Open-Source AI-based SE Tools: Opportunities and Challenges of Collaborative Software Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become instrumental in advancing software engineering (SE) tasks, showcasing their efficacy in code understanding and beyond. Like traditional SE tools, open-source collaboration is key in realising the excellent products. However, with AI models, the essential need is in data. The collaboration of these AI-based SE models hinges on maximising the sources of high-quality data. However, data especially of high quality, often holds commercial or sensitive value, making it less accessible for open-source AI-based SE projects. This reality presents a significant barrier to the development and enhancement of AI-based SE tools within the software engineering community. Therefore, researchers need to find solutions for enabling open-source AI-based SE models to tap into resources by different organisations. Addressing this challenge, our position paper investigates one solution to facilitate access to diverse organizational resources for open-source AI models, ensuring privacy and commercial sensitivities are respected. We introduce a governance framework centered on federated learning (FL), designed to foster the joint development and maintenance of open-source AI code models while safeguarding data privacy and security. Additionally, we present guidelines for developers on AI-based SE tool collaboration, covering data requirements, model architecture, updating strategies, and version control. Given the significant influence of data characteristics on FL, our research examines the effect of code data heterogeneity on FL performance.

Letz Translate: Low-Resource Machine Translation for Luxembourgish

Natural language processing of Low-Resource Languages (LRL) is often challenged by the lack of data. Therefore, achieving accurate machine translation (MT) in a low-resource environment is a real problem that requires practical solutions. Research in multilingual models have shown that some LRLs can be handled with such models. However, their large size and computational needs make their use in constrained environments (e.g., mobile/IoT devices or limited/old servers) impractical. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging the power of large multilingual MT models using knowledge distillation. Knowledge distillation can transfer knowledge from a large and complex teacher model to a simpler and smaller student model without losing much in performance. We also make use of high-resource languages that are related or share the same linguistic root as the target LRL. For our evaluation, we consider Luxembourgish as the LRL that shares some roots and properties with German. We build multiple resource-efficient models based on German, knowledge distillation from the multilingual No Language Left Behind (NLLB) model, and pseudo-translation. We find that our efficient models are more than 30\% faster and perform only 4\% lower compared to the large state-of-the-art NLLB model.