Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool to support developers using traditional text-based programming languages, but the graphical notation of the block-based Scratch programming environment inhibits the use of LLMs. To overcome this limitation, we propose the LitterBox+ framework that extends the Scratch static code analysis tool LitterBox with the generative abilities of LLMs. By converting block-based code to a textual representation suitable for LLMs, LitterBox+ allows users to query LLMs about their programs, about quality issues reported by LitterBox, and it allows generating code fixes. Besides offering a programmatic API for these functionalities, LitterBox+ also extends the Scratch user interface to make these functionalities available directly in the environment familiar to learners. The framework is designed to be easily extensible with other prompts, LLM providers, and new features combining the program analysis capabilities of LitterBox with the generative features of LLMs. We provide a screencast demonstrating the tool at https://youtu.be/RZ6E0xgrIgQ.

We introduce ComputerRL, a framework for autonomous desktop intelligence that enables agents to operate complex digital workspaces skillfully. ComputerRL features the API-GUI paradigm, which unifies programmatic API calls and direct GUI interaction to address the inherent mismatch between machine agents and human-centric desktop environments. Scaling end-to-end RL training is crucial for improvement and generalization across diverse desktop tasks, yet remains challenging due to environmental inefficiency and instability in extended training. To support scalable and robust training, we develop a distributed RL infrastructure capable of orchestrating thousands of parallel virtual desktop environments to accelerate large-scale online RL. Furthermore, we propose Entropulse, a training strategy that alternates reinforcement learning with supervised fine-tuning, effectively mitigating entropy collapse during extended training runs. We employ ComputerRL on open models GLM-4-9B-0414 and Qwen2.5-14B, and evaluate them on the OSWorld benchmark. The AutoGLM-OS-9B based on GLM-4-9B-0414 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 48.1%, demonstrating significant improvements for general agents in desktop automation. The algorithm and framework are adopted in building AutoGLM (Liu et al., 2024a)

Multimodal agents for computer use rely exclusively on primitive actions (click, type, scroll) that require accurate visual grounding and lengthy execution chains, leading to cascading failures and performance bottlenecks. While other agents leverage rich programmatic interfaces (APIs, MCP servers, tools), computer-use agents (CUAs) remain isolated from these capabilities. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that bridges this gap through hybrid action -- seamlessly integrating GUI primitives with high-level programmatic tool calls. To achieve this, our approach comprises four key components: (1) an automated pipeline that scales programmatic tools from software documentation, open-source repositories, and code generation; (2) a synthetic data engine producing over 17,000 verifiable tasks spanning real-world computer-use scenarios; (3) a large-scale high-quality hybrid action trajectory collection with both low-level GUI actions and high-level programmatic tool calls; and (4) a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling strategic alternation between low-level and high-level actions. Experiments with our 7B and 32B models demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art agents. On OSWorld, UltraCUA models achieve an average 22% relative improvement over base models, while being 11% faster in terms of steps. Out-of-domain evaluation on WindowsAgentArena shows our model reaches 21.7% success rate, outperforming baselines trained on Windows data. The hybrid action mechanism proves critical, reducing error propagation while maintaining execution efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved beyond simple text generation to power software agents that directly translate natural language commands into tangible actions. While API-based LLM agents initially rose to prominence for their robust automation capabilities and seamless integration with programmatic endpoints, recent progress in multimodal LLM research has enabled GUI-based LLM agents that interact with graphical user interfaces in a human-like manner. Although these two paradigms share the goal of enabling LLM-driven task automation, they diverge significantly in architectural complexity, development workflows, and user interaction models. This paper presents the first comprehensive comparative study of API-based and GUI-based LLM agents, systematically analyzing their divergence and potential convergence. We examine key dimensions and highlight scenarios in which hybrid approaches can harness their complementary strengths. By proposing clear decision criteria and illustrating practical use cases, we aim to guide practitioners and researchers in selecting, combining, or transitioning between these paradigms. Ultimately, we indicate that continuing innovations in LLM-based automation are poised to blur the lines between API- and GUI-driven agents, paving the way for more flexible, adaptive solutions in a wide range of real-world applications.

Large language models (LLMs), such as Codex and GPT-4, have recently showcased their remarkable code generation abilities, facilitating a significant boost in coding efficiency. This paper will delve into utilizing LLMs for code generation in private libraries, as they are widely employed in everyday programming. Despite their remarkable capabilities, generating such private APIs poses a formidable conundrum for LLMs, as they inherently lack exposure to these private libraries during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that emulates the process of programmers writing private code. This framework comprises two modules: APIFinder first retrieves potentially useful APIs from API documentation; and APICoder then leverages these retrieved APIs to generate private code. Specifically, APIFinder employs vector retrieval techniques and allows user involvement in the retrieval process. For APICoder, it can directly utilize off-the-shelf code generation models. To further cultivate explicit proficiency in invoking APIs from prompts, we continuously pre-train a reinforced version of APICoder, named CodeGenAPI. Our goal is to train the above two modules on vast public libraries, enabling generalization to private ones. Meanwhile, we create four private library benchmarks, including TorchDataEval, TorchDataComplexEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval, and meticulously handcraft test cases for each benchmark to support comprehensive evaluations. Numerous experiments on the four benchmarks consistently affirm the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, deeper analysis is also conducted to glean additional insights.

Recent advancements in integrating large language models (LLMs) with application programming interfaces (APIs) have gained significant interest in both academia and industry. These API-based agents, leveraging the strong autonomy and planning capabilities of LLMs, can efficiently solve problems requiring multi-step actions. However, their ability to handle multi-dimensional difficulty levels, diverse task types, and real-world demands through APIs remains unknown. In this paper, we introduce ShortcutsBench, a large-scale benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of API-based agents in solving tasks with varying levels of difficulty, diverse task types, and real-world demands. ShortcutsBench includes a wealth of real APIs from Apple Inc.'s operating systems, refined user queries from shortcuts, human-annotated high-quality action sequences from shortcut developers, and accurate parameter filling values about primitive parameter types, enum parameter types, outputs from previous actions, and parameters that need to request necessary information from the system or user. Our extensive evaluation of agents built with 5 leading open-source (size >= 57B) and 4 closed-source LLMs (e.g. Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-3.5) reveals significant limitations in handling complex queries related to API selection, parameter filling, and requesting necessary information from systems and users. These findings highlight the challenges that API-based agents face in effectively fulfilling real and complex user queries. All datasets, code, and experimental results will be available at https://github.com/eachsheep/shortcutsbench.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

With the rise of software-as-a-service and microservice architectures, RESTful APIs are now ubiquitous in mobile and web applications. A service can have tens or hundreds of API methods, making it a challenge for programmers to find the right combination of methods to solve their task. We present APIphany, a component-based synthesizer for programs that compose calls to RESTful APIs. The main innovation behind APIphany is the use of precise semantic types, both to specify user intent and to direct the search. APIphany contributes three novel mechanisms to overcome challenges in adapting component-based synthesis to the REST domain: (1) a type inference algorithm for augmenting REST specifications with semantic types; (2) an efficient synthesis technique for "wrangling" semi-structured data, which is commonly required in working with RESTful APIs; and (3) a new form of simulated execution to avoid executing APIs calls during synthesis. We evaluate APIphany on three real-world APIs and 32 tasks extracted from GitHub repositories and StackOverflow. In our experiments, APIphany found correct solutions to 29 tasks, with 23 of them reported among top ten synthesis results.

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

Automatic API method recommendation is an essential task of code intelligence, which aims to suggest suitable APIs for programming queries. Existing approaches can be categorized into two primary groups: retrieval-based and learning-based approaches. Although these approaches have achieved remarkable success, they still come with notable limitations. The retrieval-based approaches rely on the text representation capabilities of embedding models, while the learning-based approaches require extensive task-specific labeled data for training. To mitigate the limitations, we propose APIGen, a generative API recommendation approach through enhanced in-context learning (ICL). APIGen involves two main components: (1) Diverse Examples Selection. APIGen searches for similar posts to the programming queries from the lexical, syntactical, and semantic perspectives, providing more informative examples for ICL. (2) Guided API Recommendation. APIGen enables large language models (LLMs) to perform reasoning before generating API recommendations, where the reasoning involves fine-grained matching between the task intent behind the queries and the factual knowledge of the APIs. With the reasoning process, APIGen makes recommended APIs better meet the programming requirement of queries and also enhances the interpretability of results. We compare APIGen with four existing approaches on two publicly available benchmarks. Experiments show that APIGen outperforms the best baseline CLEAR by 105.8% in method-level API recommendation and 54.3% in class-level API recommendation in terms of SuccessRate@1. Besides, APIGen achieves an average 49.87% increase compared to the zero-shot performance of popular LLMs such as GPT-4 in method-level API recommendation regarding the SuccessRate@3 metric.

We introduce API Pack, a multilingual dataset featuring over one million instruction-API call pairs aimed at advancing large language models' API call generation capabilities. Through experiments, we demonstrate API Pack's efficacy in enhancing models for this specialized task while maintaining their overall proficiency at general coding. Fine-tuning CodeLlama-13B on just 20,000 Python instances yields over 10% and 5% higher accuracy than GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 respectively in generating unseen API calls. Scaling to 100k examples improves generalization to new APIs not seen during training. In addition, cross-lingual API call generation is achieved without needing extensive data per language. The dataset, fine-tuned models, and overall code base are publicly available at https://github.com/zguo0525/API-Pack.

