Daily Papers

Though LLMs are capable of generating plausible programs, it's challenging to interact with the LLMs further to revise the program, especially if the user's specific requirements are different from the initial proposal. In this paper, we introduce ANPL, an interactive programming system that ensures users can always refine the generated code towards their specific programmatic intents via structured decompositions. Borrowing the paradigm of sketching from program synthesis, an ANPL program consists of a set of input-outputs that it must satisfy, a ``sketch'' -- control/data flow expressed in precise code (e.g. Python), and ``holes'' -- sub-modules to be implemented by the LLM specified with natural language. The user revises an ANPL program by either modifying the sketch, changing the language used to describe the holes, or providing additional input-outputs to a particular hole, turning it into a sub-ANPL program that can be solved recursively. This workflow allows the users to offload programming burdens to the LLM as much as possible while retaining the ability to pinpoint and resolve bugs locally, without exposing the rest of the program to the LLM. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. Additional evaluations on APPS, HumanEval, and real-world programming tasks have validated that the ANPL framework is applicable to multiple programming domains. We release the ANPL solutions to the ARC tasks as a dataset, providing insights into how humans decompose novel tasks programmatically. See our code at https://iprc-dip.github.io/ANPL/.

In recent times, a plethora of Large Code Generation Models (LCGMs) have been proposed, showcasing significant potential in assisting developers with complex programming tasks. Benchmarking LCGMs necessitates the creation of a set of diverse programming problems, and each problem comprises the prompt (including the task description), canonical solution, and test inputs. The existing methods for constructing such a problem set can be categorized into two main types: manual methods and perturbation-based methods. However, manual methods demand high effort and lack scalability, while also risking data integrity due to LCGMs' potentially contaminated data collection, and perturbation-based approaches mainly generate semantically homogeneous problems with the same canonical solutions and introduce typos that can be easily auto-corrected by IDE, making them ineffective and unrealistic. In this work, we propose the idea of programming problem merging (PPM) and provide two implementation of this idea, we utilize our tool on two widely-used datasets and compare it against nine baseline methods using eight code generation models. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in generating more challenging, diverse, and natural programming problems, comparing to the baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate reasoning steps can inadvertently introduce hallucinations and accumulated errors, thereby limiting models' ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by how humans engage in careful and meticulous deductive logical reasoning processes to solve tasks, we seek to enable language models to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning, and also ensure the trustworthiness of their reasoning process through self-verification. However, directly verifying the validity of an entire deductive reasoning process is challenging, even with advanced models like ChatGPT. In light of this, we propose to decompose a reasoning verification process into a series of step-by-step subprocesses, each only receiving their necessary context and premises. To facilitate this procedure, we propose Natural Program, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format. Our approach enables models to generate precise reasoning steps where subsequent steps are more rigorously grounded on prior steps. It also empowers language models to carry out reasoning self-verification in a step-by-step manner. By integrating this verification process into each deductive reasoning stage, we significantly enhance the rigor and trustfulness of generated reasoning steps. Along this process, we also improve the answer correctness on complex reasoning tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lz1oceani/verify_cot.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has profoundly transformed our lives, revolutionizing interactions with AI and lowering the barrier to AI usage. While LLMs are primarily designed for natural language interaction, the extensive embedded knowledge empowers them to comprehend digital sensor data. This capability enables LLMs to engage with the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, performing a myriad of AIoT tasks. Consequently, this evolution triggers a paradigm shift in conventional AIoT application development, democratizing its accessibility to all by facilitating the design and development of AIoT applications via natural language. However, some limitations need to be addressed to unlock the full potential of LLMs in AIoT application development. First, existing solutions often require transferring raw sensor data to LLM servers, which raises privacy concerns, incurs high query fees, and is limited by token size. Moreover, the reasoning processes of LLMs are opaque to users, making it difficult to verify the robustness and correctness of inference results. This paper introduces AutoIOT, an LLM-based automated program generator for AIoT applications. AutoIOT enables users to specify their requirements using natural language (input) and automatically synthesizes interpretable programs with documentation (output). AutoIOT automates the iterative optimization to enhance the quality of generated code with minimum user involvement. AutoIOT not only makes the execution of AIoT tasks more explainable but also mitigates privacy concerns and reduces token costs with local execution of synthesized programs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate AutoIOT's remarkable capability in program synthesis for various AIoT tasks. The synthesized programs can match and even outperform some representative baselines.

Natural language programming is a promising approach to enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. However, our formative study found that end users would often use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally instructing tasks in natural language, especially when specifying conditionals. Existing systems have limited support for letting the user teach agents new concepts or explaining unclear concepts. In this paper, we describe a new multi-modal domain-independent approach that combines natural language programming and programming-by-demonstration to allow users to first naturally describe tasks and associated conditions at a high level, and then collaborate with the agent to recursively resolve any ambiguities or vagueness through conversations and demonstrations. Users can also define new procedures and concepts by demonstrating and referring to contents within GUIs of existing mobile apps. We demonstrate this approach in PUMICE, an end-user programmable agent that implements this approach. A lab study with 10 users showed its usability.

Sequence-to-sequence models have been used to transform erroneous programs into correct ones when trained with a large enough dataset. Some recent studies also demonstrated strong empirical evidence that code review could improve the program repair further. Large language models, trained with Natural Language (NL) and Programming Language (PL), can contain inherent knowledge of both. In this study, we investigate if this inherent knowledge of PL and NL can be utilized to improve automated program repair. We applied PLBART and CodeT5, two state-of-the-art language models that are pre-trained with both PL and NL, on two such natural language-based program repair datasets and found that the pre-trained language models fine-tuned with datasets containing both code review and subsequent code changes notably outperformed each of the previous models. With the advent of code generative models like Codex and GPT-3.5-Turbo, we also performed zero-shot and few-shots learning-based prompt engineering to assess their performance on these datasets. However, the practical application of using LLMs in the context of automated program repair is still a long way off based on our manual analysis of the generated repaired codes by the learning models.

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur

Question answering plays a pivotal role in human daily life because it involves our acquisition of knowledge about the world. However, due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real-world facts, the answer can be completely different when the time constraint in the question changes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering, while our experiments reveal that the aforementioned problems still pose a significant challenge to existing LLMs. This can be attributed to the LLMs' inability to perform rigorous reasoning based on surface-level text semantics. To overcome this limitation, rather than requiring LLMs to directly answer the question, we propose a novel approach where we reframe the Question Answering task as Programming (QAaP). Concretely, by leveraging modern LLMs' superior capability in understanding both natural language and programming language, we endeavor to harness LLMs to represent diversely expressed text as well-structured code and select the best matching answer from multiple candidates through programming. We evaluate our QAaP framework on several time-sensitive question answering datasets and achieve decent improvement, up to 14.5% over strong baselines. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/TianHongZXY/qaap

We present PanGu-Coder, a pretrained decoder-only language model adopting the PanGu-Alpha architecture for text-to-code generation, i.e. the synthesis of programming language solutions given a natural language problem description. We train PanGu-Coder using a two-stage strategy: the first stage employs Causal Language Modelling (CLM) to pre-train on raw programming language data, while the second stage uses a combination of Causal Language Modelling and Masked Language Modelling (MLM) training objectives that focus on the downstream task of text-to-code generation and train on loosely curated pairs of natural language program definitions and code functions. Finally, we discuss PanGu-Coder-FT, which is fine-tuned on a combination of competitive programming problems and code with continuous integration tests. We evaluate PanGu-Coder with a focus on whether it generates functionally correct programs and demonstrate that it achieves equivalent or better performance than similarly sized models, such as CodeX, while attending a smaller context window and training on less data.

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a quantitative evaluation of performance on the MCoNaLa dataset by testing with state-of-the-art code generation systems. While the difficulties vary across these three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in understanding complex natural language. One important application of LLM is LLM-based AI Agent, which leverages the ability of LLM as well as external tools for complex-task solving. To make sure LLM Agents follow an effective and reliable procedure to solve the given task, manually designed workflows are usually used to guide the working mechanism of agents. However, manually designing the workflows requires considerable efforts and domain knowledge, making it difficult to develop and deploy agents on massive scales. To address these issues, we propose AutoFlow, a framework designed to automatically generate workflows for agents to solve complex tasks. AutoFlow takes natural language program as the format of agent workflow and employs a workflow optimization procedure to iteratively optimize the workflow quality. Besides, this work offers two workflow generation methods: fine-tuning-based and in-context-based methods, making the AutoFlow framework applicable to both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Experimental results show that our framework can produce robust and reliable agent workflows. We believe that the automatic generation and interpretation of workflows in natural language represent a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, particularly with the rapid development of LLMs. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AutoFlow.

Humans generally acquire new skills without compromising the old; however, the opposite holds for Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g., from LLaMA to CodeLLaMA. To this end, we propose a new post-pretraining method for LLMs with an expansion of Transformer blocks. We tune the expanded blocks using only new corpus, efficiently and effectively improving the model's knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we experiment on the corpus of code and math, yielding LLaMA Pro-8.3B, a versatile foundation model initialized from LLaMA2-7B, excelling in general tasks, programming, and mathematics. LLaMA Pro and its instruction-following counterpart (LLaMA Pro-Instruct) achieve advanced performance among various benchmarks, demonstrating superiority over existing open models in the LLaMA family and the immense potential of reasoning and addressing diverse tasks as an intelligent agent. Our findings provide valuable insights into integrating natural and programming languages, laying a solid foundation for developing advanced language agents that operate effectively in various environments.

By combining voice and touch interactions, multimodal interfaces can surpass the efficiency of either modality alone. Traditional multimodal frameworks require laborious developer work to support rich multimodal commands where the user's multimodal command involves possibly exponential combinations of actions/function invocations. This paper presents ReactGenie, a programming framework that better separates multimodal input from the computational model to enable developers to create efficient and capable multimodal interfaces with ease. ReactGenie translates multimodal user commands into NLPL (Natural Language Programming Language), a programming language we created, using a neural semantic parser based on large-language models. The ReactGenie runtime interprets the parsed NLPL and composes primitives in the computational model to implement complex user commands. As a result, ReactGenie allows easy implementation and unprecedented richness in commands for end-users of multimodal apps. Our evaluation showed that 12 developers can learn and build a nontrivial ReactGenie application in under 2.5 hours on average. In addition, compared with a traditional GUI, end-users can complete tasks faster and with less task load using ReactGenie apps.

In the large language model (LLM) revolution, embedding is a key component of various systems. For example, it is used to retrieve knowledge or memories for LLMs, to build content moderation filters, etc. As such cases span from English to other natural or programming languages, from retrieval to classification and beyond, it is desirable to build a unified embedding model rather than dedicated ones for each scenario. In this work, we make an initial step towards this goal, demonstrating that multiple languages (both natural and programming) pre-trained transformer decoders can embed universally when finetuned on limited English data. We provide a comprehensive practice with thorough evaluations. On English MTEB, our models achieve competitive performance on different embedding tasks by minimal training data. On other benchmarks, such as multilingual classification and code search, our models (without any supervision) perform comparably to, or even surpass heavily supervised baselines and/or APIs. These results provide evidence of a promising path towards building powerful unified embedders that can be applied across tasks and languages.

Code search is a task to find programming codes that semantically match the given natural language queries. Even though some of the existing datasets for this task are multilingual on the programming language side, their query data are only in English. In this research, we create a multilingual code search dataset in four natural and four programming languages using a neural machine translation model. Using our dataset, we pre-train and fine-tune the Transformer-based models and then evaluate them on multiple code search test sets. Our results show that the model pre-trained with all natural and programming language data has performed best in most cases. By applying back-translation data filtering to our dataset, we demonstrate that the translation quality affects the model's performance to a certain extent, but the data size matters more.

Text Normalization and Semantic Parsing have numerous applications in natural language processing, such as natural language programming, paraphrasing, data augmentation, constructing expert systems, text matching, and more. Despite the prominent achievements of deep learning in Large Language Models (LLMs), the interpretability of neural network architectures is still poor, which affects their credibility and hence limits the deployments of risk-sensitive scenarios. In certain scenario-specific domains with scarce data, rapidly obtaining a large number of supervised learning labels is challenging, and the workload of manually labeling data would be enormous. Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks further leads to low data utilization rates. In situations where swift responses are vital, the density of the model makes local deployment difficult and the response time long, which is not conducive to local applications of these fields. Inspired by the multiplication rule, a principle of combinatorial mathematics, and human thinking patterns, a multilayer framework along with its algorithm, the Digestion Algorithm in Hierarchical Symbolic Forests (DAHSF), is proposed to address these above issues, combining text normalization and semantic parsing workflows. The Chinese Scripting Language "Fire Bunny Intelligent Development Platform V2.0" is an important test and application of the technology discussed in this paper. DAHSF can run locally in scenario-specific domains on little datasets, with model size and memory usage optimized by at least two orders of magnitude, thus improving the execution speed, and possessing a promising optimization outlook.

