Seeker: Enhancing Exception Handling in Code with LLM-based Multi-Agent Approach

In real world software development, improper or missing exception handling can severely impact the robustness and reliability of code. Exception handling mechanisms require developers to detect, capture, and manage exceptions according to high standards, but many developers struggle with these tasks, leading to fragile code. This problem is particularly evident in open source projects and impacts the overall quality of the software ecosystem. To address this challenge, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to improve exception handling in code. Through extensive analysis, we identify three key issues: Insensitive Detection of Fragile Code, Inaccurate Capture of Exception Types, and Distorted Handling Solutions. These problems are widespread across real world repositories, suggesting that robust exception handling practices are often overlooked or mishandled. In response, we propose Seeker, a multi agent framework inspired by expert developer strategies for exception handling. Seeker uses agents: Scanner, Detector, Predator, Ranker, and Handler to assist LLMs in detecting, capturing, and resolving exceptions more effectively. Our work is the first systematic study on leveraging LLMs to enhance exception handling practices, providing valuable insights for future improvements in code reliability.

DECOR: Improving Coherence in L2 English Writing with a Novel Benchmark for Incoherence Detection, Reasoning, and Rewriting

Coherence in writing, an aspect that second-language (L2) English learners often struggle with, is crucial in assessing L2 English writing. Existing automated writing evaluation systems primarily use basic surface linguistic features to detect coherence in writing. However, little effort has been made to correct the detected incoherence, which could significantly benefit L2 language learners seeking to improve their writing. To bridge this gap, we introduce DECOR, a novel benchmark that includes expert annotations for detecting incoherence in L2 English writing, identifying the underlying reasons, and rewriting the incoherent sentences. To our knowledge, DECOR is the first coherence assessment dataset specifically designed for improving L2 English writing, featuring pairs of original incoherent sentences alongside their expert-rewritten counterparts. Additionally, we fine-tuned models to automatically detect and rewrite incoherence in student essays. We find that incorporating specific reasons for incoherence during fine-tuning consistently improves the quality of the rewrites, achieving a result that is favored in both automatic and human evaluations.

VarBench: Robust Language Model Benchmarking Through Dynamic Variable Perturbation

As large language models achieve impressive scores on traditional benchmarks, an increasing number of researchers are becoming concerned about benchmark data leakage during pre-training, commonly known as the data contamination problem. To ensure fair evaluation, recent benchmarks release only the training and validation sets, keeping the test set labels closed-source. They require anyone wishing to evaluate his language model to submit the model's predictions for centralized processing and then publish the model's result on their leaderboard. However, this submission process is inefficient and prevents effective error analysis. To address this issue, we propose to variabilize benchmarks and evaluate language models dynamically. Specifically, we extract variables from each test case and define a value range for each variable. For each evaluation, we sample new values from these value ranges to create unique test cases, thus ensuring a fresh evaluation each time. We applied this variable perturbation method to four datasets: GSM8K, ARC, CommonsenseQA, and TruthfulQA, which cover mathematical generation and multiple-choice tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach provides a more accurate assessment of the true capabilities of language models, effectively mitigating the contamination problem.

DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories

How to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open question. We find that existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs. To address the knowledge gap, we propose a new benchmark named DevEval, which has three advances. (1) DevEval aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code distributions and dependency distributions. (2) DevEval is annotated by 13 developers and contains comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, original repositories, reference code, and reference dependencies). (3) DevEval comprises 1,874 testing samples from 117 repositories, covering 10 popular domains (e.g., Internet, Database). Based on DevEval, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 8 popular LLMs on DevEval (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, StarCoder 2, DeepSeek Coder, CodeLLaMa). Our experiments reveal these LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. For example, in our experiments, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4-turbo is only 53.04%. We also analyze LLMs' failed cases and summarize their shortcomings. We hope DevEval can facilitate the development of LLMs in real code repositories. DevEval, prompts, and LLMs' predictions have been released.