In the rapidly evolving domain of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) play a crucial role due to their advanced text processing and generation abilities. This study introduces a new strategy aimed at harnessing on-device LLMs in invoking software APIs. We meticulously compile a dataset derived from software API documentation and apply fine-tuning to LLMs with capacities of 2B, 3B and 7B parameters, specifically to enhance their proficiency in software API interactions. Our approach concentrates on refining the models' grasp of API structures and syntax, significantly enhancing the accuracy of API function calls. Additionally, we propose conditional masking techniques to ensure outputs in the desired formats and reduce error rates while maintaining inference speeds. We also propose a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in API interactions, establishing a foundation for subsequent research. Octopus, the fine-tuned model, is proved to have better performance than GPT-4 for the software APIs calling. This research aims to advance automated software development and API integration, representing substantial progress in aligning LLM capabilities with the demands of practical software engineering applications.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced capabilities in function-calling, these advancements primarily rely on accessing the functions' responses. This methodology is practical for simpler APIs but faces scalability issues with irreversible APIs that significantly impact the system, such as a database deletion API. Similarly, processes requiring extensive time for each API call and those necessitating forward planning, like automated action pipelines, present complex challenges. Furthermore, scenarios often arise where a generalized approach is needed because algorithms lack direct access to the specific implementations of these functions or secrets to use them. Traditional tool planning methods are inadequate in these cases, compelling the need to operate within black-box environments. Unlike their performance in tool manipulation, LLMs excel in black-box tasks, such as program synthesis. Therefore, we harness the program synthesis capabilities of LLMs to strategize tool usage in black-box settings, ensuring solutions are verified prior to implementation. We introduce TOPGUN, an ingeniously crafted approach leveraging program synthesis for black box tool planning. Accompanied by SwissNYF, a comprehensive suite that integrates black-box algorithms for planning and verification tasks, addressing the aforementioned challenges and enhancing the versatility and effectiveness of LLMs in complex API interactions. The public code for SwissNYF is available at https://github.com/iclr-dummy-user/SwissNYF.

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a result, several automatic comment generation models are developed as a solution. The recent models explore the integration of external knowledge resources such as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to improve the generated comments. In this paper, we propose API2Com, a model that leverages the Application Programming Interface Documentations (API Docs) as a knowledge resource for comment generation. The API Docs include the description of the methods in more details and therefore, can provide better context in the generated comments. The API Docs are used along with the code snippets and Abstract Syntax Trees in our model. We apply the model on a large Java dataset of over 130,000 methods and evaluate it using both Transformer and RNN-base architectures. Interestingly, when API Docs are used, the performance increase is negligible. We therefore run different experiments to reason about the results. For methods that only contain one API, adding API Docs improves the results by 4% BLEU score on average (BLEU score is an automatic evaluation metric used in machine translation). However, as the number of APIs that are used in a method increases, the performance of the model in generating comments decreases due to long documentations used in the input. Our results confirm that the API Docs can be useful in generating better comments, but, new techniques are required to identify the most informative ones in a method rather than using all documentations simultaneously.

Autonomous agent applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently risen to prominence as effective tools for addressing complex real-world tasks. At their core, agentic workflows rely on LLMs to plan and execute the use of tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in sequence to arrive at the answer to a user's request. Various benchmarks and leaderboards have emerged to evaluate an LLM's capabilities for tool and API use; however, most of these evaluations only track single or multiple isolated API calling capabilities. In this paper, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL has a total of 300 human annotated samples divided into two types - executable and non-executable. The executable samples are curated manually by crawling Rapid-APIs whereas the non-executable samples are hand picked by human annotators from data synthetically generated using an LLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs with function calling abilities on NESTFUL. Our results show that most models do not perform well on nested APIs in NESTFUL as compared to their performance on the simpler problem settings available in existing benchmarks.

Interacting with a software system via a chatbot can be challenging, especially when the chatbot needs to generate API calls, in the right order and with the right parameters, to communicate with the system. API calling in chatbot systems poses significant challenges, particularly in complex, multi-step tasks requiring accurate API selection and execution. We contribute to this domain in three ways: first, by introducing a novel dataset designed to assess models on API function selection, parameter generation, and nested API calls; second, by benchmarking state-of-the-art language models across varying levels of complexity to evaluate their performance in API function generation and parameter accuracy; and third, by proposing an enhanced API routing method that combines general-purpose large language models for API selection with fine-tuned models for parameter generation and some prompt engineering approach. These approaches lead to substantial improvements in handling complex API tasks, offering practical advancements for real-world API-driven chatbot systems.

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another interface designed specifically for machine interaction with online content: application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper we ask -- what if we were to take tasks traditionally tackled by browsing agents, and give AI agents access to APIs? To do so, we propose two varieties of agents: (1) an API-calling agent that attempts to perform online tasks through APIs only, similar to traditional coding agents, and (2) a Hybrid Agent that can interact with online data through both web browsing and APIs. In experiments on WebArena, a widely-used and realistic benchmark for web navigation tasks, we find that API-based agents outperform web browsing agents. Hybrid Agents out-perform both others nearly uniformly across tasks, resulting in a more than 20.0% absolute improvement over web browsing alone, achieving a success rate of 35.8%, achiving the SOTA performance among task-agnostic agents. These results strongly suggest that when APIs are available, they present an attractive alternative to relying on web browsing alone.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex dependency relationship between different APIs. However, it is essential to utilize multiple APIs collaboratively from various sources (e.g., different Apps in the iPhone), especially for complex user instructions. In this paper, we introduce AppBench, the first benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user's task. Specifically, we consider two significant challenges in multiple APIs: 1) graph structures: some APIs can be executed independently while others need to be executed one by one, resulting in graph-like execution order; and 2) permission constraints: which source is authorized to execute the API call. We have experimental results on 9 distinct LLMs; e.g., GPT-4o achieves only a 2.0\% success rate at the most complex instruction, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ruleGreen/AppBench.

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.

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Recently, the large language models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary ability in understanding natural language and generating programming code. It has been a common practice of software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and align the code with the intended semantics, the reliability and robustness of the code generationfrom LLMs have not yet been thoroughly studied. The executable code is not equivalent to the reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development. The misuse of APIs in the generated code could lead to severe problem, such as resource leaks, program crashes. To make things worse, the users of LLM code generation services are actually the developers that are most vulnerable to these code that seems right -- They are always novice developers that are not familiar with the APIs that LLMs generate code for them. Therefore, they could hardly tell the misuse in the code generated by LLMs, which further facilitates the incorrect code applied in real-world software. Existing code evaluation benchmark and datasets focus on crafting small tasks such as programming questions in coding interviews, which however deviates from the problem that developers would ask LLM for real-world coding help. To fill the missing piece, in this work, we propose a dataset RobustAPI for evaluating the reliability and robustness of code generated by LLMs. We collect 1208 coding questions from StackOverflow on 24 representative Java APIs. We summarize thecommon misuse patterns of these APIs and evaluate them oncurrent popular LLMs. The evaluation results show that evenfor GPT-4, 62% of the generated code contains API misuses,which would cause unexpected consequences if the code isintroduced into real-world software.

In this paper, we describe Function Assistant, a lightweight Python-based toolkit for querying and exploring source code repositories using natural language. The toolkit is designed to help end-users of a target API quickly find information about functions through high-level natural language queries and descriptions. For a given text query and background API, the tool finds candidate functions by performing a translation from the text to known representations in the API using the semantic parsing approach of Richardson and Kuhn (2017). Translations are automatically learned from example text-code pairs in example APIs. The toolkit includes features for building translation pipelines and query engines for arbitrary source code projects. To explore this last feature, we perform new experiments on 27 well-known Python projects hosted on Github.

Source code is rarely written in isolation. It depends significantly on the programmatic context, such as the class that the code would reside in. To study this phenomenon, we introduce the task of generating class member functions given English documentation and the programmatic context provided by the rest of the class. This task is challenging because the desired code can vary greatly depending on the functionality the class provides (e.g., a sort function may or may not be available when we are asked to "return the smallest element" in a particular member variable list). We introduce CONCODE, a new large dataset with over 100,000 examples consisting of Java classes from online code repositories, and develop a new encoder-decoder architecture that models the interaction between the method documentation and the class environment. We also present a detailed error analysis suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this task.

The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains. The dataset is available on Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/xlam-function-calling-60k and the project homepage: https://apigen-pipeline.github.io/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072.

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has increasingly shown its power in extending large language models' (LLMs') capability beyond their pre-trained knowledge. Existing works have shown that RAG can help with software development tasks such as code generation, code update, and test generation. Yet, the effectiveness of adapting LLMs to fast-evolving or less common API libraries using RAG remains unknown. To bridge this gap, we take an initial step to study this unexplored yet practical setting - when developers code with a less common library, they often refer to its API documentation; likewise, when LLMs are allowed to look up API documentation via RAG, to what extent can LLMs be advanced? To mimic such a setting, we select four less common open-source Python libraries with a total of 1017 eligible APIs. We study the factors that affect the effectiveness of using the documentation of less common API libraries as additional knowledge for retrieval and generation. Our intensive study yields interesting findings: (1) RAG helps improve LLMs' performance by 83%-220%. (2) Example code contributes the most to advance LLMs, instead of the descriptive texts and parameter lists in the API documentation. (3) LLMs could sometimes tolerate mild noises (typos in description or incorrect parameters) by referencing their pre-trained knowledge or document context. Finally, we suggest that developers pay more attention to the quality and diversity of the code examples in the API documentation. The study sheds light on future low-code software development workflows.

While enabling large language models to implement function calling (known as APIs) can greatly enhance the performance of LLMs, function calling is still a challenging task due to the complicated relations between different APIs, especially in a context-learning setting without fine-tuning. This paper proposes a simple yet controllable target-driven approach called Reverse Chain to empower LLMs with capabilities to use external APIs with only prompts. Given that most open-source LLMs have limited tool-use or tool-plan capabilities, LLMs in Reverse Chain are only employed to implement simple tasks, e.g., API selection and argument completion, and a generic rule is employed to implement a controllable multiple functions calling. In this generic rule, after selecting a final API to handle a given task via LLMs, we first ask LLMs to fill the required arguments from user query and context. Some missing arguments could be further completed by letting LLMs select another API based on API description before asking user. This process continues until a given task is completed. Extensive numerical experiments indicate an impressive capability of Reverse Chain on implementing multiple function calling. Interestingly enough, the experiments also reveal that tool-use capabilities of the existing LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, can be greatly improved via Reverse Chain.