The collection of security-related logs holds the key to understanding attack behaviors and diagnosing vulnerabilities. Still, their analysis remains a daunting challenge. Recently, Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated unmatched potential in understanding natural and programming languages. The question arises whether and how LMs could be also useful for security experts since their logs contain intrinsically confused and obfuscated information. In this paper, we systematically study how to benefit from the state-of-the-art in LM to automatically analyze text-like Unix shell attack logs. We present a thorough design methodology that leads to LogPr\'ecis. It receives as input raw shell sessions and automatically identifies and assigns the attacker tactic to each portion of the session, i.e., unveiling the sequence of the attacker's goals. We demonstrate LogPr\'ecis capability to support the analysis of two large datasets containing about 400,000 unique Unix shell attacks. LogPr\'ecis reduces them into about 3,000 fingerprints, each grouping sessions with the same sequence of tactics. The abstraction it provides lets the analyst better understand attacks, identify fingerprints, detect novelty, link similar attacks, and track families and mutations. Overall, LogPr\'ecis, released as open source, paves the way for better and more responsive defense against cyberattacks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code are a family of high-parameter, transformer-based neural networks pre-trained on massive datasets of both natural and programming languages. These models are rapidly being employed in commercial AI-based developer tools, such as GitHub CoPilot. However, measuring and explaining their effectiveness on programming tasks is a challenging proposition, given their size and complexity. The methods for evaluating and explaining LLMs for code are inextricably linked. That is, in order to explain a model's predictions, they must be reliably mapped to fine-grained, understandable concepts. Once this mapping is achieved, new methods for detailed model evaluations are possible. However, most current explainability techniques and evaluation benchmarks focus on model robustness or individual task performance, as opposed to interpreting model predictions. To this end, this paper introduces ASTxplainer, an explainability method specific to LLMs for code that enables both new methods for LLM evaluation and visualizations of LLM predictions that aid end-users in understanding model predictions. At its core, ASTxplainer provides an automated method for aligning token predictions with AST nodes, by extracting and aggregating normalized model logits within AST structures. To demonstrate the practical benefit of ASTxplainer, we illustrate the insights that our framework can provide by performing an empirical evaluation on 12 popular LLMs for code using a curated dataset of the most popular GitHub projects. Additionally, we perform a user study examining the usefulness of an ASTxplainer-derived visualization of model predictions aimed at enabling model users to explain predictions. The results of these studies illustrate the potential for ASTxplainer to provide insights into LLM effectiveness, and aid end-users in understanding predictions.

Language models (LMs) are bound to their tokenizer, which maps raw text to a sequence of vocabulary items (tokens). This restricts their flexibility: for example, LMs trained primarily on English may still perform well in other natural and programming languages, but have vastly decreased efficiency due to their English-centric tokenizer. To mitigate this, we should be able to swap the original LM tokenizer with an arbitrary one, on the fly, without degrading performance. Hence, in this work we define a new problem: Zero-Shot Tokenizer Transfer (ZeTT). The challenge at the core of ZeTT is finding embeddings for the tokens in the vocabulary of the new tokenizer. Since prior heuristics for initializing embeddings often perform at chance level in a ZeTT setting, we propose a new solution: we train a hypernetwork taking a tokenizer as input and predicting the corresponding embeddings. We empirically demonstrate that the hypernetwork generalizes to new tokenizers both with encoder (e.g., XLM-R) and decoder LLMs (e.g., Mistral-7B). Our method comes close to the original models' performance in cross-lingual and coding tasks while markedly reducing the length of the tokenized sequence. We also find that the remaining gap can be quickly closed by continued training on less than 1B tokens. Finally, we show that a ZeTT hypernetwork trained for a base (L)LM can also be applied to fine-tuned variants without extra training. Overall, our results make substantial strides toward detaching LMs from their tokenizer.

Fine-tuning is widely used to adapt language models for specific goals, often leveraging real-world data such as patient records, customer-service interactions, or web content in languages not covered in pre-training. These datasets are typically massive, noisy, and often confidential, making their direct inspection challenging. However, understanding them is essential for guiding model deployment and informing decisions about data cleaning or suppressing any harmful behaviors learned during fine-tuning. In this study, we introduce the task of novelty discovery through generation, which aims to identify novel properties of a fine-tuning dataset by generating examples that illustrate these properties. Our approach, Contrastive Generative Exploration (CGE), assumes no direct access to the data but instead relies on a pre-trained model and the same model after fine-tuning. By contrasting the predictions of these two models, CGE can generate examples that highlight novel characteristics of the fine-tuning data. However, this simple approach may produce examples that are too similar to one another, failing to capture the full range of novel phenomena present in the dataset. We address this by introducing an iterative version of CGE, where the previously generated examples are used to update the pre-trained model, and this updated model is then contrasted with the fully fine-tuned model to generate the next example, promoting diversity in the generated outputs. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CGE in detecting novel content, such as toxic language, as well as new natural and programming languages. Furthermore, we show that CGE remains effective even when models are fine-tuned using differential privacy techniques.

In the recent years, many software systems have adopted AI techniques, especially deep learning techniques. Due to their black-box nature, AI-based systems brought challenges to traceability, because AI system behaviors are based on models and data, whereas the requirements or policies are rules in the form of natural or programming language. To the best of our knowledge, there is a limited amount of studies on how AI and deep neural network-based systems behave against rule-based requirements/policies. This experience paper examines deep neural network behaviors against rule-based requirements described in natural language policies. In particular, we focus on a case study to check AI-based content moderation software against content moderation policies. First, using crowdsourcing, we collect natural language test cases which match each moderation policy, we name this dataset HateModerate; second, using the test cases in HateModerate, we test the failure rates of state-of-the-art hate speech detection software, and we find that these models have high failure rates for certain policies; finally, since manual labeling is costly, we further proposed an automated approach to augument HateModerate by finetuning OpenAI's large language models to automatically match new examples to policies. The dataset and code of this work can be found on our anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/content-moderation-project.

How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction following tasks. Our approach prompts a language model to generate full Python programs that define functions over data structures which contain natural language representations of structured knowledge. A Python interpreter then executes the generated code and prints the output. Despite using a task-general prompt, we find that this approach can improve upon strong baselines across a range of different tasks including math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following. We further find the generated programs are often interpretable and enable post-hoc verification of the intermediate reasoning steps.

In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in representation learning for program synthesis and understanding tasks. The quality of the learned representations appears to be dictated by the neural scaling laws as a function of the number of model parameters and observations, while imposing upper bounds on the model performance by the amount of available data and compute, which is costly. In this study, we attempt to render the training of LLMs for program synthesis more efficient by unifying four key components: (1) model architectures, (2) learning methods, (3) infill sampling, and, (4) data distributions. Specifically, for the model architecture, we attempt to unify encoder and decoder-based models into a single prefix-LM. For learning methods, (i) causal language modeling, (ii) span corruption, (iii) infilling are unified into a simple learning algorithm. For infill sampling, we explore the claim of a "free lunch" hypothesis. For data distributions, the effect of a mixture distribution of programming and natural languages on model performance is explored. We conduct a comprehensive series of empirical experiments on 1B LLMs, for which failures and successes of this exploration are distilled into four lessons. We will provide a final recipe for training and release CodeGen2 models in size 1B, 3.7B, 7B, and, 16B parameters, along with the training framework as open-source: https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen2.

We present CodeBERT, a bimodal pre-trained model for programming language (PL) and nat-ural language (NL). CodeBERT learns general-purpose representations that support downstream NL-PL applications such as natural language codesearch, code documentation generation, etc. We develop CodeBERT with Transformer-based neural architecture, and train it with a hybrid objective function that incorporates the pre-training task of replaced token detection, which is to detect plausible alternatives sampled from generators. This enables us to utilize both bimodal data of NL-PL pairs and unimodal data, where the former provides input tokens for model training while the latter helps to learn better generators. We evaluate CodeBERT on two NL-PL applications by fine-tuning model parameters. Results show that CodeBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both natural language code search and code documentation generation tasks. Furthermore, to investigate what type of knowledge is learned in CodeBERT, we construct a dataset for NL-PL probing, and evaluate in a zero-shot setting where parameters of pre-trained models are fixed. Results show that CodeBERT performs better than previous pre-trained models on NL-PL probing.

This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The MathQA-Python dataset, a Python version of the MathQA benchmark, contains 23914 problems that evaluate the ability of the models to synthesize code from more complex text. On both datasets, we find that synthesis performance scales log-linearly with model size. Our largest models, even without finetuning on a code dataset, can synthesize solutions to 59.6 percent of the problems from MBPP using few-shot learning with a well-designed prompt. Fine-tuning on a held-out portion of the dataset improves performance by about 10 percentage points across most model sizes. On the MathQA-Python dataset, the largest fine-tuned model achieves 83.8 percent accuracy. Going further, we study the model's ability to engage in dialog about code, incorporating human feedback to improve its solutions. We find that natural language feedback from a human halves the error rate compared to the model's initial prediction. Additionally, we conduct an error analysis to shed light on where these models fall short and what types of programs are most difficult to generate. Finally, we explore the semantic grounding of these models by fine-tuning them to predict the results of program execution. We find that even our best models are generally unable to predict the output of a program given a specific input.

Research shows that grammatical mistakes in a sentence can be corrected by translating it to another language and back using neural machine translation with language models. We investigate whether this correction capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) extends to Automatic Program Repair (APR). Current generative models for APR are pre-trained on source code and fine-tuned for repair. This paper proposes bypassing the fine-tuning step and using Round-Trip Translation (RTT): translation of code from one programming language to another programming or natural language, and back. We hypothesize that RTT with LLMs restores the most commonly seen patterns in code during pre-training, i.e., performs a regression toward the mean, which removes bugs as they are a form of noise w.r.t. the more frequent, natural, bug-free code in the training data. To test this hypothesis, we employ eight recent LLMs pre-trained on code, including the latest GPT versions, and four common program repair benchmarks in Java. We find that RTT with English as an intermediate language repaired 101 of 164 bugs with GPT-4 on the HumanEval-Java dataset. Moreover, 46 of these are unique bugs that are not repaired by other LLMs fine-tuned for APR. Our findings highlight the viability of round-trip translation with LLMs as a technique for automated program repair and its potential for research in software engineering. Keywords: automated program repair, large language model, machine translation

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in generating codes from textual prompts. However, existing benchmarks have mainly concentrated on translating English prompts to multilingual codes or have been constrained to very limited natural languages (NLs). These benchmarks have overlooked the vast landscape of massively multilingual NL to multilingual code, leaving a critical gap in the evaluation of multilingual LLMs. In response, we introduce HumanEval-XL, a massively multilingual code generation benchmark specifically crafted to address this deficiency. HumanEval-XL establishes connections between 23 NLs and 12 programming languages (PLs), and comprises of a collection of 22,080 prompts with an average of 8.33 test cases. By ensuring parallel data across multiple NLs and PLs, HumanEval-XL offers a comprehensive evaluation platform for multilingual LLMs, allowing the assessment of the understanding of different NLs. Our work serves as a pioneering step towards filling the void in evaluating NL generalization in the area of multilingual code generation. We make our evaluation code and data publicly available at https://github.com/FloatAI/HumanEval-XL.

Program synthesis strives to generate a computer program as a solution to a given problem specification, expressed with input-output examples or natural language descriptions. The prevalence of large language models advances the state-of-the-art for program synthesis, though limited training resources and data impede open access to such models. To democratize this, we train and release a family of large language models up to 16.1B parameters, called CODEGEN, on natural language and programming language data, and open source the training library JAXFORMER. We show the utility of the trained model by demonstrating that it is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art on zero-shot Python code generation on HumanEval. We further investigate the multi-step paradigm for program synthesis, where a single program is factorized into multiple prompts specifying subproblems. To this end, we construct an open benchmark, Multi-Turn Programming Benchmark (MTPB), consisting of 115 diverse problem sets that are factorized into multi-turn prompts. Our analysis on MTPB shows that the same intent provided to CODEGEN in multi-turn fashion significantly improves program synthesis over that provided as a single turn. We make the training library JAXFORMER and model checkpoints available as open source contribution: https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen.

Neural Code Intelligence -- leveraging deep learning to understand, generate, and optimize code -- holds immense potential for transformative impacts on the whole society. Bridging the gap between Natural Language and Programming Language, this domain has drawn significant attention from researchers in both research communities over the past few years. This survey presents a systematic and chronological review of the advancements in code intelligence, encompassing over 50 representative models and their variants, more than 20 categories of tasks, and an extensive coverage of over 680 related works. We follow the historical progression to trace the paradigm shifts across different research phases (e.g., from modeling code with recurrent neural networks to the era of Large Language Models). Concurrently, we highlight the major technical transitions in models, tasks, and evaluations spanning through different stages. For applications, we also observe a co-evolving shift. It spans from initial endeavors to tackling specific scenarios, through exploring a diverse array of tasks during its rapid expansion, to currently focusing on tackling increasingly complex and varied real-world challenges. Building on our examination of the developmental trajectories, we further investigate the emerging synergies between code intelligence and broader machine intelligence, uncovering new cross-domain opportunities and illustrating the substantial influence of code intelligence across various domains. Finally, we delve into both the opportunities and challenges associated with this field, alongside elucidating our insights on the most promising research directions. An ongoing, dynamically updated project and resources associated with this survey have been released at https://github.com/QiushiSun/NCISurvey.

