We demonstrate how the unambiguous intent discovered through our approach increases the percentage of verifiable auto-generated programs on a recently proposed dataset in the Dafny programming language.
GeoCode-GPT: A Large Language Model for Geospatial Code Generation Tasks
Hou, Shuyang, Shen, Zhangxiao, Zhao, Anqi, Liang, Jianyuan, Gui, Zhipeng, Guan, Xuefeng, Li, Rui, Wu, Huayi
The increasing demand for spatiotemporal data and modeling tasks in geosciences has made geospatial code generation technology a critical factor in enhancing productivity. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in code generation tasks, they often encounter issues such as refusal to code or hallucination in geospatial code generation due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge and code corpora. To address these challenges, this paper presents and open-sources the GeoCode-PT and GeoCode-SFT corpora, along with the GeoCode-Eval evaluation dataset. Additionally, by leveraging QLoRA and LoRA for pretraining and fine-tuning, we introduce GeoCode-GPT-7B, the first LLM focused on geospatial code generation, fine-tuned from Code Llama-7B. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive geospatial code evaluation framework, incorporating option matching, expert validation, and prompt engineering scoring for LLMs, and systematically evaluate GeoCode-GPT-7B using the GeoCode-Eval dataset. Experimental results show that GeoCode-GPT outperforms other models in multiple-choice accuracy by 9.1% to 32.1%, in code summarization ability by 1.7% to 25.4%, and in code generation capability by 1.2% to 25.1%. This paper provides a solution and empirical validation for enhancing LLMs' performance in geospatial code generation, extends the boundaries of domain-specific model applications, and offers valuable insights into unlocking their potential in geospatial code generation.
Code Generation as a Dual Task of Code Summarization
Code summarization (CS) and code generation (CG) are two crucial tasks in the field of automatic software development. Various neural network-based approaches are proposed to solve these two tasks separately. However, there exists a specific intuitive correlation between CS and CG, which has not been exploited in previous work. In this paper, we apply the relations between two tasks to improve the performance of both tasks. In other words, exploiting the duality between the two tasks, we propose a dual training framework to train the two tasks simultaneously. In this framework, we consider the dualities on probability and attention weights, and design corresponding regularization terms to constrain the duality.
Uncovering and Quantifying Social Biases in Code Generation
With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We propose a new paradigm to construct code prompts and successfully uncover social biases in code generation models. To quantify the severity of social biases in generated code, we develop a dataset along with three metrics to evaluate the overall social bias and fine-grained unfairness across different demographics. Experimental results on three pre-trained code generation models (Codex, InCoder, and CodeGen) with varying sizes, reveal severe social biases.
Tadashi: Enabling AI-Based Automated Code Generation With Guaranteed Correctness
Vatai, Emil, Drozd, Aleksandr, Ivanov, Ivan R., Ren, Yinghao, Wahib, Mohamed
Frameworks and DSLs auto-generating code have traditionally relied on human experts developing them to have in place rigorous methods to assure the legality of the applied code transformations. Machine Learning (ML) is gaining wider adoption as a means to auto-generate code optimised for the hardware target. However, ML solutions, and in particular black-box DNNs, provide no such guarantees on legality. In this paper we propose a library, Tadashi, which leverages the polyhedral model to empower researchers seeking to curate datasets crucial for applying ML in code-generation. Tadashi provides the ability to reliably and practically check the legality of candidate transformations on polyhedral schedules applied on a baseline reference code. We provide a proof that our library guarantees the legality of generated transformations, and demonstrate its lightweight practical cost. Tadashi is available at https://github.com/vatai/tadashi/.
Contextualized Data-Wrangling Code Generation in Computational Notebooks
Huang, Junjie, Guo, Daya, Wang, Chenglong, Gu, Jiazhen, Lu, Shuai, Inala, Jeevana Priya, Yan, Cong, Gao, Jianfeng, Duan, Nan, Lyu, Michael R.
Data wrangling, the process of preparing raw data for further analysis in computational notebooks, is a crucial yet time-consuming step in data science. Code generation has the potential to automate the data wrangling process to reduce analysts' overhead by translating user intents into executable code. Precisely generating data wrangling code necessitates a comprehensive consideration of the rich context present in notebooks, including textual context, code context and data context. However, notebooks often interleave multiple non-linear analysis tasks into linear sequence of code blocks, where the contextual dependencies are not clearly reflected. Directly training models with source code blocks fails to fully exploit the contexts for accurate wrangling code generation. To bridge the gap, we aim to construct a high quality datasets with clear and rich contexts to help training models for data wrangling code generation tasks. In this work, we first propose an automated approach, CoCoMine to mine data-wrangling code generation examples with clear multi-modal contextual dependency. It first adopts data flow analysis to identify the code blocks containing data wrangling codes. Then, CoCoMine extracts the contextualized datawrangling code examples through tracing and replaying notebooks. With CoCoMine, we construct CoCoNote, a dataset containing 58,221 examples for Contextualized Data-wrangling Code generation in Notebooks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset, we finetune a range of pretrained code models and prompt various large language models on our task. Furthermore, we also propose DataCoder, which encodes data context and code&textual contexts separately to enhance code generation. Experiment results demonstrate the significance of incorporating data context in data-wrangling code generation and the effectiveness of our model. We release code and data at url...
AutoSafeCoder: A Multi-Agent Framework for Securing LLM Code Generation through Static Analysis and Fuzz Testing
Nunez, Ana, Islam, Nafis Tanveer, Jha, Sumit Kumar, Najafirad, Peyman
Recent advancements in automatic code generation using large language models (LLMs) have brought us closer to fully automated secure software development. However, existing approaches often rely on a single agent for code generation, which struggles to produce secure, vulnerability-free code. Traditional program synthesis with LLMs has primarily focused on functional correctness, often neglecting critical dynamic security implications that happen during runtime. To address these challenges, we propose AutoSafeCoder, a multi-agent framework that leverages LLM-driven agents for code generation, vulnerability analysis, and security enhancement through continuous collaboration. The framework consists of three agents: a Coding Agent responsible for code generation, a Static Analyzer Agent identifying vulnerabilities, and a Fuzzing Agent performing dynamic testing using a mutation-based fuzzing approach to detect runtime errors. Our contribution focuses on ensuring the safety of multi-agent code generation by integrating dynamic and static testing in an iterative process during code generation by LLM that improves security. Experiments using the SecurityEval dataset demonstrate a 13% reduction in code vulnerabilities compared to baseline LLMs, with no compromise in functionality.
DOCE: Finding the Sweet Spot for Execution-Based Code Generation
Li, Haau-Sing, Fernandes, Patrick, Gurevych, Iryna, Martins, André F. T.
Recently, a diverse set of decoding and reranking procedures have been shown effective for LLM-based code generation. However, a comprehensive framework that links and experimentally compares these methods is missing. We address this by proposing Decoding Objectives for Code Execution, a comprehensive framework that includes candidate generation, $n$-best reranking, minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding, and self-debugging as the core components. We then study the contributions of these components through execution-based evaluation metrics. Our findings highlight the importance of execution-based methods and the difference gap between execution-based and execution-free methods. Furthermore, we assess the impact of filtering based on trial unit tests, a simple and effective strategy that has been often overlooked in prior works. We also propose self-debugging on multiple candidates, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on reranking for code generation. We expect our framework to provide a solid guideline for future research on code generation.