Recent availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of numerous LLM-based approaches aimed at providing natural language interfaces for various end-user tasks. These end-user tasks in turn can typically be accomplished by orchestrating a given set of APIs. In practice, natural language task requests (user queries) are often incomplete, i.e., they may not contain all the information required by the APIs. While LLMs excel at natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they frequently hallucinate on missing information or struggle with orchestrating the APIs. The key idea behind our proposed approach is to leverage logical reasoning and classical AI planning along with an LLM for accurately answering user queries including identification and gathering of any missing information in these queries. Our approach uses an LLM and ASP (Answer Set Programming) solver to translate a user query to a representation in Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) via an intermediate representation in ASP. We introduce a special API "get_info_api" for gathering missing information. We model all the APIs as PDDL actions in a way that supports dataflow between the APIs. Our approach then uses a classical AI planner to generate an orchestration of API calls (including calls to get_info_api) to answer the user query. Our evaluation results show that our approach significantly outperforms a pure LLM based approach by achieving over 95\% success rate in most cases on a dataset containing complete and incomplete single goal and multi-goal queries where the multi-goal queries may or may not require dataflow among the APIs.

REST APIs play important roles in enriching the action space of web agents, yet most API-based agents rely on curated and uniform toolsets that do not reflect the complexity of real-world APIs. Building tool-using agents for arbitrary domains remains a major challenge, as it requires reading unstructured API documentation, testing APIs and inferring correct parameters. We propose Doc2Agent, a scalable pipeline to build agents that can call Python-based tools generated from API documentation. Doc2Agent generates executable tools from API documentations and iteratively refines them using a code agent. We evaluate our approach on real-world APIs, WebArena APIs, and research APIs, producing validated tools. We achieved a 55\% relative performance improvement with 90\% lower cost compared to direct API calling on WebArena benchmark. A domain-specific agent built for glycomaterial science further demonstrates the pipeline's adaptability to complex, knowledge-rich tasks. Doc2Agent offers a generalizable solution for building tool agents from unstructured API documentation at scale.

Tool-Augmented Language Models (TALMs) leverage external APIs to answer user queries across various domains. However, existing benchmark datasets for TALM research often feature simplistic dialogues that do not reflect real-world scenarios, such as the need for models to ask clarifying questions or proactively call additional APIs when essential information is missing. To address these limitations, we construct and release ToolDial, a dataset comprising 11,111 multi-turn dialogues, with an average of 8.95 turns per dialogue, based on APIs from RapidAPI. ToolDial has two key characteristics. First, the dialogues incorporate 16 user and system actions (e.g., "Request", "Clarify", "Fail inform") to capture the rich dynamics of real-world interactions. Second, we simulate dialogues where the system requests necessary information from the user based on API documentation and seeks additional APIs if the user fails to provide the required information. To facilitate this process, we introduce a method for generating an API graph that represents input and output compatibility between APIs. Using ToolDial, we evaluate a suite of language models on their ability to predict correct actions and extract input parameter values for API calls from the dialogue history. Modern language models achieve accuracy scores below 70%, indicating substantial room for improvement. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/holi-lab/ToolDial.

Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. However, three pivotal questions remain unanswered: (1) How effective are current LLMs in utilizing tools? (2) How can we enhance LLMs' ability to utilize tools? (3) What obstacles need to be overcome to leverage tools? To address these questions, we introduce API-Bank, a groundbreaking benchmark, specifically designed for tool-augmented LLMs. For the first question, we develop a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools. We annotate 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls to assess the existing LLMs' capabilities in planning, retrieving, and calling APIs. For the second question, we construct a comprehensive training set containing 1,888 tool-use dialogues from 2,138 APIs spanning 1,000 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we train Lynx, a tool-augmented LLM initialized from Alpaca. Experimental results demonstrate that GPT-3.5 exhibits improved tool utilization compared to GPT-3, while GPT-4 excels in planning. However, there is still significant potential for further improvement. Moreover, Lynx surpasses Alpaca's tool utilization performance by more than 26 pts and approaches the effectiveness of GPT-3.5. Through error analysis, we highlight the key challenges for future research in this field to answer the third question.

Current search techniques are limited to standard RAG query-document applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to expand the code and index for predicting the required APIs, directly enabling high-quality, end-to-end code generation for auto-completion and agentic AI applications. We address the problem of API leaks in current code-to-code benchmark datasets by introducing a new dataset built from real-world ServiceNow Script Includes that capture the challenge of unclear API usage intent in the code. Our evaluation metrics show that this method achieves 87.86% top-40 retrieval accuracy, allowing the critical context with APIs needed for successful downstream code generation. To enable real-time predictions, we develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline that optimizes a compact 0.6B reranker through synthetic dataset generation, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. This approach enables our compact reranker to outperform a much larger 8B model while maintaining 2.5x reduced latency, effectively addressing the nuances of enterprise-specific code without the computational overhead of larger models.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a Python interpreter, CodeAct can execute code actions and dynamically revise prior actions or emit new actions upon new observations through multi-turn interactions. Our extensive analysis of 17 LLMs on API-Bank and a newly curated benchmark shows that CodeAct outperforms widely used alternatives (up to 20% higher success rate). The encouraging performance of CodeAct motivates us to build an open-source LLM agent that interacts with environments by executing interpretable code and collaborates with users using natural language. To this end, we collect an instruction-tuning dataset CodeActInstruct that consists of 7k multi-turn interactions using CodeAct. We show that it can be used with existing data to improve models in agent-oriented tasks without compromising their general capability. CodeActAgent, finetuned from Llama2 and Mistral, is integrated with Python interpreter and uniquely tailored to perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., model training) using existing libraries and autonomously self-debug.

Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built AppWorld Engine, a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created AppWorld Benchmark (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT-4o, solves only ~49% of our 'normal' tasks and ~30% of 'challenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark's difficulty and AppWorld's potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents. The project website is available at https://appworld.dev/.

Large language models (LLMs) have limitations in handling tasks that require real-time access to external APIs. While several benchmarks like ToolBench and APIGen have been developed to assess LLMs' API-use capabilities, they often suffer from issues such as lack of generalizability, limited multi-step reasoning coverage, and instability due to real-time API fluctuations. In this paper, we introduce SEAL, an end-to-end testbed designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world API usage. SEAL standardizes existing benchmarks, integrates an agent system for testing API retrieval and planning, and addresses the instability of real-time APIs by introducing a GPT-4-powered API simulator with caching for deterministic evaluations. Our testbed provides a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that covers API retrieval, API calls, and final responses, offering a reliable framework for structured performance comparison in diverse real-world scenarios. SEAL is publicly available, with ongoing updates for new benchmarks.

Web API specifications are machine-readable descriptions of APIs. These specifications, in combination with related tooling, simplify and support the consumption of APIs. However, despite the increased distribution of web APIs, specifications are rare and their creation and maintenance heavily relies on manual efforts by third parties. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach and an associated tool called D2Spec for extracting specifications from web API documentation pages. Given a seed online documentation page on an API, D2Spec first crawls all documentation pages on the API, and then uses a set of machine learning techniques to extract the base URL, path templates, and HTTP methods, which collectively describe the endpoints of an API. We evaluated whether D2Spec can accurately extract endpoints from documentation on 120 web APIs. The results showed that D2Spec achieved a precision of 87.5% in identifying base URLs, a precision of 81.3% and a recall of 80.6% in generating path templates, and a precision of 84.4% and a recall of 76.2% in extracting HTTP methods. In addition, we found that D2Spec was useful when applied to APIs with pre-existing API specifications: D2Spec revealed many inconsistencies between web API documentation and their corresponding publicly available specifications. Thus, D2Spec can be used by web API providers to keep documentation and specifications in synchronization.

We introduce AnyTool, a large language model agent designed to revolutionize the utilization of a vast array of tools in addressing user queries. We utilize over 16,000 APIs from Rapid API, operating under the assumption that a subset of these APIs could potentially resolve the queries. AnyTool primarily incorporates three elements: an API retriever with a hierarchical structure, a solver aimed at resolving user queries using a selected set of API candidates, and a self-reflection mechanism, which re-activates AnyTool if the initial solution proves impracticable. AnyTool is powered by the function calling feature of GPT-4, eliminating the need for training external modules. We also revisit the evaluation protocol introduced by previous works and identify a limitation in this protocol that leads to an artificially high pass rate. By revising the evaluation protocol to better reflect practical application scenarios, we introduce an additional benchmark, termed AnyToolBench. Experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our AnyTool over strong baselines such as ToolLLM and a GPT-4 variant tailored for tool utilization. For instance, AnyTool outperforms ToolLLM by +35.4% in terms of average pass rate on ToolBench. Code will be available at https://github.com/dyabel/AnyTool.

Macros are building block tasks of our everyday smartphone activity (e.g., "login", or "booking a flight"). Effectively extracting macros is important for understanding mobile interaction and enabling task automation. These macros are however difficult to extract at scale as they can be comprised of multiple steps yet hidden within programmatic components of mobile apps. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract semantically meaningful macros from both random and user-curated mobile interaction traces. The macros produced by our approach are automatically tagged with natural language descriptions and are fully executable. We conduct multiple studies to validate the quality of extracted macros, including user evaluation, comparative analysis against human-curated tasks, and automatic execution of these macros. These experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our approach and the usefulness of extracted macros in various downstream applications.

Applying large language models (LLMs) for academic API usage shows promise in reducing researchers' academic information seeking efforts. However, current LLM API-using methods struggle with complex API coupling commonly encountered in academic queries. To address this, we introduce SoAy, a solution-based LLM API-using methodology for academic information seeking. It uses code with a solution as the reasoning method, where a solution is a pre-constructed API calling sequence. The addition of the solution reduces the difficulty for the model to understand the complex relationships between APIs. Code improves the efficiency of reasoning. To evaluate SoAy, we introduce SoAyBench, an evaluation benchmark accompanied by SoAyEval, built upon a cloned environment of APIs from AMiner. Experimental results demonstrate a 34.58-75.99\% performance improvement compared to state-of-the-art LLM API-based baselines. All datasets, codes, tuned models, and deployed online services are publicly accessible at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SoAy.