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 identifying the syntactic structures of programs. Specifically, we introduce CodeSyntax, a large-scale dataset of programs annotated with the syntactic relationships in their corresponding abstract syntax trees. Our key observation is that existing language models pretrained on code still lack the understanding of code syntax. In fact, these pre-trained programming language models fail to match the performance of simple baselines based on positional offsets and keywords. We also present a natural language benchmark to highlight the differences between natural languages and programming languages in terms of syntactic structure understanding. Our findings point out key limitations of existing pre-training methods for programming languages, and suggest the importance of modeling code syntactic structures.

Generating accurate code review comments remains a significant challenge due to the inherently diverse and non-unique nature of the task output. Large language models pretrained on both programming and natural language data tend to perform well in code-oriented tasks. However, large-scale pretraining is not always feasible due to its environmental impact and project-specific generalizability issues. In this work, first we fine-tune open-source Large language models (LLM) in parameter-efficient, quantized low-rank (QLoRA) fashion on consumer-grade hardware to improve review comment generation. Recent studies demonstrate the efficacy of augmenting semantic metadata information into prompts to boost performance in other code-related tasks. To explore this in code review activities, we also prompt proprietary, closed-source LLMs augmenting the input code patch with function call graphs and code summaries. Both of our strategies improve the review comment generation performance, with function call graph augmented few-shot prompting on the GPT-3.5 model surpassing the pretrained baseline by around 90% BLEU-4 score on the CodeReviewer dataset. Moreover, few-shot prompted Gemini-1.0 Pro, QLoRA fine-tuned Code Llama and Llama 3.1 models achieve competitive results (ranging from 25% to 83% performance improvement) on this task. An additional human evaluation study further validates our experimental findings, reflecting real-world developers' perceptions of LLM-generated code review comments based on relevant qualitative metrics.

As the complexity of modern software continues to escalate, software engineering has become an increasingly daunting and error-prone endeavor. In recent years, the field of Neural Code Intelligence (NCI) has emerged as a promising solution, leveraging the power of deep learning techniques to tackle analytical tasks on source code with the goal of improving programming efficiency and minimizing human errors within the software industry. Pretrained language models have become a dominant force in NCI research, consistently delivering state-of-the-art results across a wide range of tasks, including code summarization, generation, and translation. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the NCI domain, including a thorough review of pretraining techniques, tasks, datasets, and model architectures. We hope this paper will serve as a bridge between the natural language and programming language communities, offering insights for future research in this rapidly evolving field.

Large language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Such models open up the possibility of multi-language code generation: could code generation models generalize knowledge from one language to another? Although contemporary code generation models can generate semantically correct Python code, little is known about their abilities with other languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages. We create the first massively multilingual code generation benchmark by using MultiPL-E to translate two popular Python code generation benchmarks to 18 additional programming languages. We use MultiPL-E to extend the HumanEval benchmark and MBPP benchmark to 18 languages that encompass a range of programming paradigms and popularity. Using these new parallel benchmarks, we evaluate the multi-language performance of three state-of-the-art code generation models: Codex, CodeGen, and InCoder. We find that Codex matches or even exceeds its performance on Python for several other languages. The range of programming languages represented in MultiPL-E allow us to explore the impact of language frequency and language features on model performance. Finally, the MultiPL-E approach of compiling code generation benchmarks to new programming languages is both scalable and extensible, making it straightforward to evaluate new models, benchmarks, and languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped code generation by synergizing their exceptional comprehension of natural language and programming syntax, thereby substantially boosting developer productivity. These advancements have prompted numerous efforts to quantitatively evaluate their coding capabilities. However, persistent challenges, such as benchmark leakage, data dissipation, and limited system accessibility, continue to impede a timely and accurate assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce CodeArena, an online evaluation framework tailored for LLM code generation. The key innovation is a collective evaluation mechanism, which dynamically recalibrates individual model scores based on the holistic performance of all participating models, mitigating score biases caused by widespread benchmark leakage. In addition, CodeArena ensures open access to all submitted solutions and test cases and provides automation-friendly APIs to streamline the code evaluation workflow. Our main contributions are: (1) a collective evaluation system for unbiased assessment, (2) a public repository of solutions and test cases, and (3) automation-ready APIs for seamless integration.

With easier access to powerful compute resources, there is a growing trend in the field of AI for software development to develop larger and larger language models (LLMs) to address a variety of programming tasks. Even LLMs applied to tasks from the high-performance computing (HPC) domain are huge in size (e.g., billions of parameters) and demand expensive compute resources for training. We found this design choice confusing - why do we need large LLMs trained on natural languages and programming languages unrelated to HPC for HPC-specific tasks? In this line of work, we aim to question design choices made by existing LLMs by developing smaller LLMs for specific domains - we call them domain-specific LLMs. Specifically, we start off with HPC as a domain and propose a novel tokenizer named Tokompiler, designed specifically for preprocessing code in HPC and compilation-centric tasks. Tokompiler leverages knowledge of language primitives to generate language-oriented tokens, providing a context-aware understanding of code structure while avoiding human semantics attributed to code structures completely. We applied Tokompiler to pre-train two state-of-the-art models, SPT-Code and Polycoder, for a Fortran code corpus mined from GitHub. We evaluate the performance of these models against the conventional LLMs. Results demonstrate that Tokompiler significantly enhances code completion accuracy and semantic understanding compared to traditional tokenizers in normalized-perplexity tests, down to ~1 perplexity score. This research opens avenues for further advancements in domain-specific LLMs, catering to the unique demands of HPC and compilation tasks.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to understand both natural language and code, driving their use in tasks like natural language-to-code (NL2Code) and code summarization. However, LLMs are prone to hallucination-outputs that stray from intended meanings. Detecting hallucinations in code summarization is especially difficult due to the complex interplay between programming and natural languages. We introduce a first-of-its-kind dataset with sim10K samples, curated specifically for hallucination detection in code summarization. We further propose a novel Entity Tracing Framework (ETF) that a) utilizes static program analysis to identify code entities from the program and b) uses LLMs to map and verify these entities and their intents within generated code summaries. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the framework, leading to a 0.73 F1 score. This approach provides an interpretable method for detecting hallucinations by grounding entities, allowing us to evaluate summary accuracy.

With easier access to powerful compute resources, there is a growing trend in AI for software development to develop large language models (LLMs) to address a variety of programming tasks. Even LLMs applied to tasks from the high-performance computing (HPC) domain are huge in size and demand expensive compute resources for training. This is partly because LLMs for HPC tasks are obtained by finetuning existing LLMs that support several natural and/or programming languages. We found this design choice confusing - why do we need LLMs trained on natural languages and programming languages unrelated to HPC for HPC-specific tasks? In this line of work, we aim to question choices made by existing LLMs by developing smaller language models (LMs) for specific domains - we call them domain-specific LMs. Specifically, we start with HPC as a domain and build an HPC-specific LM, named MonoCoder, which is orders of magnitude smaller than existing LMs but delivers better performance on non-HPC and HPC codes. Specifically, we pre-trained MonoCoder on an HPC-specific dataset (named HPCorpus) of C and C++ programs mined from GitHub. We evaluated the performance of MonoCoder against state-of-the-art multi-lingual LLMs. Results demonstrate that MonoCoder, although much smaller than existing LMs, outperforms other LLMs on normalized-perplexity tests (in relation to model size) while also delivering competing CodeBLEU scores for high-performance and parallel code generations. In other words, results suggest that MonoCoder understands HPC code better than state-of-the-art LLMs.

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) are being increasingly employed in real-life applications, so evaluating them is critical. While the conventional accuracy evaluates the performance of Code LLMs on a set of individual tasks, their self-consistency across different tasks is overlooked. Intuitively, a trustworthy model should be self-consistent when generating natural language specifications for its own code and generating code for its own specifications. Failure to preserve self-consistency reveals a lack of understanding of the shared semantics underlying natural language and programming language, and therefore undermines the trustworthiness of a model. In this paper, we first formally define the self-consistency of Code LLMs and then design a framework, IdentityChain, which effectively and efficiently evaluates the self-consistency and conventional accuracy of a model at the same time. We study eleven Code LLMs and show that they fail to preserve self-consistency, which is indeed a distinct aspect from conventional accuracy. Furthermore, we show that IdentityChain can be used as a model debugging tool to expose weaknesses of Code LLMs by demonstrating three major weaknesses that we identify in current models using IdentityChain. Our code is available at https://github.com/marcusm117/IdentityChain.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-3.5-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed "HiddenTables" as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, "HiddenTables" is played between the code-generating LLM "Solver" and the "Oracle" which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve Table QA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM's collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of "HiddenTables" to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset "PyQTax" that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns & labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs' deficiency in TableQA tasks, "HiddenTables" is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.

This paper investigates the ability of transformer-based models to learn structural recursion from examples. Recursion is a universal concept in both natural and formal languages. Structural recursion is central to the programming language and formal mathematics tasks where symbolic tools currently excel beyond neural models, such as inferring semantic relations between datatypes and emulating program behavior. We introduce a general framework that nicely connects the abstract concepts of structural recursion in the programming language domain to concrete sequence modeling problems and learned models' behavior. The framework includes a representation that captures the general syntax of structural recursion, coupled with two different frameworks for understanding their semantics -- one that is more natural from a programming languages perspective and one that helps bridge that perspective with a mechanistic understanding of the underlying transformer architecture. With our framework as a powerful conceptual tool, we identify different issues under various set-ups. The models trained to emulate recursive computations cannot fully capture the recursion yet instead fit short-cut algorithms and thus cannot solve certain edge cases that are under-represented in the training distribution. In addition, it is difficult for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to mine recursive rules from in-context demonstrations. Meanwhile, these LLMs fail in interesting ways when emulating reduction (step-wise computation) of the recursive function.

Recently, large language models (LLMs), especially those that are pretrained on code, have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating programs from natural language inputs in a few-shot or even zero-shot manner. Despite promising results, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive evaluation of these models language-to-code generation capabilities. Existing studies often focus on specific tasks, model architectures, or learning paradigms, leading to a fragmented understanding of the overall landscape. In this work, we present L2CEval, a systematic evaluation of the language-to-code generation capabilities of LLMs on 7 tasks across the domain spectrum of semantic parsing, math reasoning and Python programming, analyzing the factors that potentially affect their performance, such as model size, pretraining data, instruction tuning, and different prompting methods. In addition to assessing model performance, we measure confidence calibration for the models and conduct human evaluations of the output programs. This enables us to identify and analyze the typical failure modes across various tasks and models. L2CEval offers a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in language-to-code generation. We also release the evaluation framework and all model outputs, hoping to lay the groundwork for further future research in this domain.

Code comment generation aims at generating natural language descriptions for a code snippet to facilitate developers' program comprehension activities. Despite being studied for a long time, a bottleneck for existing approaches is that given a code snippet, they can only generate one comment while developers usually need to know information from diverse perspectives such as what is the functionality of this code snippet and how to use it. To tackle this limitation, this study empirically investigates the feasibility of utilizing large language models (LLMs) to generate comments that can fulfill developers' diverse intents. Our intuition is based on the facts that (1) the code and its pairwise comment are used during the pre-training process of LLMs to build the semantic connection between the natural language and programming language, and (2) comments in the real-world projects, which are collected for the pre-training, usually contain different developers' intents. We thus postulate that the LLMs can already understand the code from different perspectives after the pre-training. Indeed, experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate the rationale of our insights: by adopting the in-context learning paradigm and giving adequate prompts to the LLM (e.g., providing it with ten or more examples), the LLM can significantly outperform a state-of-the-art supervised learning approach on generating comments with multiple intents. Results also show that customized strategies for constructing the prompts and post-processing strategies for reranking the results can both boost the LLM's performances, which shed light on future research directions for using LLMs to achieve comment generation.

We present CoTexT, a pre-trained, transformer-based encoder-decoder model that learns the representative context between natural language (NL) and programming language (PL). Using self-supervision, CoTexT is pre-trained on large programming language corpora to learn a general understanding of language and code. CoTexT supports downstream NL-PL tasks such as code summarizing/documentation, code generation, defect detection, and code debugging. We train CoTexT on different combinations of available PL corpus including both "bimodal" and "unimodal" data. Here, bimodal data is the combination of text and corresponding code snippets, whereas unimodal data is merely code snippets. We first evaluate CoTexT with multi-task learning: we perform Code Summarization on 6 different programming languages and Code Refinement on both small and medium size featured in the CodeXGLUE dataset. We further conduct extensive experiments to investigate CoTexT on other tasks within the CodeXGlue dataset, including Code Generation and Defect Detection. We consistently achieve SOTA results in these tasks, demonstrating the versatility of our models.