EvoCodeBench: An Evolving Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories

How to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation is an open question. Existing benchmarks demonstrate poor alignment with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs. This paper proposes a new benchmark - EvoCodeBench to address the preceding problems, which has three primary advances. (1) EvoCodeBench aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code distributions and dependency distributions. (2) EvoCodeBench offers comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, reference code, and reference dependencies), and robust evaluation metrics (e.g., Pass@k and Recall@k). (3) EvoCodeBench is an evolving benchmark to avoid data leakage. We build an automatic pipeline to update EvoCodeBench from the latest repositories. We release the first version - EvoCodeBench-2403, containing 275 samples from 25 real-world repositories. Based on EvoCodeBench, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 10 popular LLMs (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, DeepSeek Coder, StarCoder 2, CodeLLaMa, Gemma, and Qwen 1.5). Our experiments reveal the coding abilities of these LLMs in real-world repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 only is 20.73% in our experiments. We also analyze failed cases and summarize the shortcomings of existing LLMs in EvoCodeBench. We release EvoCodeBench, all prompts, and LLMs' completions for further community analysis.

DevEval: Evaluating Code Generation in Practical Software Projects

How to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation is an open question. Many benchmarks have been proposed but are inconsistent with practical software projects, e.g., unreal program distributions, insufficient dependencies, and small-scale project contexts. Thus, the capabilities of LLMs in practical projects are still unclear. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark named DevEval, aligned with Developers' experiences in practical projects. DevEval is collected through a rigorous pipeline, containing 2,690 samples from 119 practical projects and covering 10 domains. Compared to previous benchmarks, DevEval aligns to practical projects in multiple dimensions, e.g., real program distributions, sufficient dependencies, and enough-scale project contexts. We assess five popular LLMs on DevEval (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5-turbo, CodeLLaMa, and StarCoder) and reveal their actual abilities in code generation. For instance, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-3.5-turbo only is 42 in our experiments. We also discuss the challenges and future directions of code generation in practical projects. We open-source DevEval and hope it can facilitate the development of code generation in practical projects.

ProLex: A Benchmark for Language Proficiency-oriented Lexical Substitution

Lexical Substitution discovers appropriate substitutes for a given target word in a context sentence. However, the task fails to consider substitutes that are of equal or higher proficiency than the target, an aspect that could be beneficial for language learners looking to improve their writing. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task, language proficiency-oriented lexical substitution. We also introduce ProLex, a novel benchmark designed to assess systems' ability to generate not only appropriate substitutes but also substitutes that demonstrate better language proficiency. Besides the benchmark, we propose models that can automatically perform the new task. We show that our best model, a Llama2-13B model fine-tuned with task-specific synthetic data, outperforms ChatGPT by an average of 3.2% in F-score and achieves comparable results with GPT-4 on ProLex.

Carbon Emission Prediction and Clean Industry Transformation Based on Machine Learning: A Case Study of Sichuan Province

This study preprocessed 2000-2019 energy consumption data for 46 key Sichuan industries using matrix normalization. DBSCAN clustering identified 16 feature classes to objectively group industries. Penalized regression models were then applied for their advantages in overfitting control, high-dimensional data processing, and feature selection - well-suited for the complex energy data. Results showed the second cluster around coal had highest emissions due to production needs. Emissions from gasoline-focused and coke-focused clusters were also significant. Based on this, emission reduction suggestions included clean coal technologies, transportation management, coal-electricity replacement in steel, and industry standardization. The research introduced unsupervised learning to objectively select factors and aimed to explore new emission reduction avenues. In summary, the study identified industry groupings, assessed emissions drivers, and proposed scientific reduction strategies to better inform decision-making using algorithms like DBSCAN and penalized regression models.

A High-fidelity, Machine-learning Enhanced Queueing Network Simulation Model for Hospital Ultrasound Operations

We collaborate with a large teaching hospital in Shenzhen, China and build a high-fidelity simulation model for its ultrasound center to predict key performance metrics, including the distributions of queue length, waiting time and sojourn time, with high accuracy. The key challenge to build an accurate simulation model is to understanding the complicated patient routing at the ultrasound center. To address the issue, we propose a novel two-level routing component to the queueing network model. We apply machine learning tools to calibrate the key components of the queueing model from data with enhanced accuracy.