Programming assistants powered by large language models have transformed software development, yet most benchmarks focus narrowly on code generation tasks. Recent efforts like InfiBench and StackEval attempt to address this gap using Stack Overflow data but remain limited to single-turn interactions in isolated contexts, require significant manual curation, and fail to represent complete project environments. We introduce CodeAssistBench (CAB), the first benchmark framework for evaluating multi-turn programming assistance in realistic settings that address real-world questions about actual codebases. Unlike existing programming Q&A benchmarks, CAB automatically generates scalable datasets from question-related GitHub issues using configurable parameters (e.g., repository creation date, star count, programming languages), and includes automatic containerization of codebases for evaluation. It then evaluates models through simulated users in these containerized environments with full codebase access. Using this framework, we constructed a test set of 3,286 real-world programming questions across 231 repositories, spanning seven programming languages and diverse problem domains. Our evaluation of leading LLMs reveals a substantial capability gap: while models perform well on Stack Overflow questions with success rates of 70-83%, they resolve only up to 16.49% of CAB's recent issues. This discrepancy highlights the challenges of providing assistance in complex, project-specific contexts versus answering standalone questions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen an impressive wave of advances recently, with models now excelling in a variety of tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and program synthesis. However, their potential to effectively use tools via API calls remains unfulfilled. This is a challenging task even for today's state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4, largely due to their inability to generate accurate input arguments and their tendency to hallucinate the wrong usage of an API call. We release Gorilla, a finetuned LLaMA-based model that surpasses the performance of GPT-4 on writing API calls. When combined with a document retriever, Gorilla demonstrates a strong capability to adapt to test-time document changes, enabling flexible user updates or version changes. It also substantially mitigates the issue of hallucination, commonly encountered when prompting LLMs directly. To evaluate the model's ability, we introduce APIBench, a comprehensive dataset consisting of HuggingFace, TorchHub, and TensorHub APIs. The successful integration of the retrieval system with Gorilla demonstrates the potential for LLMs to use tools more accurately, keep up with frequently updated documentation, and consequently increase the reliability and applicability of their outputs. Gorilla's code, model, data, and demo are available at https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu

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/.

Language model applications are becoming increasingly popular and complex, often including features like tool usage and retrieval augmentation. However, existing frameworks for such applications are often opinionated, deciding for developers how their prompts ought to be formatted and imposing limitations on customizability and reproducibility. To solve this we present Kani: a lightweight, flexible, and model-agnostic open-source framework for building language model applications. Kani helps developers implement a variety of complex features by supporting the core building blocks of chat interaction: model interfacing, chat management, and robust function calling. All Kani core functions are easily overridable and well documented to empower developers to customize functionality for their own needs. Kani thus serves as a useful tool for researchers, hobbyists, and industry professionals alike to accelerate their development while retaining interoperability and fine-grained control.

Natural Language to Code Generation has made significant progress in recent years with the advent of Large Language Models(LLMs). While generation for general-purpose languages like C, C++, and Python has improved significantly, LLMs struggle with custom function names in Domain Specific Languages or DSLs. This leads to higher hallucination rates and syntax errors, specially for DSLs having a high number of custom function names. Additionally, constant updates to function names add to the challenge as LLMs need to stay up-to-date. In this paper, we present optimizations for using Retrieval Augmented Generation (or RAG) with LLMs for DSL generation along with an ablation study comparing these strategies. We generated a train as well as test dataset with a DSL to represent automation tasks across roughly 700 APIs in public domain. We used the training dataset to fine-tune a Codex model for this DSL. Our results showed that the fine-tuned model scored the best on code similarity metric. With our RAG optimizations, we achieved parity for similarity metric. The compilation rate, however, showed that both the models still got the syntax wrong many times, with RAG-based method being 2 pts better. Conversely, hallucination rate for RAG model lagged by 1 pt for API names and by 2 pts for API parameter keys. We conclude that an optimized RAG model can match the quality of fine-tuned models and offer advantages for new, unseen APIs.

CodeLLMs have demonstrated remarkable advancements in software engineering tasks. However, while these models can generate functionally correct code, they often produce code that is inefficient in terms of runtime. This inefficiency is particularly problematic in resource-constrained environments, impacting software performance and sustainability. Existing approaches for optimizing code efficiency for CodeLLMs like SOAP and PIE exhibit certain limitations. SOAP requires a compatible execution environment and predefined test cases for iterative code modification, while PIE focuses on instruction tuning, improving efficiency but compromising correctness. These shortcomings highlight the need for a fine-tuning framework that optimizes both efficiency and correctness without relying on predefined test cases or specific execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACECode, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning framework that aligns CodeLLMs with dual objectives of efficiency and correctness. ACECode combines three key steps: (1) generating code with an actor CodeLLM, (2) calculating a training-free reward signal derived from code execution feedback for each generated code, and (3) optimizing the CodeLLM via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. This reward signal enables joint assessment of efficiency and correctness without manual labeling. We evaluate ACECode by fine-tuning four SOTA (state-of-the-art) CodeLLMs and comparing their code with three baselines: original, instruction-tuned, and PIE-tuned CodeLLMs. Extensive experiment results suggest that significantly improves the efficiency and correctness of generated code against all baselines for all CodeLLMs. Specifically, CodeLLMs fine-tuned with ACECode improve pass@1 by 1.84% to 14.51% and reduce runtime in 65% to 72% of cases compared to original CodeLLMs.

We introduce MacroBench, a code-first benchmark that evaluates whether LLMs can synthesize reusable browser-automation programs (macros) from natural-language goals by reading HTML/DOM and emitting Selenium. MacroBench instantiates seven self-hosted sites covering 681 tasks across interaction complexity and targeting difficulty. Our end-to-end protocol validates generated code via static checks, sandboxed execution, and outcome verification (DOM assertions, database snapshots), and includes a safety suite for scraping, spam/abuse, and credential/privacy prompts. Across 2,636 model-task runs, we observe stratified success: GPT-4o-mini (96.8%), GPT-4o (95.3%), Gemini (89.0%), DeepSeek (83.4%). Models handle simple tasks reliably (91.7%) but fail on complex workflows (0.0%), and none meet production-quality coding practices despite functional completion. We release our complete benchmark pipeline, evaluation framework, and experimental results at https://github.com/hyunjun1121/MacroBench to enable reproducible assessment of macro synthesis for web automation.

Context: Automated code generation using Foundation Models (FMs) offers promising solutions for enhancing software development efficiency. However, challenges remain in ensuring domain specificity, cost-effectiveness, and security - especially when relying on third-party APIs. This paper introduces CodeLSI, a framework that combines low-rank optimization and domain-specific instruction tuning to address these challenges. Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate CodeLSI, a novel approach for generating high-quality code tailored to specific domains, using FMs fine-tuned on company infrastructure without dependence on external APIs. Methods: CodeLSI applies low-rank adaptation techniques to reduce the computational cost of model pre-training and fine-tuning. Domain-specific instruction tuning is employed to align code generation with organizational needs. We implemented and tested the framework on real-world JavaScript coding tasks using datasets drawn from internal software projects. Results: Experimental evaluations show that CodeLSI produces high-quality, context aware code. It outperforms baseline models in terms of relevance, accuracy, and domain fit. The use of low-rank optimization significantly reduced resource requirements, enabling scalable training on company-owned infrastructure. Conclusion: CodeLSI demonstrates that combining low-rank optimization with domain specific tuning can enhance the practicality and performance of FMs for automated code generation. This approach provides a secure, cost-efficient alternative to commercial API based solutions and supports faster, more targeted innovation in software development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

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.

The rapid advancement of Generative AI has catalyzed the emergence of autonomous AI agents, presenting unprecedented challenges for enterprise computing infrastructures. Current enterprise API architectures are predominantly designed for human-driven, predefined interaction patterns, rendering them ill-equipped to support intelligent agents' dynamic, goal-oriented behaviors. This research systematically examines the architectural adaptations for enterprise APIs to support AI agentic workflows effectively. Through a comprehensive analysis of existing API design paradigms, agent interaction models, and emerging technological constraints, the paper develops a strategic framework for API transformation. The study employs a mixed-method approach, combining theoretical modeling, comparative analysis, and exploratory design principles to address critical challenges in standardization, performance, and intelligent interaction. The proposed research contributes a conceptual model for next-generation enterprise APIs that can seamlessly integrate with autonomous AI agent ecosystems, offering significant implications for future enterprise computing architectures.

Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models, where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, real function-calling data is quite challenging to collect and annotate, while synthetic data generated by existing pipelines tends to lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, guided by a formalized thinking process. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data, even with only 8B parameters, achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, rivaling the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.

Publicly available source-code libraries are continuously growing and changing. This makes it impossible for models of code to keep current with all available APIs by simply training these models on existing code repositories. Thus, existing models inherently cannot generalize to using unseen functions and libraries, because these would never appear in the training data. In contrast, when human programmers use functions and libraries for the first time, they frequently refer to textual resources such as code manuals and documentation, to explore and understand the available functionality. Inspired by this observation, we introduce DocPrompting: a natural-language-to-code generation approach that explicitly leverages documentation by (1) retrieving the relevant documentation pieces given an NL intent, and (2) generating code based on the NL intent and the retrieved documentation. DocPrompting is general: it can be applied to any programming language and is agnostic to the underlying neural model. We demonstrate that DocPrompting consistently improves NL-to-code models: DocPrompting improves strong base models such as CodeT5 by 2.85% in pass@1 (52% relative gain) and 4.39% in pass@10 (30% relative gain) in execution-based evaluation on the popular Python CoNaLa benchmark; on a new Bash dataset tldr, DocPrompting improves CodeT5 and GPT-Neo1.3B by up to absolute 6.9% exact match.

We extend JAX with the capability to automatically differentiate higher-order functions (functionals and operators). By representing functions as a generalization of arrays, we seamlessly use JAX's existing primitive system to implement higher-order functions. We present a set of primitive operators that serve as foundational building blocks for constructing several key types of functionals. For every introduced primitive operator, we derive and implement both linearization and transposition rules, aligning with JAX's internal protocols for forward and reverse mode automatic differentiation. This enhancement allows for functional differentiation in the same syntax traditionally use for functions. The resulting functional gradients are themselves functions ready to be invoked in python. We showcase this tool's efficacy and simplicity through applications where functional derivatives are indispensable. The source code of this work is released at https://github.com/sail-sg/autofd .