Stack Overflow (SO) has been a great source of natural language questions and their code solutions (i.e., question-code pairs), which are critical for many tasks including code retrieval and annotation. In most existing research, question-code pairs were collected heuristically and tend to have low quality. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of systematically mining question-code pairs from Stack Overflow (in contrast to heuristically collecting them). It is formulated as predicting whether or not a code snippet is a standalone solution to a question. We propose a novel Bi-View Hierarchical Neural Network which can capture both the programming content and the textual context of a code snippet (i.e., two views) to make a prediction. On two manually annotated datasets in Python and SQL domain, our framework substantially outperforms heuristic methods with at least 15% higher F1 and accuracy. Furthermore, we present StaQC (Stack Overflow Question-Code pairs), the largest dataset to date of ~148K Python and ~120K SQL question-code pairs, automatically mined from SO using our framework. Under various case studies, we demonstrate that StaQC can greatly help develop data-hungry models for associating natural language with programming language.

We propose a new shared task for tactical data-to-text generation in the domain of source code libraries. Specifically, we focus on text generation of function descriptions from example software projects. Data is drawn from existing resources used for studying the related problem of semantic parser induction (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017b; Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a), and spans a wide variety of both natural languages and programming languages. In this paper, we describe these existing resources, which will serve as training and development data for the task, and discuss plans for building new independent test sets.

This paper envisions a revolutionary AIOS-Agent ecosystem, where Large Language Model (LLM) serves as the (Artificial) Intelligent Operating System (IOS, or AIOS)--an operating system "with soul". Upon this foundation, a diverse range of LLM-based AI Agent Applications (Agents, or AAPs) are developed, enriching the AIOS-Agent ecosystem and signaling a paradigm shift from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. We envision that LLM's impact will not be limited to the AI application level, instead, it will in turn revolutionize the design and implementation of computer system, architecture, software, and programming language, featured by several main concepts: LLM as OS (system-level), Agents as Applications (application-level), Natural Language as Programming Interface (user-level), and Tools as Devices/Libraries (hardware/middleware-level). We begin by introducing the architecture of traditional OS. Then we formalize a conceptual framework for AIOS through "LLM as OS (LLMOS)", drawing analogies between AIOS and traditional OS: LLM is likened to OS kernel, context window to memory, external storage to file system, hardware tools to peripheral devices, software tools to programming libraries, and user prompts to user commands. Subsequently, we introduce the new AIOS-Agent Ecosystem, where users can easily program Agent Applications (AAPs) using natural language, democratizing the development of software, which is different from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. Following this, we explore the diverse scope of Agent Applications. We delve into both single-agent and multi-agent systems, as well as human-agent interaction. Lastly, drawing on the insights from traditional OS-APP ecosystem, we propose a roadmap for the evolution of the AIOS-Agent ecosystem. This roadmap is designed to guide the future research and development, suggesting systematic progresses of AIOS and its Agent applications.

We present Semantic Interpreter, a natural language-friendly AI system for productivity software such as Microsoft Office that leverages large language models (LLMs) to execute user intent across application features. While LLMs are excellent at understanding user intent expressed as natural language, they are not sufficient for fulfilling application-specific user intent that requires more than text-to-text transformations. We therefore introduce the Office Domain Specific Language (ODSL), a concise, high-level language specialized for performing actions in and interacting with entities in Office applications. Semantic Interpreter leverages an Analysis-Retrieval prompt construction method with LLMs for program synthesis, translating natural language user utterances to ODSL programs that can be transpiled to application APIs and then executed. We focus our discussion primarily on a research exploration for Microsoft PowerPoint.

Creating programs to correctly manipulate data is a difficult task, as the underlying programming languages and APIs can be challenging to learn for many users who are not skilled programmers. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential for generating code from natural language, but in the data manipulation domain, apart from the natural language (NL) description of the intended task, we also have the dataset on which the task is to be performed, or the "data context". Existing approaches have utilized data context in a limited way by simply adding relevant information from the input data into the prompts sent to the LLM. In this work, we utilize the available input data to execute the candidate programs generated by the LLMs and gather their outputs. We introduce semantic reranking, a technique to rerank the programs generated by LLMs based on three signals coming the program outputs: (a) semantic filtering and well-formedness based score tuning: do programs even generate well-formed outputs, (b) semantic interleaving: how do the outputs from different candidates compare to each other, and (c) output-based score tuning: how do the outputs compare to outputs predicted for the same task. We provide theoretical justification for semantic interleaving. We also introduce temperature mixing, where we combine samples generated by LLMs using both high and low temperatures. We extensively evaluate our approach in three domains, namely databases (SQL), data science (Pandas) and business intelligence (Excel's Power Query M) on a variety of new and existing benchmarks. We observe substantial gains across domains, with improvements of up to 45% in top-1 accuracy and 34% in top-3 accuracy.

Numerous real-world decision-making problems can be formulated and solved using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models. However, the transformation of these problems into MILP models heavily relies on expertise in operations research and mathematical optimization, which restricts non-experts' accessibility to MILP. To address this challenge, we propose a framework for automatically formulating MILP models from unstructured natural language descriptions of decision problems, which integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and mathematical modeling techniques. This framework consists of three phases: i) identification of decision variables, ii) classification of objective and constraints, and iii) finally, generation of MILP models. In this study, we present a constraint classification scheme and a set of constraint templates that can guide the LLMs in synthesizing a complete MILP model. After fine-tuning LLMs, our approach can identify and synthesize logic constraints in addition to classic demand and resource constraints. The logic constraints have not been studied in existing work. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we extend the NL4Opt dataset with more problem descriptions and constraint types, and with the new dataset, we compare our framework with one-step model generation methods offered by LLMs. The experimental results reveal that with respect to the accuracies of generating the correct model, objective, and constraints, our method which integrates constraint classification and templates with LLMs significantly outperforms the others. The prototype system that we developed has a great potential to capture more constraints for more complex MILPs. It opens up opportunities for developing training tools for operations research practitioners and has the potential to be a powerful tool for automatic decision problem modeling and solving in practice.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time ("few-shot prompting"). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as "chain-of-thought'', which employ LLMs for both understanding the problem description by decomposing it into steps, as well as solving each step of the problem. While LLMs seem to be adept at this sort of step-by-step decomposition, LLMs often make logical and arithmetic mistakes in the solution part, even when the problem is decomposed correctly. In this paper, we present Program-Aided Language models (PAL): a novel approach that uses the LLM to read natural language problems and generate programs as the intermediate reasoning steps, but offloads the solution step to a runtime such as a Python interpreter. With PAL, decomposing the natural language problem into runnable steps remains the only learning task for the LLM, while solving is delegated to the interpreter. We demonstrate this synergy between a neural LLM and a symbolic interpreter across 13 mathematical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks from BIG-Bench Hard and other benchmarks. In all these natural language reasoning tasks, generating code using an LLM and reasoning using a Python interpreter leads to more accurate results than much larger models. For example, PAL using Codex achieves state-of-the-art few-shot accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing PaLM-540B which uses chain-of-thought by absolute 15% top-1. Our code and data are publicly available at http://reasonwithpal.com/ .

In natural language processing, transformer-based large language models (LLMs) like GPT-x models developed by OpenAI have revolutionized the landscape. Despite their impressive capabilities, these models often encounter challenges when handling tasks that differ from their training data, resulting in compromised performance. To address this, few-shot learning has emerged as a valuable technique, allowing LLMs to adapt with minimal task-specific data. One innovative strategy, known as Chain-of-Thought Prompting (CoT), has been introduced to guide LLMs in revealing cognitive processes during multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose Code Chain-of-Thought~(CodeCoT), which consists of two components: the Vanilla CodeCoT and the Self-exam CodeCoT. The latter incorporates self-examination, empowering the model to iteratively generate code, formulate test cases, and refine its outputs. Specifically, the process entails the generation of test examples by the model corresponding to the code it is tasked to implement. If it fails on the test examples, then it regenerates the code based on the erroneous code and associated error types. Through comprehensive experiments, we observed that both techniques significantly enhance code generation accuracy across various LLM variants. Our evaluation results reveal that CodeCoT improves the code generation effectiveness, including an unprecedented pass@1 accuracy of 79.27\% using the Self-exam CodeCoT approach on the gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 model in the HumanEval dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at program synthesis, yet their ability to produce symbolic graphics programs (SGPs) that render into precise visual content remains underexplored. We study symbolic graphics programming, where the goal is to generate an SGP from a natural-language description. This task also serves as a lens into how LLMs understand the visual world by prompting them to generate images rendered from SGPs. Among various SGPs, our paper sticks to scalable vector graphics (SVGs). We begin by examining the extent to which LLMs can generate SGPs. To this end, we introduce SGP-GenBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering object fidelity, scene fidelity, and compositionality (attribute binding, spatial relations, numeracy). On SGP-GenBench, we discover that frontier proprietary models substantially outperform open-source models, and performance correlates well with general coding capabilities. Motivated by this gap, we aim to improve LLMs' ability to generate SGPs. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards approach, where a format-validity gate ensures renderable SVG, and a cross-modal reward aligns text and the rendered image via strong vision encoders (e.g., SigLIP for text-image and DINO for image-image). Applied to Qwen-2.5-7B, our method substantially improves SVG generation quality and semantics, achieving performance on par with frontier systems. We further analyze training dynamics, showing that RL induces (i) finer decomposition of objects into controllable primitives and (ii) contextual details that improve scene coherence. Our results demonstrate that symbolic graphics programming offers a precise and interpretable lens on cross-modal grounding.

Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.

We present and test the largest benchmark for vericoding, LLM-generation of formally verified code from formal specifications - in contrast to vibe coding, which generates potentially buggy code from a natural language description. Our benchmark contains 12,504 formal specifications, with 3,029 in Dafny, 2,334 in Verus/Rust and 7,141 in Lean. Of these, 6,174 are new unseen problems. We find vericoding success rates of 27% in Lean, 44% in Verus/Rust and 82% in Dafny using off-the-shelf LLMs. Adding natural-language descriptions does not significantly improve performance. We also find that LLM progress has improved progress on pure Dafny verification from 68% to 96% over the past year. The benchmark and vericoding results are shared at https://github.com/Beneficial-AI-Foundation/vericoding-benchmark

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in several natural language processing tasks, their size and inaccessibility present challenges for extensive practical application. Previous studies acquire specialized skills through distillation on LLMs, which result in trading generic abilities, called model specialization. As for reasoning ability, chain-of-thought was synthesized to subsequent distillation. However, due to hallucination, synthetic chain-of-thought from LLMs contains faulty reasoning. These incorrect reasoning steps damage the reasoning capability. To tackle above issues, we propose Program-aided Distillation (PaD), which distills LLMs to obtain specialized small models in reasoning tasks. In PaD, we strengthen specialized models with program-aided reasoning, and help them overcome faulty reasoning steps with automated error checking. Experimental results demonstrate that, on the GSM8K benchmark, a 0.06B model using PaD can not only outperform certain LLMs (e.g., LLaMA), but also achieves a 10% improvement over baselines with a significantly smaller scale of parameters and data. Data pruning analysis reveals that PaD possesses higher training efficiency.

Pre-trained models of code have achieved success in many important software engineering tasks. However, these powerful models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that slightly perturb model inputs to make a victim model produce wrong outputs. Current works mainly attack models of code with examples that preserve operational program semantics but ignore a fundamental requirement for adversarial example generation: perturbations should be natural to human judges, which we refer to as naturalness requirement. In this paper, we propose ALERT (nAturaLnEss AwaRe ATtack), a black-box attack that adversarially transforms inputs to make victim models produce wrong outputs. Different from prior works, this paper considers the natural semantic of generated examples at the same time as preserving the operational semantic of original inputs. Our user study demonstrates that human developers consistently consider that adversarial examples generated by ALERT are more natural than those generated by the state-of-the-art work by Zhang et al. that ignores the naturalness requirement. On attacking CodeBERT, our approach can achieve attack success rates of 53.62%, 27.79%, and 35.78% across three downstream tasks: vulnerability prediction, clone detection and code authorship attribution. On GraphCodeBERT, our approach can achieve average success rates of 76.95%, 7.96% and 61.47% on the three tasks. The above outperforms the baseline by 14.07% and 18.56% on the two pre-trained models on average. Finally, we investigated the value of the generated adversarial examples to harden victim models through an adversarial fine-tuning procedure and demonstrated the accuracy of CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT against ALERT-generated adversarial examples increased by 87.59% and 92.32%, respectively.

