Automatic Programming: Large Language Models and Beyond

Automatic programming has seen increasing popularity due to the emergence of tools like GitHub Copilot which rely on Large Language Models (LLMs). At the same time, automatically generated code faces challenges during deployment due to concerns around quality and trust. In this article, we study automated coding in a general sense and study the concerns around code quality, security and related issues of programmer responsibility. These are key issues for organizations while deciding on the usage of automatically generated code. We discuss how advances in software engineering such as program repair and analysis can enable automatic programming. We conclude with a forward looking view, focusing on the programming environment of the near future, where programmers may need to switch to different roles to fully utilize the power of automatic programming. Automated repair of automatically generated programs from LLMs, can help produce higher assurance code from LLMs, along with evidence of assurance

Aligning LLMs for FL-free Program Repair

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved decent results on automated program repair (APR). However, the next token prediction training objective of decoder-only LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) is misaligned with the masked span prediction objective of current infilling-style methods, which impedes LLMs from fully leveraging pre-trained knowledge for program repair. In addition, while some LLMs are capable of locating and repairing bugs end-to-end when using the related artifacts (e.g., test cases) as input, existing methods regard them as separate tasks and ask LLMs to generate patches at fixed locations. This restriction hinders LLMs from exploring potential patches beyond the given locations. In this paper, we investigate a new approach to adapt LLMs to program repair. Our core insight is that LLM's APR capability can be greatly improved by simply aligning the output to their training objective and allowing them to refine the whole program without first performing fault localization. Based on this insight, we designed D4C, a straightforward prompting framework for APR. D4C can repair 180 bugs correctly in Defects4J, with each patch being sampled only 10 times. This surpasses the SOTA APR methods with perfect fault localization by 10% and reduces the patch sampling number by 90%. Our findings reveal that (1) objective alignment is crucial for fully exploiting LLM's pre-trained capability, and (2) replacing the traditional localize-then-repair workflow with direct debugging is more effective for LLM-based APR methods. Thus, we believe this paper introduces a new mindset for harnessing LLMs in APR.

EFFL: Egalitarian Fairness in Federated Learning for Mitigating Matthew Effect

Recent advances in federated learning (FL) enable collaborative training of machine learning (ML) models from large-scale and widely dispersed clients while protecting their privacy. However, when different clients' datasets are heterogeneous, traditional FL mechanisms produce a global model that does not adequately represent the poorer clients with limited data resources, resulting in lower accuracy and higher bias on their local data. According to the Matthew effect, which describes how the advantaged gain more advantage and the disadvantaged lose more over time, deploying such a global model in client applications may worsen the resource disparity among the clients and harm the principles of social welfare and fairness. To mitigate the Matthew effect, we propose Egalitarian Fairness Federated Learning (EFFL), where egalitarian fairness refers to the global model learned from FL has: (1) equal accuracy among clients; (2) equal decision bias among clients. Besides achieving egalitarian fairness among the clients, EFFL also aims for performance optimality, minimizing the empirical risk loss and the bias for each client; both are essential for any ML model training, whether centralized or decentralized. We formulate EFFL as a constrained multi-constrained multi-objectives optimization (MCMOO) problem, with the decision bias and egalitarian fairness as constraints and the minimization of the empirical risk losses on all clients as multiple objectives to be optimized. We propose a gradient-based three-stage algorithm to obtain the Pareto optimal solutions within the constraint space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EFFL outperforms other state-of-the-art FL algorithms in achieving a high-performance global model with enhanced egalitarian fairness among all clients.

The State and Future of Genetic Improvement

We report the discussion session at the sixth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2019 @ ICSE, which was held as part of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Tuesday 28th May 2019. Topics included GI representations, the maintainability of evolved code, automated software testing, future areas of GI research, such as co-evolution, and existing GI tools and benchmarks.