Recent studies on software tool manipulation with large language models (LLMs) mostly rely on closed model APIs. The industrial adoption of these models is substantially constrained due to the security and robustness risks in exposing information to closed LLM API services. In this paper, we ask can we enhance open-source LLMs to be competitive to leading closed LLM APIs in tool manipulation, with practical amount of human supervision. By analyzing common tool manipulation failures, we first demonstrate that open-source LLMs may require training with usage examples, in-context demonstration and generation style regulation to resolve failures. These insights motivate us to revisit classical methods in LLM literature, and demonstrate that we can adapt them as model alignment with programmatic data generation, system prompts and in-context demonstration retrievers to enhance open-source LLMs for tool manipulation. To evaluate these techniques, we create the ToolBench, a tool manipulation benchmark consisting of diverse software tools for real-world tasks. We demonstrate that our techniques can boost leading open-source LLMs by up to 90% success rate, showing capabilities competitive to OpenAI GPT-4 in 4 out of 8 ToolBench tasks. We show that such enhancement typically requires about one developer day to curate data for each tool, rendering a recipe with practical amount of human supervision.

We present CodeReef - an open platform to share all the components necessary to enable cross-platform MLOps (MLSysOps), i.e. automating the deployment of ML models across diverse systems in the most efficient way. We also introduce the CodeReef solution - a way to package and share models as non-virtualized, portable, customizable and reproducible archive files. Such ML packages include JSON meta description of models with all dependencies, Python APIs, CLI actions and portable workflows necessary to automatically build, benchmark, test and customize models across diverse platforms, AI frameworks, libraries, compilers and datasets. We demonstrate several CodeReef solutions to automatically build, run and measure object detection based on SSD-Mobilenets, TensorFlow and COCO dataset from the latest MLPerf inference benchmark across a wide range of platforms from Raspberry Pi, Android phones and IoT devices to data centers. Our long-term goal is to help researchers share their new techniques as production-ready packages along with research papers to participate in collaborative and reproducible benchmarking, compare the different ML/software/hardware stacks and select the most efficient ones on a Pareto frontier using online CodeReef dashboards.

Scikit-learn is an increasingly popular machine learning li- brary. Written in Python, it is designed to be simple and efficient, accessible to non-experts, and reusable in various contexts. In this paper, we present and discuss our design choices for the application programming interface (API) of the project. In particular, we describe the simple and elegant interface shared by all learning and processing units in the library and then discuss its advantages in terms of composition and reusability. The paper also comments on implementation details specific to the Python ecosystem and analyzes obstacles faced by users and developers of the library.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to synthesize and reason about source code. However, the static nature of these models' knowledge does not reflect the fact that libraries and API functions they invoke are continuously evolving, with functionality being added or changing. While numerous benchmarks evaluate how LLMs can generate code, no prior work has studied how an LLMs' knowledge about code API functions can be updated. To fill this gap, we present CodeUpdateArena, a benchmark for knowledge editing in the code domain. An instance in our benchmark consists of a synthetic API function update paired with a program synthesis example that uses the updated functionality; our goal is to update an LLM to be able to solve this program synthesis example without providing documentation of the update at inference time. Compared to knowledge editing for facts encoded in text, success here is more challenging: a code LLM must correctly reason about the semantics of the modified function rather than just reproduce its syntax. Our dataset is constructed by first prompting GPT-4 to generate atomic and executable function updates. Then, for each update, we generate program synthesis examples whose code solutions are prone to use the update. Our benchmark covers updates of various types to 54 functions from seven diverse Python packages, with a total of 670 program synthesis examples. Our experiments show that prepending documentation of the update to open-source code LLMs (i.e., DeepSeek, CodeLlama) does not allow them to incorporate changes for problem solving, and existing knowledge editing techniques also have substantial room for improvement. We hope our benchmark will inspire new methods for knowledge updating in code LLMs.

MCP standardizes how LLMs interact with external systems, forming the foundation for general agents. However, existing MCP benchmarks remain narrow in scope: they focus on read-heavy tasks or tasks with limited interaction depth, and fail to capture the complexity and realism of real-world workflows. To address this gap, we propose MCPMark, a benchmark designed to evaluate MCP use in a more realistic and comprehensive manner. It consists of 127 high-quality tasks collaboratively created by domain experts and AI agents. Each task begins with a curated initial state and includes a programmatic script for automatic verification. These tasks demand richer and more diverse interactions with the environment, involving a broad range of create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of cutting-edge LLMs using a minimal agent framework that operates in a tool-calling loop. Empirical results show that the best-performing model, gpt-5-medium, reaches only 52.56\% pass@1 and 33.86\% pass^4, while other widely regarded strong models, including claude-sonnet-4 and o3, fall below 30\% pass@1 and 15\% pass^4. On average, LLMs require 16.2 execution turns and 17.4 tool calls per task, significantly surpassing those in previous MCP benchmarks and highlighting the stress-testing nature of MCPMark.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have brought exciting new advances to mobile UI agents, a long-standing research field that aims to complete arbitrary natural language tasks through mobile UI interactions. However, existing UI agents usually demand high reasoning capabilities of powerful large models that are difficult to be deployed locally on end-users' devices, which raises huge concerns about user privacy and centralized serving cost. One way to reduce the required model size is to customize a smaller domain-specific model with high-quality training data, e.g. large-scale human demonstrations of diverse types of apps and tasks, while such datasets are extremely difficult to obtain. Inspired by the remarkable coding abilities of recent small language models (SLMs), we propose to convert the UI task automation problem to a code generation problem, which can be effectively solved by an on-device SLM and efficiently executed with an on-device code interpreter. Unlike normal coding tasks that can be extensively pretrained with public datasets, generating UI automation code is challenging due to the diversity, complexity, and variability of target apps. Therefore, we adopt a document-centered approach that automatically builds fine-grained API documentation for each app and generates diverse task samples based on this documentation. By guiding the agent with the synthetic documents and task samples, it learns to generate precise and efficient scripts to complete unseen tasks. Based on detailed comparisons with state-of-the-art mobile UI agents, our approach effectively improves the mobile task automation with significantly higher success rates and lower latency/token consumption. Code will be open-sourced.

API misuses often lead to software bugs, crashes, and vulnerabilities. While several API misuse detectors have been proposed, there are no automatic repair tools specifically designed for this purpose. In a recent study, test-suite-based automatic program repair (APR) tools were found to be ineffective in repairing API misuses. Still, since the study focused on non-learning-aided APR tools, it remains unknown whether learning-aided APR tools are capable of fixing API misuses. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded greatly in many natural language processing tasks. There is a rising interest in applying PLMs to APR. However, there has not been any study that investigates the effectiveness of PLMs in repairing API misuse. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on 11 learning-aided APR tools, which include 9 of the state-of-the-art general-purpose PLMs and two APR tools. We evaluate these models with an API-misuse repair dataset, consisting of two variants. Our results show that PLMs perform better than the studied APR tools in repairing API misuses. Among the 9 pre-trained models tested, CodeT5 is the best performer in the exact match. We also offer insights and potential exploration directions for future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet code generation remains a major challenge. Current approaches for obtaining high-quality code data primarily focus on (i) collecting large-scale pre-training data and (ii) synthesizing instruction data through prompt engineering with powerful models. While pre-training data faces quality consistency issues, instruction-based synthesis suffers from limited instruction diversity and inherent biases of LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce UnitCoder, a systematic pipeline leveraging model-generated unit tests to both guide and validate the code generation process. Combined with large-scale package-based retrieval from pre-training corpus, we generate a dataset of 500K+ verifiable programs containing diverse API calls. Evaluations on multiple Python benchmarks (BigCodeBench, HumanEval, MBPP) demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our synthetic data exhibit consistent performance improvements. Notably, Llama3.1-8B and InternLM2.5-7B improve from 31\% and 28\% to 40\% and 39\% success rates on BigCodeBench, respectively. Our work presents a scalable approach that leverages model-generated unit tests to guide the synthesis of high-quality code data from pre-training corpora, demonstrating the potential for producing diverse and high-quality post-training data at scale. All code and data will be released (https://github.com).

Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

The application of machine learning algorithms to source code has grown in the past years. Since these algorithms are quite sensitive to input data, it is not surprising that researchers experiment with input representations. Nowadays, a popular starting point to represent code is abstract syntax trees (ASTs). Abstract syntax trees have been used for a long time in various software engineering domains, and in particular in IDEs. The API of modern IDEs allows to manipulate and traverse ASTs, resolve references between code elements, etc. Such algorithms can enrich ASTs with new data and therefore may be useful in ML-based code analysis. In this work, we present PSIMiner - a tool for processing PSI trees from the IntelliJ Platform. PSI trees contain code syntax trees as well as functions to work with them, and therefore can be used to enrich code representation using static analysis algorithms of modern IDEs. To showcase this idea, we use our tool to infer types of identifiers in Java ASTs and extend the code2seq model for the method name prediction problem.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation. Despite their great success, their effectiveness within particular domains (e.g., web development) necessitates further evaluation. In this study, we conduct an empirical study of domain-specific code generation with LLMs. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit sub-optimal performance in generating domain-specific code, due to their limited proficiency in utilizing domain-specific libraries. We further observe that incorporating API knowledge as prompts can empower LLMs to generate more professional code. Based on these findings, we further investigate how to efficiently incorporate API knowledge into the code generation process. We experiment with three strategies for incorporating domain knowledge, namely, external knowledge inquirer, chain-of-thought prompting, and chain-of-thought fine-tuning. We refer to these strategies as a new code generation approach called DomCoder. Experimental results show that all strategies of DomCoder lead to improvement in the effectiveness of domain-specific code generation under certain settings. The results also show that there is still ample room for further improvement, based on which we suggest possible future works.

Recently, an increasing number of AI-driven programming assistants powered by code LLMs have been integrated into various real-world software development environments, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily focus on general-purpose scenarios, leaving the code generation performance of LLMs for specific application domains largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, MultiCodeBench, to fill this gap. MultiCodeBench comprises 2,400 programming tasks, covering 12 popular software development domains and 15 programming languages. Specifically, we perform in-depth research to identify these 12 application domains. Given that each domain may involve multiple technical frameworks, and that different frameworks present distinct challenges in the coding process, we categorize the commonly used frameworks and platforms within each domain. We then sample programming problems from GitHub repositories related to these subdomains. To ensure the quality of the tasks and mitigate data leakage issues, we invite annotators to rewrite the docstrings for each task in MultiCodeBench. Additionally, we build a static analysis-based dependency parsing tool to extract the dependencies in the ground truth for each task, enabling deeper performance analysis. Through extensive experiments on MultiCodeBench with eleven representative mainstream LLMs, we reveal the code generation performance of the LLMs across different application domains, providing practical insights for developers in downstream fields when selecting LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons behind the models' failures in completing software application development tasks, offering guidance for model developers to enhance domain-specific code generation capabilities.