Traditional RLHF optimizes language models with coarse, scalar rewards that mask the fine-grained reasons behind success or failure, leading to slow and opaque learning. Recent work augments RL with textual critiques through prompting or reflection, improving interpretability but leaving model parameters untouched. We introduce Text2Grad, a reinforcement-learning paradigm that turns free-form textual feedback into span-level gradients. Given human (or programmatic) critiques, Text2Grad aligns each feedback phrase with the relevant token spans, converts these alignments into differentiable reward signals, and performs gradient updates that directly refine the offending portions of the model's policy. This yields precise, feedback-conditioned adjustments instead of global nudges. Text2Grad is realized through three components: (1) a high-quality feedback-annotation pipeline that pairs critiques with token spans; (2) a fine-grained reward model that predicts span-level reward on answer while generating explanatory critiques; and (3) a span-level policy optimizer that back-propagates natural-language gradients. Across summarization, code generation, and question answering, Text2Grad consistently surpasses scalar-reward RL and prompt-only baselines, providing both higher task metrics and richer interpretability. Our results demonstrate that natural-language feedback, when converted to gradients, is a powerful signal for fine-grained policy optimization. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Text2Grad

Natural language interfaces often require supervised data to translate user requests into programs, database queries, or other structured intent representations. During data collection, it can be difficult to anticipate and formalize the full range of user needs -- for example, in a system designed to handle simple requests (like find my meetings tomorrow or move my meeting with my manager to noon), users may also express more elaborate requests (like swap all my calls on Monday and Tuesday). We introduce an approach for equipping a simple language-to-code model to handle complex utterances via a process of hierarchical natural language decomposition. Our approach uses a pre-trained language model to decompose a complex utterance into a sequence of smaller natural language steps, then interprets each step using the language-to-code model. To test our approach, we collect and release DeCU -- a new NL-to-program benchmark to evaluate Decomposition of Complex Utterances. Experiments show that the proposed approach enables the interpretation of complex utterances with almost no complex training data, while outperforming standard few-shot prompting approaches.

Our everyday lives now heavily rely on artificial intelligence (AI) powered large language models (LLMs). Like regular users, programmers are also benefiting from the newest large language models. In response to the critical role that AI models play in modern software development, this study presents a thorough evaluation of leading programming assistants, including ChatGPT, Gemini(Bard AI), AlphaCode, and GitHub Copilot. The evaluation is based on tasks like natural language processing and code generation accuracy in different programming languages like Java, Python and C++. Based on the results, it has emphasized their strengths and weaknesses and the importance of further modifications to increase the reliability and accuracy of the latest popular models. Although these AI assistants illustrate a high level of progress in language understanding and code generation, along with ethical considerations and responsible usage, they provoke a necessity for discussion. With time, developing more refined AI technology is essential for achieving advanced solutions in various fields, especially with the knowledge of the feature intricacies of these models and their implications. This study offers a comparison of different LLMs and provides essential feedback on the rapidly changing area of AI models. It also emphasizes the need for ethical developmental practices to actualize AI models' full potential.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities in mathematics and logical reasoning tasks. Prior research indicates that LLMs pre-trained with programming language data exhibit high mathematical and reasoning abilities; however, this causal relationship has not been rigorously tested. Our research aims to verify which programming languages and features during pre-training affect logical inference performance. Specifically, we pre-trained decoder-based language models from scratch using datasets from ten programming languages (e.g., Python, C, Java) and three natural language datasets (Wikipedia, Fineweb, C4) under identical conditions. Thereafter, we evaluated the trained models in a few-shot in-context learning setting on logical reasoning tasks: FLD and bAbi, which do not require commonsense or world knowledge. The results demonstrate that nearly all models trained with programming languages consistently outperform those trained with natural languages, indicating that programming languages contain factors that elicit logic inference performance. In addition, we found that models trained with programming languages exhibit a better ability to follow instructions compared to those trained with natural languages. Further analysis reveals that the depth of Abstract Syntax Trees representing parsed results of programs also affects logical reasoning performance. These findings will offer insights into the essential elements of pre-training for acquiring the foundational abilities of LLMs.

Twenty-seven years ago, E. Freuder highlighted that "Constraint programming represents one of the closest approaches computer science has yet made to the Holy Grail of programming: the user states the problem, the computer solves it". Nowadays, CP users have great modeling tools available (like Minizinc and CPMpy), allowing them to formulate the problem and then let a solver do the rest of the job, getting closer to the stated goal. However, this still requires the CP user to know the formalism and respect it. Another significant challenge lies in the expertise required to effectively model combinatorial problems. All this limits the wider adoption of CP. In this position paper, we investigate a possible approach to leverage pre-trained Large Language Models to extract models from textual problem descriptions. More specifically, we take inspiration from the Natural Language Processing for Optimization (NL4OPT) challenge and present early results with a decomposition-based prompting approach to GPT Models.

Code quality is and will be a crucial factor while developing new software code, requiring appropriate tools to ensure functional and reliable code. Machine learning techniques are still rarely used for software engineering tools, missing out the potential benefits of its application. Natural language processing has shown the potential to process text data regarding a variety of tasks. We argue, that such models can also show similar benefits for software code processing. In this paper, we investigate how models used for natural language processing can be trained upon software code. We introduce a data retrieval pipeline for software code and train a model upon Java software code. The resulting model, JavaBERT, shows a high accuracy on the masked language modeling task showing its potential for software engineering tools.

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.

Programming language processing (similar to natural language processing) is a hot research topic in the field of software engineering; it has also aroused growing interest in the artificial intelligence community. However, different from a natural language sentence, a program contains rich, explicit, and complicated structural information. Hence, traditional NLP models may be inappropriate for programs. In this paper, we propose a novel tree-based convolutional neural network (TBCNN) for programming language processing, in which a convolution kernel is designed over programs' abstract syntax trees to capture structural information. TBCNN is a generic architecture for programming language processing; our experiments show its effectiveness in two different program analysis tasks: classifying programs according to functionality, and detecting code snippets of certain patterns. TBCNN outperforms baseline methods, including several neural models for NLP.

We introduce transductive program synthesis, a new formulation of the program synthesis task that explicitly leverages test inputs during synthesis. While prior approaches to program synthesis--whether based on natural language descriptions or input-output examples--typically aim to generalize from training examples, they often struggle with robustness, especially in real-world settings where training examples are limited and test inputs involve various edge cases. To address this, we propose a novel framework that improves robustness by treating synthesis as an active learning over a finite hypothesis class defined by programs' outputs. We use an LLM to predict outputs for selected test inputs and eliminate inconsistent hypotheses, where the inputs are chosen via a greedy maximin algorithm to minimize the number of LLM queries required. We evaluate our approach on four benchmarks: Playgol, MBPP+, 1D-ARC, and programmatic world modeling on MiniGrid. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves program synthesis in both accuracy and efficiency. We release our code at https://github.com/klee972/SYNTRA.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of generating complete applications from natural language instructions, creating new opportunities in science and education. In these domains, interactive scientific demonstrations are particularly valuable for explaining concepts, supporting new teaching methods, and presenting research findings. Generating such demonstrations requires models to combine accurate scientific knowledge with the ability to implement interactive front-end code that behaves correctly and responds to user actions. This capability goes beyond the scope of existing benchmarks, which typically evaluate either knowledge question answering without grounding in code or static web code generation without scientific interactivity. To evaluate this integrated ability, we design a hybrid framework that combines programmatic functional testing to rigorously verify interaction logic with visually-grounded qualitative testing to assess rendered outputs against reference snapshots. Building on this framework, we present InteractScience, a benchmark consisting of a substantial set of carefully designed questions across five scientific domains, each paired with unit tests, reference snapshots, and checklists. We evaluate 30 leading open- and closed-source LLMs and report results that highlight ongoing weaknesses in integrating domain knowledge with interactive front-end coding. Our work positions InteractScience as the first benchmark to automatically measure this combined capability with realistic interactive operations, providing a foundation for advancing reliable and educationally useful scientific demonstration code generation. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/InteractScience.

The strong performance of large language models (LLMs) on natural language processing tasks raises extensive discussion on their application to code generation. Recent work suggests multiple sampling approaches to improve initial code generation accuracy or program repair approaches to refine the code. However, these methods suffer from LLMs' inefficiencies and limited reasoning capacity. In this work, we propose an LLM programming workflow (LPW) designed to improve both initial code generation and subsequent refinements within a structured two-phase workflow. Specifically, in the solution generation phase, the LLM first outlines a solution plan that decomposes the problem into manageable sub-problems and then verifies the generated solution plan through visible test cases. Subsequently, in the code implementation phase, the LLM initially drafts a code according to the solution plan and its verification. If the generated code fails the visible tests, the plan verification serves as the intended natural language solution to inform the refinement process for correcting bugs. We further introduce SLPW, a sampling variant of LPW, which initially generates multiple solution plans and plan verifications, produces a program for each plan and its verification, and refines each program as necessary until one successfully passes the visible tests. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods across various existing LLMs, our experimental results show that LPW significantly improves the Pass@1 accuracy by up to 16.4% on well-established text-to-code generation benchmarks, especially with a notable improvement of around 10% on challenging benchmarks. Additionally, SLPW demonstrates up to a 5.6% improvement over LPW and sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy on various benchmarks, e.g., 98.2% on HumanEval, 84.8% on MBPP, 64.0% on APPS, and 35.3% on CodeContest, using GPT-4o as the backbone.

Recently, LLM agents have made rapid progress in improving their programming capabilities. However, existing benchmarks lack the ability to automatically evaluate from users' perspective, and also lack the explainability of the results of LLM agents' code generation capabilities. Thus, we introduce ProjectEval, a new benchmark for LLM agents project-level code generation's automated evaluation by simulating user interaction. ProjectEval is constructed by LLM with human reviewing. It has three different level inputs of natural languages or code skeletons. ProjectEval can evaluate the generated projects by user interaction simulation for execution, and by code similarity through existing objective indicators. Through ProjectEval, we find that systematic engineering project code, overall understanding of the project and comprehensive analysis capability are the keys for LLM agents to achieve practical projects. Our findings and benchmark provide valuable insights for developing more effective programming agents that can be deployed in future real-world production.

Implementing automated unit tests is an important but time-consuming activity in software development. To assist developers in this task, many techniques for automating unit test generation have been developed. However, despite this effort, usable tools exist for very few programming languages. Moreover, studies have found that automatically generated tests suffer poor readability and do not resemble developer-written tests. In this work, we present a rigorous investigation of how large language models (LLMs) can help bridge the gap. We describe a generic pipeline that incorporates static analysis to guide LLMs in generating compilable and high-coverage test cases. We illustrate how the pipeline can be applied to different programming languages, specifically Java and Python, and to complex software requiring environment mocking. We conducted an empirical study to assess the quality of the generated tests in terms of code coverage and test naturalness -- evaluating them on standard as well as enterprise Java applications and a large Python benchmark. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based test generation, when guided by static analysis, can be competitive with, and even outperform, state-of-the-art test-generation techniques in coverage achieved while also producing considerably more natural test cases that developers find easy to understand. We also present the results of a user study, conducted with 161 professional developers, that highlights the naturalness characteristics of the tests generated by our approach.

LLM-assisted hardware verification is gaining substantial attention due to its potential to significantly reduce the cost and effort of crafting effective testbenches. It also serves as a critical enabler for LLM-aided end-to-end hardware language design. However, existing current LLMs often struggle with Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, resulting in testbenches that exhibit functional errors in Hardware Description Languages (HDL) logic. Motivated by the strong performance of LLMs in Python code generation under inference-time sampling strategies, and their promising capabilities as judge agents, we propose PRO-V a fully program generation multi-agent system for robust RTL verification. Pro-V incorporates an efficient best-of-n iterative sampling strategy to enhance the correctness of generated testbenches. Moreover, it introduces an LLM-as-a-judge aid validation framework featuring an automated prompt generation pipeline. By converting rule-based static analysis from the compiler into natural language through in-context learning, this pipeline enables LLMs to assist the compiler in determining whether verification failures stem from errors in the RTL design or the testbench. PRO-V attains a verification accuracy of 87.17% on golden RTL implementations and 76.28% on RTL mutants. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/stable-lab/Pro-V.

