Dr. Liu Mingwei (刘名威)

Automated code generation has been extensively studied in recent literature. In this work, we first survey 66 participants to motivate a more pragmatic code generation scenario, i.e., library-oriented code generation, where the generated code should implement the functionally of the natural language query with the given library. We then revisit existing learning-based code generation techniques and find they have limited effectiveness in such a library-oriented code generation scenario. To address this limitation, we propose a novel library-oriented code generation technique, CodeGen4Libs, which incorporates two stages: import generation and code generation. The import generation stage generates import statements for the natural language query with the given third-party libraries, while the code generation stage generates concrete code based on the generated imports and the query. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on a dataset of 403,780 data items. Our results demonstrate that CodeGen4Libs outperforms baseline models in both import generation and code generation stages, achieving improvements of up to 97.4% on EM (Exact Match), 54.5% on BLEU, and 53.5% on Hit@All. Overall, our proposed CodeGen4Libs approach shows promising results in generating high-quality code with specific third-party libraries, which can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of software development.

Fixing crashes is challenging, and developers often discuss their encountered crashes and refer to similar crashes and solutions on online Q&A forums (e.g., Stack Overflow). However, a crash often involves very complex contexts, which includes different contextual elements, e.g., purposes, environments, code, and crash traces. Existing crash solution recommendation or general solution recommendation techniques only use an incomplete context or treat the entire context as pure texts to search relevant solutions for a given crash, resulting in inaccurate recommendation results. In this work, we propose a novel crash solution knowledge graph (KG) to summarize the complete crash context and its solution with a graph-structured representation. To construct the crash solution KG automatically, we propose to leverage prompt learning to construct the KG from SO threads with a small set of labeled data. Based on the constructed KG, we further propose a novel KG-based crash solution recommendation technique KG4CraSolver, which precisely finds the relevant SO thread for an encountered crash by finely analyzing and matching the complete crash context based on the crash solution KG. The evaluation results show that the constructed KG is of high quality and KG4CraSolver outperforms baselines in terms of all metrics (e.g., 13.4%-113.4% MRR improvements). Moreover, we perform a user study and find that KG4CraSolver helps participants find crash solutions 34.4% faster and 63.3% more accurately.

Library migration, which replaces the current library with a different one to retain the same software behavior, is common in software evolution. An essential part of this is finding an analogous API for the desired functionality. However, due to the multitude of libraries/APIs, manually finding such an API is time-consuming and error-prone. Researchers created automated analogical API recommendation techniques, notably documentation-based methods. Despite potential, these methods have limitations, e.g., incomplete semantic understanding in documentation and scalability issues. In this study, we present KGE4AR, a novel documentation-based approach using knowledge graph (KG) embedding for recommending analogical APIs during library migration. KGE4AR introduces a unified API KG to comprehensively represent documentation knowledge, capturing high-level semantics. It further embeds this unified API KG into vectors for efficient, scalable similarity calculation. We assess KGE4AR with 35,773 Java libraries in two scenarios, with and without target libraries. KGE4AR notably outperforms state-of-the-art techniques (e.g., 47.1%-143.0% and 11.7%-80.6% MRR improvements), showcasing scalability with growing library counts.

Recently, many large language models (LLMs) have been proposed, showing advanced proficiency in code generation. Meanwhile, many efforts have been dedicated to evaluating LLMs on code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval. Although being very helpful for comparing different LLMs, existing evaluation focuses on a simple code generation scenario (i.e., function-level or statement-level code generation), which mainly asks LLMs to generate one single code unit (e.g., a function or a statement) for the given natural language description. Such evaluation focuses on generating independent and often small-scale code units, thus leaving it unclear how LLMs perform in real-world software development scenarios. To fill this knowledge gap, we make the first attempt to evaluate LLMs in a more challenging code generation scenario, i.e., classlevel code generation. Compared with existing code generation benchmarks, it better reflects real-world software development scenarios due to it comprising broader contextual dependencies and multiple, interdependent units of code. We first manually construct the first class-level code generation benchmark ClassEval of 100 class-level Python code generation tasks with approximately 500 person-hours. Based on the new benchmark ClassEval, we then perform the first study of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs on class-level code generation. Based on our results, we find that all LLMs perform much worse on class-level code generation compared to the methodlevel. While GPT models still dominate other LLMs on class-level code generation, the performance rankings of other models on method-level code generation no longer holds for class-level code generation. Besides, most models (except GPT models) perform better when generating the class method by method; and they have the limited ability of generating dependent code. Based on our findings, we call for software engineering (SE) researchers’ expertise to build more LLM benchmarks based on practical and complicated software development scenarios