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.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked various applications of this technology in software development. In particular, generative LLMs have been shown to effectively power AI-based code authoring tools that can suggest entire statements or blocks of code during code authoring. In this paper we present CodeCompose, an AI-assisted code authoring tool developed and deployed at Meta internally. CodeCompose is based on the InCoder LLM that merges generative capabilities with bi-directionality. We have scaled up CodeCompose to serve tens of thousands of developers at Meta, across 10+ programming languages and several coding surfaces. We discuss unique challenges in terms of user experience and metrics that arise when deploying such tools in large-scale industrial settings. We present our experience in making design decisions about the model and system architecture for CodeCompose that addresses these challenges. Finally, we present metrics from our large-scale deployment of CodeCompose that shows its impact on Meta's internal code authoring experience over a 15-day time window, where 4.5 million suggestions were made by CodeCompose. Quantitative metrics reveal that (i) CodeCompose has an acceptance rate of 22% across several languages, and (ii) 8% of the code typed by users of CodeCompose is through accepting code suggestions from CodeCompose. Qualitative feedback indicates an overwhelming 91.5% positive reception for CodeCompose. In addition to assisting with code authoring, CodeCompose is also introducing other positive side effects such as encouraging developers to generate more in-code documentation, helping them with the discovery of new APIs, etc.

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated code generation but typically excel only in simpler tasks such as generating standalone code units. Real-world software development, however, often involves complex code repositories (named repo) with complex dependencies and extensive documentation. To fill this gap, our research pivots towards evaluating LLMs in a more realistic setting -- real-world repo-level code generation. We introduce CodeAgentBench, a manually curated benchmark for repo-level code generation. This benchmark comprises five high-quality Python projects, encompassing a total of 101 samples. We assess nine leading LLMs on repo-level tasks and observe a decline in their performance. To tackle this, we present CodeAgent, a novel LLM-based agent framework that employs external tools for effective repo-level code generation. CodeAgent integrates five programming tools, enabling interaction with software artifacts for information retrieval, code symbol navigation, and code testing. We implement four agent strategies to optimize these tools' usage. Our experiments on CodeAgentBench show that CodeAgent enhances LLM performance significantly, with improvements ranging from 18.1\% to 250\%. Further tests on the HumanEval benchmark confirm CodeAgent's adaptability and efficacy across various code generation tasks. Notably, CodeAgent outperforms commercial products like Github Copilot, showcasing superior accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate CodeAgent's robust capabilities in code generation, highlighting its potential for real-world repo-level coding challenges.

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.

Dataflow analysis is a fundamental code analysis technique that identifies dependencies between program values. Traditional approaches typically necessitate successful compilation and expert customization, hindering their applicability and usability for analyzing uncompilable programs with evolving analysis needs in real-world scenarios. This paper presents LLMDFA, an LLM-powered compilation-free and customizable dataflow analysis framework. To address hallucinations for reliable results, we decompose the problem into several subtasks and introduce a series of novel strategies. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to synthesize code that outsources delicate reasoning to external expert tools, such as using a parsing library to extract program values of interest and invoking an automated theorem prover to validate path feasibility. Additionally, we adopt a few-shot chain-of-thought prompting to summarize dataflow facts in individual functions, aligning the LLMs with the program semantics of small code snippets to mitigate hallucinations. We evaluate LLMDFA on synthetic programs to detect three representative types of bugs and on real-world Android applications for customized bug detection. On average, LLMDFA achieves 87.10% precision and 80.77% recall, surpassing existing techniques with F1 score improvements of up to 0.35. We have open-sourced LLMDFA at https://github.com/chengpeng-wang/LLMDFA.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their utilization in code generation tasks have significantly reshaped the field of software development. Despite the remarkable efficacy of code completion solutions in mainstream programming languages, their performance lags when applied to less ubiquitous formats such as OpenAPI definitions. This study evaluates the OpenAPI completion performance of GitHub Copilot, a prevalent commercial code completion tool, and proposes a set of task-specific optimizations leveraging Meta's open-source model Code Llama. A semantics-aware OpenAPI completion benchmark proposed in this research is used to perform a series of experiments through which the impact of various prompt-engineering and fine-tuning techniques on the Code Llama model's performance is analyzed. The fine-tuned Code Llama model reaches a peak correctness improvement of 55.2% over GitHub Copilot despite utilizing 25 times fewer parameters than the commercial solution's underlying Codex model. Additionally, this research proposes an enhancement to a widely used code infilling training technique, addressing the issue of underperformance when the model is prompted with context sizes smaller than those used during training. The dataset, the benchmark, and the model fine-tuning code are made publicly available.

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

Large language models have opened up a world of possibilities for various NLP tasks, sparking optimism for the future. Despite their potential, LLMs have yet to be widely used as agents on real mobile devices. The main challenge is the need for high-quality data sources. Time constraints and labor intensity often hinder human annotation. On the other hand, existing LLMs exhibit inadequate completion rates and need a robust data filtration strategy. Given these challenges, we develop a framework called AndroidGen to enhance the capabilities of LLM-based agents under data scarcity. In addition, we leverage AndroidGen to collect trajectories given human tasks and train open-source LLMs on these trajectories to develop an open-source mobile agent without manually labeled trajectories. We extensively evaluate AndroidGen with AndroidWorld, AitW, and various popular applications, demonstrating its improvements and revealing potential areas for future improvement. Code, model, and data are available at https://github.com/THUDM/AndroidGen.

We introduce WebApp1K, a practical code-generation benchmark to measure LLM ability to develop web apps. This benchmark aims to calibrate LLM output and aid the models to progressively improve code correctness and functionality. The benchmark is lightweight and easy to run. We present the initial version of WebApp1K, and share our findings of running the benchmark against the latest frontier LLMs. First, open source LLMs deliver impressive performance, closely trailing behind GPT-4o and Claude 3.5. Second, model size has strong correlation with code correctness. Third, no prompting techniques have been found to lift performance either universally to all models, or significantly to a single model.

Input constraints are useful for many software development tasks. For example, input constraints of a function enable the generation of valid inputs, i.e., inputs that follow these constraints, to test the function deeper. API functions of deep learning (DL) libraries have DL specific input constraints, which are described informally in the free form API documentation. Existing constraint extraction techniques are ineffective for extracting DL specific input constraints. To fill this gap, we design and implement a new technique, DocTer, to analyze API documentation to extract DL specific input constraints for DL API functions. DocTer features a novel algorithm that automatically constructs rules to extract API parameter constraints from syntactic patterns in the form of dependency parse trees of API descriptions. These rules are then applied to a large volume of API documents in popular DL libraries to extract their input parameter constraints. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the extracted constraints, DocTer uses the constraints to enable the automatic generation of valid and invalid inputs to test DL API functions. Our evaluation on three popular DL libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet) shows that the precision of DocTer in extracting input constraints is 85.4%. DocTer detects 94 bugs from 174 API functions, including one previously unknown security vulnerability that is now documented in the CVE database, while a baseline technique without input constraints detects only 59 bugs. Most (63) of the 94 bugs are previously unknown, 54 of which have been fixed or confirmed by developers after we report them. In addition, DocTer detects 43 inconsistencies in documents, 39 of which are fixed or confirmed.

Researchers have made significant progress in automating the software development process in the past decades. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the development process, where developers can use LLM-based programming assistants to achieve automated coding. Nevertheless, software engineering involves the process of program improvement apart from coding, specifically to enable software maintenance (e.g. bug fixing) and software evolution (e.g. feature additions). In this paper, we propose an automated approach for solving GitHub issues to autonomously achieve program improvement. In our approach called AutoCodeRover, LLMs are combined with sophisticated code search capabilities, ultimately leading to a program modification or patch. In contrast to recent LLM agent approaches from AI researchers and practitioners, our outlook is more software engineering oriented. We work on a program representation (abstract syntax tree) as opposed to viewing a software project as a mere collection of files. Our code search exploits the program structure in the form of classes/methods to enhance LLM's understanding of the issue's root cause, and effectively retrieve a context via iterative search. The use of spectrum-based fault localization using tests, further sharpens the context, as long as a test-suite is available. Experiments on SWE-bench-lite (300 real-life GitHub issues) show increased efficacy in solving GitHub issues (19% on SWE-bench-lite), which is higher than the efficacy of the recently reported SWE-agent. In addition, AutoCodeRover achieved this efficacy with significantly lower cost (on average, $0.43 USD), compared to other baselines. We posit that our workflow enables autonomous software engineering, where, in future, auto-generated code from LLMs can be autonomously improved.

Enhancing large language models (LLMs) with real-time APIs can help generate more accurate and up-to-date responses. However, evaluating the function calling abilities of LLMs in real-world scenarios remains under-explored due to the complexity of data collection and evaluation. In this work, we introduce ComplexFuncBench, a benchmark for complex function calling across five real-world scenarios. Compared to existing benchmarks, ComplexFuncBench encompasses multi-step and constrained function calling, which requires long-parameter filing, parameter value reasoning, and 128k long context. Additionally, we propose an automatic framework, ComplexEval, for quantitatively evaluating complex function calling tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the deficiencies of state-of-the-art LLMs in function calling and suggest future directions for optimizing these capabilities. The data and code are available at https://github.com/THUDM/ComplexFuncBench.