Accurately classifying chemical structures is essential for cheminformatics and bioinformatics, including tasks such as identifying bioactive compounds of interest, screening molecules for toxicity to humans, finding non-organic compounds with desirable material properties, or organizing large chemical libraries for drug discovery or environmental monitoring. However, manual classification is labor-intensive and difficult to scale to large chemical databases. Existing automated approaches either rely on manually constructed classification rules, or the use of deep learning methods that lack explainability. This work presents an approach that uses generative artificial intelligence to automatically write chemical classifier programs for classes in the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) database. These programs can be used for efficient deterministic run-time classification of SMILES structures, with natural language explanations. The programs themselves constitute an explainable computable ontological model of chemical class nomenclature, which we call the ChEBI Chemical Class Program Ontology (C3PO). We validated our approach against the ChEBI database, and compared our results against state of the art deep learning models. We also demonstrate the use of C3PO to classify out-of-distribution examples taken from metabolomics repositories and natural product databases. We also demonstrate the potential use of our approach to find systematic classification errors in existing chemical databases, and show how an ensemble artificial intelligence approach combining generated ontologies, automated literature search, and multimodal vision models can be used to pinpoint potential errors requiring expert validation

Learning how the world works is central to building AI agents that can adapt to complex environments. Traditional world models based on deep learning demand vast amounts of training data, and do not flexibly update their knowledge from sparse observations. Recent advances in program synthesis using Large Language Models (LLMs) give an alternate approach which learns world models represented as source code, supporting strong generalization from little data. To date, application of program-structured world models remains limited to natural language and grid-world domains. We introduce a novel program synthesis method for effectively modeling complex, non-gridworld domains by representing a world model as an exponentially-weighted product of programmatic experts (PoE-World) synthesized by LLMs. We show that this approach can learn complex, stochastic world models from just a few observations. We evaluate the learned world models by embedding them in a model-based planning agent, demonstrating efficient performance and generalization to unseen levels on Atari's Pong and Montezuma's Revenge. We release our code and display the learned world models and videos of the agent's gameplay at https://topwasu.github.io/poe-world.

Block-based programming languages like Scratch are increasingly popular for programming education and end-user programming. Recent program analyses build on the insight that source code can be modelled using techniques from natural language processing. Many of the regularities of source code that support this approach are due to the syntactic overhead imposed by textual programming languages. This syntactic overhead, however, is precisely what block-based languages remove in order to simplify programming. Consequently, it is unclear how well this modelling approach performs on block-based programming languages. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of language models for the popular block-based programming language Scratch. We model Scratch programs using n-gram models, the most essential type of language model, and transformers, a popular deep learning model. Evaluation on the example tasks of code completion and bug finding confirm that blocks inhibit predictability, but the use of language models is nevertheless feasible. Our findings serve as foundation for improving tooling and analyses for block-based languages.

Question Answering on Electronic Health Records (EHR-QA) has a significant impact on the healthcare domain, and it is being actively studied. Previous research on structured EHR-QA focuses on converting natural language queries into query language such as SQL or SPARQL (NLQ2Query), so the problem scope is limited to pre-defined data types by the specific query language. In order to expand the EHR-QA task beyond this limitation to handle multi-modal medical data and solve complex inference in the future, more primitive systemic language is needed. In this paper, we design the program-based model (NLQ2Program) for EHR-QA as the first step towards the future direction. We tackle MIMICSPARQL*, the graph-based EHR-QA dataset, via a program-based approach in a semi-supervised manner in order to overcome the absence of gold programs. Without the gold program, our proposed model shows comparable performance to the previous state-of-the-art model, which is an NLQ2Query model (0.9% gain). In addition, for a reliable EHR-QA model, we apply the uncertainty decomposition method to measure the ambiguity in the input question. We empirically confirmed data uncertainty is most indicative of the ambiguity in the input question.

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.

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

We present VISPROG, a neuro-symbolic approach to solving complex and compositional visual tasks given natural language instructions. VISPROG avoids the need for any task-specific training. Instead, it uses the in-context learning ability of large language models to generate python-like modular programs, which are then executed to get both the solution and a comprehensive and interpretable rationale. Each line of the generated program may invoke one of several off-the-shelf computer vision models, image processing routines, or python functions to produce intermediate outputs that may be consumed by subsequent parts of the program. We demonstrate the flexibility of VISPROG on 4 diverse tasks - compositional visual question answering, zero-shot reasoning on image pairs, factual knowledge object tagging, and language-guided image editing. We believe neuro-symbolic approaches like VISPROG are an exciting avenue to easily and effectively expand the scope of AI systems to serve the long tail of complex tasks that people may wish to perform.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on code completion have been shown to be capable of synthesizing simple Python programs from docstrings [1]. We find that these code-writing LLMs can be re-purposed to write robot policy code, given natural language commands. Specifically, policy code can express functions or feedback loops that process perception outputs (e.g.,from object detectors [2], [3]) and parameterize control primitive APIs. When provided as input several example language commands (formatted as comments) followed by corresponding policy code (via few-shot prompting), LLMs can take in new commands and autonomously re-compose API calls to generate new policy code respectively. By chaining classic logic structures and referencing third-party libraries (e.g., NumPy, Shapely) to perform arithmetic, LLMs used in this way can write robot policies that (i) exhibit spatial-geometric reasoning, (ii) generalize to new instructions, and (iii) prescribe precise values (e.g., velocities) to ambiguous descriptions ("faster") depending on context (i.e., behavioral commonsense). This paper presents code as policies: a robot-centric formulation of language model generated programs (LMPs) that can represent reactive policies (e.g., impedance controllers), as well as waypoint-based policies (vision-based pick and place, trajectory-based control), demonstrated across multiple real robot platforms. Central to our approach is prompting hierarchical code-gen (recursively defining undefined functions), which can write more complex code and also improves state-of-the-art to solve 39.8% of problems on the HumanEval [1] benchmark. Code and videos are available at https://code-as-policies.github.io

Is natural-language-driven earth observation data analysis now feasible with the assistance of Large Language Models (LLMs)? For open science in service of public interest, feasibility requires reliably high accuracy, interactive latencies, low (sustainable) costs, open LLMs, and openly maintainable software -- hence, the challenge. What are the techniques and programming system requirements necessary for satisfying these constraints, and what is the corresponding development and maintenance burden in practice? This study lays the groundwork for exploring these questions, introducing an impactful earth science use-case, and providing a software framework with evaluation data and metrics, along with initial results from employing model scaling, prompt-optimization, and inference-time scaling optimization techniques. While we attain high accuracy (near 100%) across 10 of 11 metrics, the analysis further considers cost (token-spend), latency, and maintainability across this space of techniques. Finally, we enumerate opportunities for further research, general programming and evaluation framework development, and ongoing work for a comprehensive, deployable solution. This is a call for collaboration and contribution.

AI-based code generators have gained a fundamental role in assisting developers in writing software starting from natural language (NL). However, since these large language models are trained on massive volumes of data collected from unreliable online sources (e.g., GitHub, Hugging Face), AI models become an easy target for data poisoning attacks, in which an attacker corrupts the training data by injecting a small amount of poison into it, i.e., astutely crafted malicious samples. In this position paper, we address the security of AI code generators by identifying a novel data poisoning attack that results in the generation of vulnerable code. Next, we devise an extensive evaluation of how these attacks impact state-of-the-art models for code generation. Lastly, we discuss potential solutions to overcome this threat.

This paper presents a quantitative program verification infrastructure for discrete probabilistic programs. Our infrastructure can be viewed as the probabilistic analogue of Boogie: its central components are an intermediate verification language (IVL) together with a real-valued logic. Our IVL provides a programming-language-style for expressing verification conditions whose validity implies the correctness of a program under investigation. As our focus is on verifying quantitative properties such as bounds on expected outcomes, expected run-times, or termination probabilities, off-the-shelf IVLs based on Boolean first-order logic do not suffice. Instead, a paradigm shift from the standard Boolean to a real-valued domain is required. Our IVL features quantitative generalizations of standard verification constructs such as assume- and assert-statements. Verification conditions are generated by a weakest-precondition-style semantics, based on our real-valued logic. We show that our verification infrastructure supports natural encodings of numerous verification techniques from the literature. With our SMT-based implementation, we automatically verify a variety of benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this establishes the first deductive verification infrastructure for expectation-based reasoning about probabilistic programs.

Within this study, we propose a new approach for natural language processing using Bayesian networks to predict and analyze the context and how this approach can be applied to the Community Question Answering domain. We discuss how Bayesian networks can detect semantic relationships and dependencies between entities, and this is connected to different score-based approaches of structure-learning. We compared the Bayesian networks with different score metrics, such as the BIC, BDeu, K2 and Chow-Liu trees. Our proposed approach out-performs the baseline model at the precision metric. We also discuss the influence of penalty terms on the structure of Bayesian networks and how they can be used to analyze the relationships between entities. In addition, we examine the visualization of directed acyclic graphs to analyze semantic relationships. The article further identifies issues with detecting certain semantic classes that are separated in the structure of directed acyclic graphs. Finally, we evaluate potential improvements for the Bayesian network approach.

Program synthesis aims to create accurate, executable code from natural language descriptions. This field has leveraged the power of reinforcement learning (RL) in conjunction with large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing code generation capabilities. This integration focuses on directly optimizing functional correctness, transcending conventional supervised losses. While current literature predominantly favors policy-based algorithms, attributes of program synthesis suggest a natural compatibility with value-based methods. This stems from rich collection of off-policy programs developed by human programmers, and the straightforward verification of generated programs through automated unit testing (i.e. easily obtainable rewards in RL language). Diverging from the predominant use of policy-based algorithms, our work explores the applicability of value-based approaches, leading to the development of our B-Coder (pronounced Bellman coder). Yet, training value-based methods presents challenges due to the enormous search space inherent to program synthesis. To this end, we propose an initialization protocol for RL agents utilizing pre-trained LMs and a conservative Bellman operator to reduce training complexities. Moreover, we demonstrate how to leverage the learned value functions as a dual strategy to post-process generated programs. Our empirical evaluations demonstrated B-Coder's capability in achieving state-of-the-art performance compared with policy-based methods. Remarkably, this achievement is reached with minimal reward engineering effort, highlighting the effectiveness of value-based RL, independent of reward designs.

Program-of-Thought (PoT), which aims to use programming language instead of natural language as an intermediate step in reasoning, is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems. Since different programming languages excel in different areas, it is natural to use the most suitable language for solving specific problems. However, current PoT research only focuses on single language PoT, ignoring the differences between different programming languages. Therefore, this paper proposes an multilingual program reasoning method, MultiLingPoT. This method allows the model to answer questions using multiple programming languages by fine-tuning on multilingual data. Additionally, prior and posterior hybrid methods are used to help the model select the most suitable language for each problem. Our experimental results show that the training of MultiLingPoT improves each program's mathematical reasoning by about 2.5\%. Moreover, with proper mixing, the performance of MultiLingPoT can be further improved, achieving a 6\% increase compared to the single-language PoT with the data augmentation.Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/Nianqi-Li/MultiLingPoT.

How does language inform our downstream thinking? In particular, how do humans make meaning from language -- and how can we leverage a theory of linguistic meaning to build machines that think in more human-like ways? In this paper, we propose rational meaning construction, a computational framework for language-informed thinking that combines neural models of language with probabilistic models for rational inference. We frame linguistic meaning as a context-sensitive mapping from natural language into a probabilistic language of thought (PLoT) -- a general-purpose symbolic substrate for probabilistic, generative world modeling. Our architecture integrates two powerful computational tools that have not previously come together: we model thinking with probabilistic programs, an expressive representation for flexible commonsense reasoning; and we model meaning construction with large language models (LLMs), which support broad-coverage translation from natural language utterances to code expressions in a probabilistic programming language. We illustrate our framework in action through examples covering four core domains from cognitive science: probabilistic reasoning, logical and relational reasoning, visual and physical reasoning, and social reasoning about agents and their plans. In each, we show that LLMs can generate context-sensitive translations that capture pragmatically-appropriate linguistic meanings, while Bayesian inference with the generated programs supports coherent and robust commonsense reasoning. We extend our framework to integrate cognitively-motivated symbolic modules to provide a unified commonsense thinking interface from language. Finally, we explore how language can drive the construction of world models themselves.

Mathematical equations have been unreasonably effective in describing complex natural phenomena across various scientific disciplines. However, discovering such insightful equations from data presents significant challenges due to the necessity of navigating extremely high-dimensional combinatorial and nonlinear hypothesis spaces. Traditional methods of equation discovery largely focus on extracting equations from data alone, often neglecting the rich domain-specific prior knowledge that scientists typically depend on. To bridge this gap, we introduce LLM-SR, a novel approach that leverages the extensive scientific knowledge and robust code generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to discover scientific equations from data in an efficient manner. Specifically, LLM-SR treats equations as programs with mathematical operators and combines LLMs' scientific priors with evolutionary search over equation programs. The LLM iteratively proposes new equation skeletons, drawing from its physical understanding, which are then optimized against data to estimate skeleton parameters. We demonstrate LLM-SR's effectiveness across three diverse scientific domains, where it discovers physically accurate equations that provide significantly better fits to in-domain and out-of-domain data compared to the well-established equation discovery baselines

Code large language models (Code LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation. Nonetheless, most existing works focus on boosting code LLMs from the perspective of programming capabilities, while their natural language capabilities receive less attention. To fill this gap, we thus propose a novel framework, comprising two modules: AttentionExtractor, which is responsible for extracting key phrases from the user's natural language requirements, and AttentionCoder, which leverages these extracted phrases to generate target code to solve the requirement. This framework pioneers an innovative idea by seamlessly integrating code LLMs with traditional natural language processing tools. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, we craft a new code generation benchmark, called MultiNL-H, covering five natural languages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Open-domain code generation aims to generate code in a general-purpose programming language (such as Python) from natural language (NL) intents. Motivated by the intuition that developers usually retrieve resources on the web when writing code, we explore the effectiveness of incorporating two varieties of external knowledge into NL-to-code generation: automatically mined NL-code pairs from the online programming QA forum StackOverflow and programming language API documentation. Our evaluations show that combining the two sources with data augmentation and retrieval-based data re-sampling improves the current state-of-the-art by up to 2.2% absolute BLEU score on the code generation testbed CoNaLa. The code and resources are available at https://github.com/neulab/external-knowledge-codegen.