Modern front-end (FE) development, especially when leveraging the unique features of frameworks like React and Vue, presents distinctive challenges. These include managing modular architectures, ensuring synchronization between data and visual outputs for declarative rendering, and adapting reusable components to various scenarios. Such complexities make it particularly difficult for state-of-the-art large vision-language models (VLMs) to generate accurate and functional code directly from design images. To address these challenges, we propose a reflective agentic workflow that synthesizes high-quality image-text data to capture the diverse characteristics of FE development. This workflow automates the extraction of self-containedA \textbf{self-contained code snippet is one that encapsulates all necessary logic, styling, and dependencies, ensuring it functions independently without requiring external imports or context.} code snippets from real-world projects, renders the corresponding visual outputs, and generates detailed descriptions that link design elements to functional code. To further expand the scope and utility of the synthesis, we introduce three data synthesis strategies: Evolution-based synthesis, which enables scalable and diverse dataset expansion; Waterfall-Model-based synthesis, which generates logically coherent code derived from system requirements; and Additive Development synthesis, which iteratively increases the complexity of human-authored components. We build a large vision-language model, Flame, trained on the synthesized datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating React code via the pass@k metric. Our results suggest that a code VLM trained to interpret images before code generation may achieve better performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning, which integrates LLMs with external tools to address diverse real-world challenges. Assessing the capability of LLMs to utilise tools necessitates large-scale and stable benchmarks. However, previous works relied on either hand-crafted online tools with limited scale, or large-scale real online APIs suffering from instability of API status. To address this problem, we introduce StableToolBench, a benchmark evolving from ToolBench, proposing a virtual API server and stable evaluation system. The virtual API server contains a caching system and API simulators which are complementary to alleviate the change in API status. Meanwhile, the stable evaluation system designs solvable pass and win rates using GPT-4 as the automatic evaluator to eliminate the randomness during evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the stability of StableToolBench, and further discuss the effectiveness of API simulators, the caching system, and the evaluator system.

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a collection of techniques designed to automate the machine learning development process. While traditional AutoML approaches have been successfully applied in several critical steps of model development (e.g. hyperparameter optimization), there lacks a AutoML system that automates the entire end-to-end model production workflow. To fill this blank, we present AutoMMLab, a general-purpose LLM-empowered AutoML system that follows user's language instructions to automate the whole model production workflow for computer vision tasks. The proposed AutoMMLab system effectively employs LLMs as the bridge to connect AutoML and OpenMMLab community, empowering non-expert individuals to easily build task-specific models via a user-friendly language interface. Specifically, we propose RU-LLaMA to understand users' request and schedule the whole pipeline, and propose a novel LLM-based hyperparameter optimizer called HPO-LLaMA to effectively search for the optimal hyperparameters. Experiments show that our AutoMMLab system is versatile and covers a wide range of mainstream tasks, including classification, detection, segmentation and keypoint estimation. We further develop a new benchmark, called LAMP, for studying key components in the end-to-end prompt-based model training pipeline. Code, model, and data will be released.

Mobile task automation is an attractive technique that aims to enable voice-based hands-free user interaction with smartphones. However, existing approaches suffer from poor scalability due to the limited language understanding ability and the non-trivial manual efforts required from developers or end-users. The recent advance of large language models (LLMs) in language understanding and reasoning inspires us to rethink the problem from a model-centric perspective, where task preparation, comprehension, and execution are handled by a unified language model. In this work, we introduce AutoDroid, a mobile task automation system that can handle arbitrary tasks on any Android application without manual efforts. The key insight is to combine the commonsense knowledge of LLMs and domain-specific knowledge of apps through automated dynamic analysis. The main components include a functionality-aware UI representation method that bridges the UI with the LLM, exploration-based memory injection techniques that augment the app-specific domain knowledge of LLM, and a multi-granularity query optimization module that reduces the cost of model inference. We integrate AutoDroid with off-the-shelf LLMs including online GPT-4/GPT-3.5 and on-device Vicuna, and evaluate its performance on a new benchmark for memory-augmented Android task automation with 158 common tasks. The results demonstrated that AutoDroid is able to precisely generate actions with an accuracy of 90.9%, and complete tasks with a success rate of 71.3%, outperforming the GPT-4-powered baselines by 36.4% and 39.7%. The demo, benchmark suites, and source code of AutoDroid will be released at url{https://autodroid-sys.github.io/}.

LLMs show promise in transforming software development, with a growing interest in integrating them into more intelligent apps. Frameworks like LangChain aid LLM-integrated app development, offering code execution utility/APIs for custom actions. However, these capabilities theoretically introduce Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, enabling remote code execution through prompt injections. No prior research systematically investigates these frameworks' RCE vulnerabilities or their impact on applications and exploitation consequences. Therefore, there is a huge research gap in this field. In this study, we propose LLMSmith to detect, validate and exploit the RCE vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated frameworks and apps. To achieve this goal, we develop two novel techniques, including 1) a lightweight static analysis to examine LLM integration mechanisms, and construct call chains to identify RCE vulnerabilities in frameworks; 2) a systematical prompt-based exploitation method to verify and exploit the found vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated apps. This technique involves various strategies to control LLM outputs, trigger RCE vulnerabilities and launch subsequent attacks. Our research has uncovered a total of 20 vulnerabilities in 11 LLM-integrated frameworks, comprising 19 RCE vulnerabilities and 1 arbitrary file read/write vulnerability. Of these, 17 have been confirmed by the framework developers, with 11 vulnerabilities being assigned CVE IDs. For the 51 apps potentially affected by RCE, we successfully executed attacks on 17 apps, 16 of which are vulnerable to RCE and 1 to SQL injection. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of these vulnerabilities and construct practical attacks to demonstrate the hazards in reality. Last, we propose several mitigation measures for both framework and app developers to counteract such attacks.

Automated software engineering has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for programming. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can perform various software engineering tasks like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks. Solving challenging and practical programming tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs. To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical programming tasks, we introduce Bench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained programming tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of Bench, Benchi, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered remarkable advancements across diverse code-related tasks, known as Code LLMs, particularly in code generation that generates source code with LLM from natural language descriptions. This burgeoning field has captured significant interest from both academic researchers and industry professionals due to its practical significance in software development, e.g., GitHub Copilot. Despite the active exploration of LLMs for a variety of code tasks, either from the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) or software engineering (SE) or both, there is a noticeable absence of a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review dedicated to LLM for code generation. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by providing a systematic literature review that serves as a valuable reference for researchers investigating the cutting-edge progress in LLMs for code generation. We introduce a taxonomy to categorize and discuss the recent developments in LLMs for code generation, covering aspects such as data curation, latest advances, performance evaluation, and real-world applications. In addition, we present a historical overview of the evolution of LLMs for code generation and offer an empirical comparison using the widely recognized HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks to highlight the progressive enhancements in LLM capabilities for code generation. We identify critical challenges and promising opportunities regarding the gap between academia and practical development. Furthermore, we have established a dedicated resource website (https://codellm.github.io) to continuously document and disseminate the most recent advances in the field.

The automatic generation of programs has long been a fundamental challenge in computer science. Recent benchmarks have shown that large language models (LLMs) can effectively generate code at the function level, make code edits, and solve algorithmic coding tasks. However, to achieve full automation, LLMs should be able to generate production-quality, self-contained application modules. To evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in solving this challenge, we introduce BaxBench, a novel evaluation benchmark consisting of 392 tasks for the generation of backend applications. We focus on backends for three critical reasons: (i) they are practically relevant, building the core components of most modern web and cloud software, (ii) they are difficult to get right, requiring multiple functions and files to achieve the desired functionality, and (iii) they are security-critical, as they are exposed to untrusted third-parties, making secure solutions that prevent deployment-time attacks an imperative. BaxBench validates the functionality of the generated applications with comprehensive test cases, and assesses their security exposure by executing end-to-end exploits. Our experiments reveal key limitations of current LLMs in both functionality and security: (i) even the best model, OpenAI o1, achieves a mere 60% on code correctness; (ii) on average, we could successfully execute security exploits on more than half of the correct programs generated by each LLM; and (iii) in less popular backend frameworks, models further struggle to generate correct and secure applications. Progress on BaxBench signifies important steps towards autonomous and secure software development with LLMs.

Code generation by Llama 3.1 models, such as Meta's Llama 3.1 405B, represents a significant advancement in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in natural language processing and programming automation. This paper explores the capabilities and applications of Llama-driven code generation, highlighting its ability to translate natural language prompts into executable code across multiple programming languages. Key features include contextual awareness, multi-language support, and enhanced debugging and optimization functionalities. By examining these aspects, we illustrate how Llama can serve as a versatile tool for developers of all skill levels, improving productivity and efficiency in software development. The potential implications for education, industry, and the future of coding practices are also discussed, underscoring the transformative impact of AI in programming. Experimentation shows that while Llama 3.1 405B performs well with simple algorithmic and data structure based problems, it still struggles with problems on Quantum Computing, Bioinformatics, and Artificial Intelligence.

Data standardization is a crucial part of the data science life cycle. While tools like Pandas offer robust functionalities, their complexity and the manual effort required for customizing code to diverse column types pose significant challenges. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown promise in automating this process through natural language understanding and code generation, it still demands expert-level programming knowledge and continuous interaction for prompt refinement. To solve these challenges, our key idea is to propose a Python library with declarative, unified APIs for standardizing different column types, simplifying the LLM's code generation with concise API calls. We first propose Dataprep.Clean, a component of the Dataprep Python Library, significantly reduces the coding complexity by enabling the standardization of specific column types with a single line of code. Then, we introduce the CleanAgent framework integrating Dataprep.Clean and LLM-based agents to automate the data standardization process. With CleanAgent, data scientists only need to provide their requirements once, allowing for a hands-free process. To demonstrate the practical utility of CleanAgent, we developed a user-friendly web application, allowing attendees to interact with it using real-world datasets.

Autonomous user interface (UI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-UI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique -- leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans -- to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-UI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-UI.

Given natural language test case description for an Android application, existing testing approaches require developers to manually write scripts using tools such as Appium and Espresso to execute the corresponding test case. This process is labor-intensive and demands significant effort to maintain as UI interfaces evolve throughout development. In this work, we introduce LELANTE, a novel framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to automate test case execution without requiring pre-written scripts. LELANTE interprets natural language test case descriptions, iteratively generate action plans, and perform the actions directly on the Android screen using its GUI. LELANTE employs a screen refinement process to enhance LLM interpretability, constructs a structured prompt for LLMs, and implements an action generation mechanism based on chain-of-thought reasoning of LLMs. To further reduce computational cost and enhance scalability, LELANTE utilizes model distillation using a foundational LLM. In experiments across 390 test cases spanning 10 popular Android applications, LELANTE achieved a 73% test execution success rate. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can effectively bridge the gap between natural language test case description and automated execution, making mobile testing more scalable and adaptable.