Assessing the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) often requires the creation of ad-hoc evaluations. Currently, building new benchmarks requires tremendous amounts of manual work for each specific analysis. This makes the evaluation process tedious and costly. In this paper, we present APEx, Automatic Programming of Experiments, the first framework for automatic benchmarking of LMMs. Given a research question expressed in natural language, APEx leverages a large language model (LLM) and a library of pre-specified tools to generate a set of experiments for the model at hand, and progressively compile a scientific report. The report drives the testing procedure: based on the current status of the investigation, APEx chooses which experiments to perform and whether the results are sufficient to draw conclusions. Finally, the LLM refines the report, presenting the results to the user in natural language. Thanks to its modularity, our framework is flexible and extensible as new tools become available. Empirically, APEx reproduces the findings of existing studies while allowing for arbitrary analyses and hypothesis testing.

Neural audio synthesis methods now allow specifying ideas in natural language. However, these methods produce results that cannot be easily tweaked, as they are based on large latent spaces and up to billions of uninterpretable parameters. We propose a text-to-audio generation method that leverages a virtual modular sound synthesizer with only 78 parameters. Synthesizers have long been used by skilled sound designers for media like music and film due to their flexibility and intuitive controls. Our method, CTAG, iteratively updates a synthesizer's parameters to produce high-quality audio renderings of text prompts that can be easily inspected and tweaked. Sounds produced this way are also more abstract, capturing essential conceptual features over fine-grained acoustic details, akin to how simple sketches can vividly convey visual concepts. Our results show how CTAG produces sounds that are distinctive, perceived as artistic, and yet similarly identifiable to recent neural audio synthesis models, positioning it as a valuable and complementary tool.

Generating low-level robot task plans from high-level natural language instructions remains a challenging problem. Although large language models have shown promising results in generating plans, the accuracy of the output remains unverified. Furthermore, the lack of domain-specific language data poses a limitation on the applicability of these models. In this paper, we propose CLAIRIFY, a novel approach that combines automatic iterative prompting with program verification to ensure programs written in data-scarce domain-specific language are syntactically valid and incorporate environment constraints. Our approach provides effective guidance to the language model on generating structured-like task plans by incorporating any errors as feedback, while the verifier ensures the syntactic accuracy of the generated plans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CLAIRIFY in planning chemistry experiments by achieving state-of-the-art results. We also show that the generated plans can be executed on a real robot by integrating them with a task and motion planner.

We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by a short Python program f, and the goal is to find an input which makes f return True. The puzzles are objective in that each one is specified entirely by the source code of its verifier f, so evaluating f is all that is needed to test a candidate solution. They do not require an answer key or input/output examples, nor do they depend on natural language understanding. The dataset is comprehensive in that it spans problems of a range of difficulties and domains, ranging from trivial string manipulation problems, to classic programming puzzles (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), to interview/competitive-programming problems (e.g., dynamic programming), to longstanding open problems in algorithms and mathematics (e.g., factoring). We develop baseline enumerative program synthesis, GPT-3 and Codex solvers that are capable of solving puzzles -- even without access to any reference solutions -- by learning from their own past solutions. Codex performs best, solving up to 18% of 397 test problems with a single try and 80% of the problems with 1,000 tries per problem. In a small user study, we find a positive correlation between puzzle-solving performance and coding experience, and between the puzzle difficulty for humans and AI solvers. Therefore, further improvements on P3 could have a significant impact on many program synthesis areas.

A transcompiler, also known as source-to-source translator, is a system that converts source code from a high-level programming language (such as C++ or Python) to another. Transcompilers are primarily used for interoperability, and to port codebases written in an obsolete or deprecated language (e.g. COBOL, Python 2) to a modern one. They typically rely on handcrafted rewrite rules, applied to the source code abstract syntax tree. Unfortunately, the resulting translations often lack readability, fail to respect the target language conventions, and require manual modifications in order to work properly. The overall translation process is timeconsuming and requires expertise in both the source and target languages, making code-translation projects expensive. Although neural models significantly outperform their rule-based counterparts in the context of natural language translation, their applications to transcompilation have been limited due to the scarcity of parallel data in this domain. In this paper, we propose to leverage recent approaches in unsupervised machine translation to train a fully unsupervised neural transcompiler. We train our model on source code from open source GitHub projects, and show that it can translate functions between C++, Java, and Python with high accuracy. Our method relies exclusively on monolingual source code, requires no expertise in the source or target languages, and can easily be generalized to other programming languages. We also build and release a test set composed of 852 parallel functions, along with unit tests to check the correctness of translations. We show that our model outperforms rule-based commercial baselines by a significant margin.

The blind application of machine learning runs the risk of amplifying biases present in data. Such a danger is facing us with word embedding, a popular framework to represent text data as vectors which has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks. We show that even word embeddings trained on Google News articles exhibit female/male gender stereotypes to a disturbing extent. This raises concerns because their widespread use, as we describe, often tends to amplify these biases. Geometrically, gender bias is first shown to be captured by a direction in the word embedding. Second, gender neutral words are shown to be linearly separable from gender definition words in the word embedding. Using these properties, we provide a methodology for modifying an embedding to remove gender stereotypes, such as the association between between the words receptionist and female, while maintaining desired associations such as between the words queen and female. We define metrics to quantify both direct and indirect gender biases in embeddings, and develop algorithms to "debias" the embedding. Using crowd-worker evaluation as well as standard benchmarks, we empirically demonstrate that our algorithms significantly reduce gender bias in embeddings while preserving the its useful properties such as the ability to cluster related concepts and to solve analogy tasks. The resulting embeddings can be used in applications without amplifying gender bias.

Solving algebraic word problems requires executing a series of arithmetic operations---a program---to obtain a final answer. However, since programs can be arbitrarily complicated, inducing them directly from question-answer pairs is a formidable challenge. To make this task more feasible, we solve these problems by generating answer rationales, sequences of natural language and human-readable mathematical expressions that derive the final answer through a series of small steps. Although rationales do not explicitly specify programs, they provide a scaffolding for their structure via intermediate milestones. To evaluate our approach, we have created a new 100,000-sample dataset of questions, answers and rationales. Experimental results show that indirect supervision of program learning via answer rationales is a promising strategy for inducing arithmetic programs.

Large language and multimodal models have shown remarkable successes on various benchmarks focused on specific skills such as general-purpose programming, natural language understanding, math word problem-solving, and visual question answering. However, it is unclear how well these models perform on tasks that require a combination of these skills. In this paper, we curate a novel program synthesis benchmark based on the XLogoOnline visual programming environment. The benchmark comprises 85 real-world tasks from the Mini-level of the XLogoOnline environment, each requiring a combination of different skills such as spatial planning, basic programming, and logical reasoning. Our evaluation shows that current state-of-the-art models like GPT-4V and Llama3-70B struggle to solve these tasks, achieving only 20% and 2.35% success rates. Next, we develop a fine-tuning pipeline to boost the performance of models by leveraging a large-scale synthetic training dataset with over 80000 tasks. Moreover, we showcase how emulator-driven feedback can be used to design a curriculum over training data distribution. We showcase that a fine-tuned Llama3-8B drastically outperforms GPT-4V and Llama3-70B models, and provide an in-depth analysis of the models' expertise across different skill dimensions. We will publicly release the benchmark for future research on program synthesis in visual programming.

Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. To alleviate this, we propose including some of a user's preferences and instructions in natural language -- collectively termed standing instructions -- as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states I'm hungry, their previously expressed preference for Persian food will be automatically added to the LLM prompt, so as to influence the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that think with images can interactively use tools to reason about visual inputs, but current approaches often rely on a narrow set of tools with limited real-world necessity and scalability. In this work, we first reveal a critical and previously overlooked weakness: even state-of-the-art MLLMs are surprisingly brittle, showing significant performance degradation on images with simple orientation changes or natural corruptions, underscoring the need for more robust tool-based reasoning. To address this, we propose CodeVision, a flexible and scalable code-as-tool framework where the model generates code as a universal interface to invoke any image operation, moving beyond fixed tool registries. We train our model using a two-stage methodology, beginning with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset curated for complex, multi-turn tool composition and error recovery, followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel and dense process reward function to encourage strategic and efficient tool use. To facilitate this research, we construct new SFT and RL datasets and introduce a challenging new benchmark suite designed to rigorously evaluate robustness to orientation changes and multi-tool reasoning. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL series show that our approach significantly improves model performance and fosters emergent capabilities such as flexible tool composition, efficient chained execution, and robust error recovery from runtime feedback. Code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/CodeVision.

In the evolving landscape of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a unique phenomenon known as emergent abilities, demonstrating adeptness across numerous tasks, from text summarization to code generation. While these abilities open up novel avenues in software design and crafting, their incorporation presents substantial challenges. Developers grapple with decisions surrounding the direct embedding of LLMs within applications versus employing them for code generation. Moreover, effective prompt design becomes a critical concern, given the necessity of data extraction from natural language outputs. To address these intricacies, this paper introduces AskIt, a domain-specific language (DSL) specifically designed for LLMs. AskIt simplifies LLM integration, offering type-guided output control, template-based function definitions, and a unified interface that diminishes the distinction between LLM-based code generation and application integration. Furthermore, through Programming by Example (PBE), AskIt harnesses the power of few-shot learning at the programming language level. Our evaluations underscore AskIt's potency. Across 50 tasks, AskIt generated concise prompts for the given tasks, achieving a 16.14% reduction in prompt length relative to benchmarks. Additionally, by enabling the transition from direct LLM application usage to function generation, AskIt achieved significant speedups, as observed in our GSM8K benchmark experiments. Through these advancements, AskIt streamlines the integration of LLMs in software development, offering a more efficient, versatile approach for leveraging emergent abilities. The implementations of AskIt in TypeScript and Python are available at https://github.com/katsumiok/ts-askit and https://github.com/katsumiok/pyaskit, respectively.

Software engineers working with the same programming language (PL) may speak different natural languages (NLs) and vice versa, erecting huge barriers to communication and working efficiency. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of generative pre-training in computer programs, yet they are always English-centric. In this work, we step towards bridging the gap between multilingual NLs and multilingual PLs for large language models (LLMs). We release ERNIE-Code, a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs. We employ two methods for universal cross-lingual pre-training: span-corruption language modeling that learns patterns from monolingual NL or PL; and pivot-based translation language modeling that relies on parallel data of many NLs and PLs. Extensive results show that ERNIE-Code outperforms previous multilingual LLMs for PL or NL across a wide range of end tasks of code intelligence, including multilingual code-to-text, text-to-code, code-to-code, and text-to-text generation. We further show its advantage of zero-shot prompting on multilingual code summarization and text-to-text translation. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoints.

The Natural Language for Optimization (NL4Opt) Competition was created to investigate methods of extracting the meaning and formulation of an optimization problem based on its text description. Specifically, the goal of the competition is to increase the accessibility and usability of optimization solvers by allowing non-experts to interface with them using natural language. We separate this challenging goal into two sub-tasks: (1) recognize and label the semantic entities that correspond to the components of the optimization problem; (2) generate a meaning representation (i.e., a logical form) of the problem from its detected problem entities. The first task aims to reduce ambiguity by detecting and tagging the entities of the optimization problems. The second task creates an intermediate representation of the linear programming (LP) problem that is converted into a format that can be used by commercial solvers. In this report, we present the LP word problem dataset and shared tasks for the NeurIPS 2022 competition. Furthermore, we investigate and compare the performance of the ChatGPT large language model against the winning solutions. Through this competition, we hope to bring interest towards the development of novel machine learning applications and datasets for optimization modeling.

Pre-trained programming language (PL) models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, etc.,) have the potential to automate software engineering tasks involving code understanding and code generation. However, these models operate in the natural channel of code, i.e., they are primarily concerned with the human understanding of the code. They are not robust to changes in the input and thus, are potentially susceptible to adversarial attacks in the natural channel. We propose, CodeAttack, a simple yet effective black-box attack model that uses code structure to generate effective, efficient, and imperceptible adversarial code samples and demonstrates the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art PL models to code-specific adversarial attacks. We evaluate the transferability of CodeAttack on several code-code (translation and repair) and code-NL (summarization) tasks across different programming languages. CodeAttack outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial NLP attack models to achieve the best overall drop in performance while being more efficient, imperceptible, consistent, and fluent. The code can be found at https://github.com/reddy-lab-code-research/CodeAttack.

As large language models (LLMs) excel at code reasoning, a natural question arises: can an LLM execute programs (i.e., act as an interpreter) purely based on a programming language's formal semantics? If so, it will enable rapid prototyping of new programming languages and language features. We study this question using the imperative language IMP (a subset of C), formalized via small-step operational semantics (SOS) and rewriting-based operational semantics (K-semantics). We introduce three evaluation sets-Human-Written, LLM-Translated, and Fuzzer- Generated-whose difficulty is controlled by code-complexity metrics spanning the size, control-flow, and data-flow axes. Given a program and its semantics formalized with SOS/K-semantics, models are evaluated on three tasks ranging from coarse to fine: (1) final-state prediction, (2) semantic rule prediction, and (3) execution trace prediction. To distinguish pretraining memorization from semantic competence, we define two nonstandard semantics obtained through systematic mutations of the standard rules. Across strong code/reasoning LLMs, performance drops under nonstandard semantics despite high performance under the standard one. We further find that (i) there are patterns to different model failures, (ii) most reasoning models perform exceptionally well on coarse grained tasks involving reasoning about highly complex programs often containing nested loop depths beyond five, and surprisingly, (iii) providing formal semantics helps on simple programs but often hurts on more complex ones. Overall, the results show a promise that LLMs could serve as programming language interpreters, but points to the lack of their robust semantics understanding. We release the benchmark and the supporting code at https://github.com/EngineeringSoftware/PLSemanticsBench.

Recent advances in artificial neural networks for machine learning, and language modeling in particular, have established a family of recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures that, unlike conventional RNNs with vector-form hidden states, use two-dimensional (2D) matrix-form hidden states. Such 2D-state RNNs, known as Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs), can be interpreted as a neural network whose synaptic weights (called fast weights) dynamically change over time as a function of input observations, and serve as short-term memory storage; corresponding synaptic weight modifications are controlled or programmed by another network (the programmer) whose parameters are trained (e.g., by gradient descent). In this Primer, we review the technical foundations of FWPs, their computational characteristics, and their connections to transformers and state space models. We also discuss connections between FWPs and models of synaptic plasticity in the brain, suggesting a convergence of natural and artificial intelligence.

Text-to-SQL transforms the user queries from natural language to executable SQL programs, enabling non-experts to interact with complex databases. Existing prompt-based methods craft meticulous text guidelines and examples to facilitate SQL generation, but their accuracy is hindered by the large semantic gap between the texts and the low-resource SQL programs. In this work, we propose Pi-SQL, which incorporates the high-resource Python program as a pivot to bridge between the natural language query and SQL program. In particular, Pi-SQL first generates Python programs that provide fine-grained step-by-step guidelines in their code blocks or comments, and then produces an SQL program following the guidance of each Python program. The final SQL program matches the reference Python program's query results and, through selection from candidates generated by different strategies, achieves superior execution speed, with a reward-based valid efficiency score up to 4.55 higher than the best-performing baseline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Pi-SQL, which improves the execution accuracy of the best-performing baseline by up to 3.20.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in automated code generation. However, existing approaches often rely heavily on pre-defined test cases, which become impractical in scenarios where such cases are unavailable. While prior works explore filtering techniques between programs and test cases, they overlook the refinement of test cases. To address this limitation, we introduce CoCoEvo, a novel LLM-based co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves programs and test cases. CoCoEvo eliminates the dependency on pre-defined test cases by generating both programs and test cases directly from natural language problem descriptions and function headers. The framework employs specialized evolutionary operators, including LLM-based crossover and mutation operators for program evolution, along with a test case generation operator for test case evolution. Additionally, we propose optimization strategies such as a crossover rate scheduler to balance exploration and convergence, and a multi-objective optimization method for test case selection. Experimental results on multiple state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that CoCoEvo surpasses existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in automated code generation and testing. These results underscore the potential of co-evolutionary techniques in advancing the field of automated programming.

Language models trained on internet-scale data sets have shown an impressive ability to solve problems in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. However, experience is showing that these models are frequently brittle in unexpected ways, and require significant scaffolding to ensure that they operate correctly in the larger systems that comprise "language-model agents." In this paper, we argue that behavior trees provide a unifying framework for combining language models with classical AI and traditional programming. We introduce Dendron, a Python library for programming language model agents using behavior trees. We demonstrate the approach embodied by Dendron in three case studies: building a chat agent, a camera-based infrastructure inspection agent for use on a mobile robot or vehicle, and an agent that has been built to satisfy safety constraints that it did not receive through instruction tuning or RLHF.

This paper presents Okapi, a new dataset for Natural Language to executable web Application Programming Interfaces (NL2API). This dataset is in English and contains 22,508 questions and 9,019 unique API calls, covering three domains. We define new compositional generalization tasks for NL2API which explore the models' ability to extrapolate from simple API calls in the training set to new and more complex API calls in the inference phase. Also, the models are required to generate API calls that execute correctly as opposed to the existing approaches which evaluate queries with placeholder values. Our dataset is different than most of the existing compositional semantic parsing datasets because it is a non-synthetic dataset studying the compositional generalization in a low-resource setting. Okapi is a step towards creating realistic datasets and benchmarks for studying compositional generalization alongside the existing datasets and tasks. We report the generalization capabilities of sequence-to-sequence baseline models trained on a variety of the SCAN and Okapi datasets tasks. The best model achieves 15\% exact match accuracy when generalizing from simple API calls to more complex API calls. This highlights some challenges for future research. Okapi dataset and tasks are publicly available at https://aka.ms/nl2api/data.

Inductive program synthesis, or programming by example, requires synthesizing functions from input-output examples that generalize to unseen inputs. While large language model agents have shown promise in programming tasks guided by natural language, their ability to perform inductive program synthesis is underexplored. Existing evaluation protocols rely on static sets of examples and held-out tests, offering no feedback when synthesized functions are incorrect and failing to reflect real-world scenarios such as reverse engineering. We propose CodeARC, the Code Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge, a new evaluation framework where agents interact with a hidden target function by querying it with new inputs, synthesizing candidate functions, and iteratively refining their solutions using a differential testing oracle. This interactive setting encourages agents to perform function calls and self-correction based on feedback. We construct the first large-scale benchmark for general-purpose inductive program synthesis, featuring 1114 functions. Among 18 models evaluated, o3-mini performs best with a success rate of 52.7%, highlighting the difficulty of this task. Fine-tuning LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct on curated synthesis traces yields up to a 31% relative performance gain. CodeARC provides a more realistic and challenging testbed for evaluating LLM-based program synthesis and inductive reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex, hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating feedback for students. We investigate using LLMs to generate feedback for fixing syntax errors in Python programs, a key scenario in introductory programming. More concretely, given a student's buggy program, our goal is to generate feedback comprising a fixed program along with a natural language explanation describing the errors/fixes, inspired by how a human tutor would give feedback. While using LLMs is promising, the critical challenge is to ensure high precision in the generated feedback, which is imperative before deploying such technology in classrooms. The main research question we study is: Can we develop LLMs-based feedback generation techniques with a tunable precision parameter, giving educators quality control over the feedback that students receive? To this end, we introduce PyFiXV, our technique to generate high-precision feedback powered by Codex. The key idea behind PyFiXV is to use a novel run-time validation mechanism to decide whether the generated feedback is suitable for sharing with the student; notably, this validation mechanism also provides a precision knob to educators. We perform an extensive evaluation using two real-world datasets of Python programs with syntax errors and show the efficacy of PyFiXV in generating high-precision feedback.

Recent Language Models (LMs) achieve breakthrough performance in code generation when trained on human-authored problems, even solving some competitive-programming problems. Self-play has proven useful in games such as Go, and thus it is natural to ask whether LMs can generate their own instructive programming problems to improve their performance. We show that it is possible for an LM to synthesize programming problems and solutions, which are filtered for correctness by a Python interpreter. The LM's performance is then seen to improve when it is fine-tuned on its own synthetic problems and verified solutions; thus the model 'improves itself' using the Python interpreter. Problems are specified formally as programming puzzles [Schuster et al., 2021], a code-based problem format where solutions can easily be verified for correctness by execution. In experiments on publicly-available LMs, test accuracy more than doubles. This work demonstrates the potential for code LMs, with an interpreter, to generate instructive problems and improve their own performance.

We introduce the Probabilistic Worldbuilding Model (PWM), a new fully-symbolic Bayesian model of semantic parsing and reasoning, as a first step in a research program toward more domain- and task-general NLU and AI. Humans create internal mental models of their observations which greatly aid in their ability to understand and reason about a large variety of problems. In PWM, the meanings of sentences, acquired facts about the world, and intermediate steps in reasoning are all expressed in a human-readable formal language, with the design goal of interpretability. PWM is Bayesian, designed specifically to be able to generalize to new domains and new tasks. We derive and implement an inference algorithm that reads sentences by parsing and abducing updates to its latent world model that capture the semantics of those sentences, and evaluate it on two out-of-domain question-answering datasets: (1) ProofWriter and (2) a new dataset we call FictionalGeoQA, designed to be more representative of real language but still simple enough to focus on evaluating reasoning ability, while being robust against heuristics. Our method outperforms baselines on both, thereby demonstrating its value as a proof-of-concept.

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 regard, here we demonstrate the necessity of extracting the intent argument of non-canonical directives in a natural language format, which may yield more accurate parsing, and suggest guidelines for building a parallel corpus for this purpose. Following the guidelines, we construct a Korean corpus of 50K instances of question/command-intent pairs, including the labels for classification of the utterance type. We also propose a method for mitigating class imbalance, demonstrating the potential applications of the corpus generation method and its multilingual extensibility.

Despite their linguistic competence, Large Language models (LLMs) often exhibit limitations in their ability to reason reliably and flexibly. To address this, we propose a neurosymbolic approach that prompts LLMs to extract and encode all relevant information from a problem statement as logical code statements, and then use a logic programming language (Prolog) to conduct the iterative computations of explicit deductive reasoning. Our approach significantly enhances the performance of LLMs on the standard mathematical reasoning benchmark, GSM8k, and the Navigate dataset from the BIG-bench dataset. Additionally, we introduce a novel dataset, the Non-Linear Reasoning (NLR) dataset, consisting of 55 unique word problems that target the shortcomings of the next token prediction paradigm of LLMs and require complex non-linear reasoning but only basic arithmetic skills to solve. Our findings demonstrate that the integration of Prolog enables LLMs to achieve high performance on the NLR dataset, which even the most advanced language models (including GPT4) fail to solve using text only.

LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in code generation tasks, achieving promising results at the function or statement level across various benchmarks. However, the complexities associated with creating code artifacts like classes, particularly within the context of real-world software repositories, remain underexplored. Prior research treats class-level generation as an isolated task, neglecting the intricate dependencies & interactions that characterize real-world software environments. To address this gap, we introduce RepoClassBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs in generating complex, class-level code within real-world repositories. RepoClassBench includes "Natural Language to Class generation" tasks across Java, Python & C# from a selection of repositories. We ensure that each class in our dataset not only has cross-file dependencies within the repository but also includes corresponding test cases to verify its functionality. We find that current models struggle with the realistic challenges posed by our benchmark, primarily due to their limited exposure to relevant repository contexts. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Retrieve-Repotools-Reflect (RRR), a novel approach that equips LLMs with static analysis tools to iteratively navigate & reason about repository-level context in an agent-based framework. Our experiments demonstrate that RRR significantly outperforms existing baselines on RepoClassBench, showcasing its effectiveness across programming languages & under various settings. Our findings emphasize the critical need for code-generation benchmarks to incorporate repo-level dependencies to more accurately reflect the complexities of software development. Our work shows the benefits of leveraging specialized tools to enhance LLMs' understanding of repository context. We plan to make our dataset & evaluation harness public.

Natural language processing (NLP) is an area of artificial intelligence that applies information technologies to process the human language, understand it to a certain degree, and use it in various applications. This area has rapidly developed in the last few years and now employs modern variants of deep neural networks to extract relevant patterns from large text corpora. The main objective of this work is to survey the recent use of NLP in the field of pharmacology. As our work shows, NLP is a highly relevant information extraction and processing approach for pharmacology. It has been used extensively, from intelligent searches through thousands of medical documents to finding traces of adversarial drug interactions in social media. We split our coverage into five categories to survey modern NLP methodology, commonly addressed tasks, relevant textual data, knowledge bases, and useful programming libraries. We split each of the five categories into appropriate subcategories, describe their main properties and ideas, and summarize them in a tabular form. The resulting survey presents a comprehensive overview of the area, useful to practitioners and interested observers.