Code search is an important task that has seen many developments in recent years. However, previous attempts have mostly considered the problem of searching for code by a text query. We argue that using a code snippet (and possibly an associated traceback) as a query and looking for answers with bugfixing instructions and code samples is a natural use case that is not covered by existing approaches. Moreover, existing datasets use comments extracted from code rather than full-text descriptions as text, making them unsuitable for this use case. We present a new SearchBySnippet dataset implementing the search-by-code use case based on StackOverflow data; it turns out that in this setting, existing architectures fall short of the simplest BM25 baseline even after fine-tuning. We present a new single encoder model SnippeR that outperforms several strong baselines on the SearchBySnippet dataset with a result of 0.451 Recall@10; we propose the SearchBySnippet dataset and SnippeR as a new important benchmark for code search evaluation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently struggle with tool invocation and chaining, as they often hallucinate or miss essential steps in a sequence. We propose RE-GAINS and EnChAnT, two novel frameworks that empower LLMs to tackle complex user queries by making API calls to external tools based on tool descriptions and argument lists. Tools are chained based on the expected output, without receiving the actual results from each individual call. EnChAnT, an open-source solution, leverages an LLM format enforcer, OpenChat 3.5 (an LLM), and ToolBench's API Retriever. RE-GAINS utilizes OpenAI models and embeddings with a specialized prompt based on the Reasoning via Planning (RAP) framework. Both frameworks are low cost (0.01\$ per query). Our key contribution is enabling LLMs for tool invocation and chaining using modifiable, externally described tools.

We introduce WebApp1K, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in test-driven development (TDD) tasks, where test cases serve as both prompt and verification for code generation. Unlike traditional approaches relying on natural language prompts, our benchmark emphasizes the ability of LLMs to interpret and implement functionality directly from test cases, reflecting real-world software development practices. Comprising 1000 diverse challenges across 20 application domains, the benchmark evaluates LLMs on their ability to generate compact, functional code under the constraints of context length and multi-feature complexity. Our findings highlight instruction following and in-context learning as critical capabilities for TDD success, surpassing the importance of general coding proficiency or pretraining knowledge. Through comprehensive evaluation of 19 frontier models, we reveal performance bottlenecks, such as instruction loss in long prompts, and provide a detailed error analysis spanning multiple root causes. This work underscores the practical value of TDD-specific benchmarks and lays the foundation for advancing LLM capabilities in rigorous, application-driven coding scenarios.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for robust instruction-following capabilities in code generation tasks has grown significantly. Code generation not only facilitates faster prototyping and automated testing, but also augments developer efficiency through improved maintainability and reusability of code. In this paper, we introduce CodeIF, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess the abilities of LLMs to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. CodeIF encompasses a broad range of tasks, including function synthesis, error debugging, algorithmic refactoring, and code explanation, thereby providing a comprehensive suite to evaluate model performance across varying complexity levels and programming domains. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations in meeting the demands of these tasks. The experimental results offer valuable insights into how well current models align with human instructions, as well as the extent to which they can generate consistent, maintainable, and contextually relevant code. Our findings not only underscore the critical role that instruction-following LLMs can play in modern software development, but also illuminate pathways for future research aimed at enhancing their adaptability, reliability, and overall effectiveness in automated code generation.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tackling a broad range of tasks. However, existing methods are mainly restricted to specifically designed tools and fail to fulfill complex instructions, having great limitations when confronted with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore a more realistic scenario by connecting LLMs with RESTful APIs, which adhere to the widely adopted REST software architectural style for web service development. To address the practical challenges of tackling complex instructions, we propose RestGPT, which exploits the power of LLMs and conducts a coarse-to-fine online planning mechanism to enhance the abilities of task decomposition and API selection. RestGPT also contains an API executor tailored for calling RESTful APIs, which can meticulously formulate parameters and parse API responses. To fully evaluate the performance of RestGPT, we propose RestBench, a high-quality benchmark which consists of two real-world scenarios and human-annotated instructions with gold solution paths. Experiments show that RestGPT is able to achieve impressive results in complex tasks and has strong robustness, which paves a new way towards AGI. RestGPT and RestBench is publicly available at https://restgpt.github.io/.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred the development of coding agents for real-world code generation. As a widely used benchmark for evaluating the code generation capabilities of these agents, SWE-Bench uses real-world problems based on GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests. However, the manually written test cases included in these pull requests are often insufficient, allowing generated patches to pass the tests without resolving the underlying issue. To address this challenge, we introduce UTGenerator, an LLM-driven test case generator that automatically analyzes codebases and dependencies to generate test cases for real-world Python projects. Building on UTGenerator, we propose UTBoost, a comprehensive framework for test case augmentation. In our evaluation, we identified 36 task instances with insufficient test cases and uncovered 345 erroneous patches incorrectly labeled as passed in the original SWE Bench. These corrections, impacting 40.9% of SWE-Bench Lite and 24.4% of SWE-Bench Verified leaderboard entries, yield 18 and 11 ranking changes, respectively.

Large language models have been successfully applied to programming assistance tasks, such as code completion, code insertion, and instructional code editing. However, these applications remain insufficiently automated and struggle to effectively integrate various types of information during the programming process, including coding history, current code, and user instructions. In this work, we propose a new conversational framework that comprehensively integrates these information sources, collect data to train our models and evaluate their performance. Firstly, to thoroughly evaluate how well models align with different types of information and the quality of their outputs, we introduce a new benchmark, APEval (Assist Programming Eval), to comprehensively assess the performance of models in programming assistance tasks. Then, for data collection, we develop a data generation pipeline, Programming-Instruct, which synthesizes training data from diverse sources, such as GitHub and online judge platforms. This pipeline can automatically generate various types of messages throughout the programming process. Finally, using this pipeline, we generate 219K samples, fine-tune multiple models, and develop the CursorCore series. We show that CursorCore outperforms other models of comparable size. This framework unifies applications such as inline chat and automated editing, contributes to the advancement of coding assistants. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/TechxGenus/CursorCore.

Code generation with large language models has shown significant promise, especially when employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with few-shot examples. However, selecting effective examples that enhance generation quality remains a challenging task, particularly when the target programming language (PL) is underrepresented. In this study, we present two key findings: (1) retrieving examples whose presented algorithmic plans can be referenced for generating the desired behavior significantly improves generation accuracy, and (2) converting code into pseudocode effectively captures such algorithmic plans, enhancing retrieval quality even when the source and the target PLs are different. Based on these findings, we propose Plan-as-query Example Retrieval for few-shot prompting in Code generation (PERC), a novel framework that utilizes algorithmic plans to identify and retrieve effective examples. We validate the effectiveness of PERC through extensive experiments on the CodeContests, HumanEval and MultiPL-E benchmarks: PERC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art RAG methods in code generation, both when the source and target programming languages match or differ, highlighting its adaptability and robustness in diverse coding environments.

Recent advances in operating system (OS) agents enable vision-language models to interact directly with the graphical user interface of an OS. These multimodal OS agents autonomously perform computer-based tasks in response to a single prompt via application programming interfaces (APIs). Such APIs typically support low-level operations, including mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and screenshot captures. We introduce a novel attack vector: malicious image patches (MIPs) that have been adversarially perturbed so that, when captured in a screenshot, they cause an OS agent to perform harmful actions by exploiting specific APIs. For instance, MIPs embedded in desktop backgrounds or shared on social media can redirect an agent to a malicious website, enabling further exploitation. These MIPs generalise across different user requests and screen layouts, and remain effective for multiple OS agents. The existence of such attacks highlights critical security vulnerabilities in OS agents, which should be carefully addressed before their widespread adoption.

Large language models (LLMs) are a new and powerful tool for a wide span of applications involving natural language and demonstrate impressive code generation abilities. In this paper, we explore the capabilitity of state-of-the-art LLMs, including closed-source options like OpenAI GPT-4 and open-source alternatives like Meta AI Codellama, to automatically generate tests and use these tests to validate and verify compiler implementations of a directive-based programming paradigm, OpenACC. Our approach entails exploring various prompt engineering techniques including a code template, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with code template, expressive prompt using RAG with code template, one-shot example, and RAG with one-shot example. This paper focusses on (a) exploring the capabilities of the latest LLMs for code generation, (b) investigating prompt and fine tuning methods, and (c) analyzing the outcome of LLMs generated tests

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in numerous fields. This survey focuses on how LLMs empower users, regardless of their technical background, to use human languages to automatically generate executable code. We begin with understanding LLMs' limitations and challenges in automated code generation. Subsequently, we review various fine-tuning techniques designed to enhance both the performance and adaptability of LLMs in code generation tasks. We then review the existing metrics and benchmarks for evaluations to assess model performance based on fine-tuning techniques. Finally, we explore the applications of LLMs (e.g. CodeLlama, GitHub Copilot, ToolGen) in code generation tasks to illustrate their roles and functionalities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of LLMs for code generation, helps researchers in diverse fields better understand the current state-of-the-art technologies, and offers the potential of effectively leveraging LLMs for code generation tasks.

We release Code Llama, a family of large language models for code based on Llama 2 providing state-of-the-art performance among open models, infilling capabilities, support for large input contexts, and zero-shot instruction following ability for programming tasks. We provide multiple flavors to cover a wide range of applications: foundation models (Code Llama), Python specializations (Code Llama - Python), and instruction-following models (Code Llama - Instruct) with 7B, 13B and 34B parameters each. All models are trained on sequences of 16k tokens and show improvements on inputs with up to 100k tokens. 7B and 13B Code Llama and Code Llama - Instruct variants support infilling based on surrounding content. Code Llama reaches state-of-the-art performance among open models on several code benchmarks, with scores of up to 53% and 55% on HumanEval and MBPP, respectively. Notably, Code Llama - Python 7B outperforms Llama 2 70B on HumanEval and MBPP, and all our models outperform every other publicly available model on MultiPL-E. We release Code Llama under a permissive license that allows for both research and commercial use.

Evaluating LLMs with a single prompt has proven unreliable, with small changes leading to significant performance differences. However, generating the prompt variations needed for a more robust multi-prompt evaluation is challenging, limiting its adoption in practice. To address this, we introduce PromptSuite, a framework that enables the automatic generation of various prompts. PromptSuite is flexible - working out of the box on a wide range of tasks and benchmarks. It follows a modular prompt design, allowing controlled perturbations to each component, and is extensible, supporting the addition of new components and perturbation types. Through a series of case studies, we show that PromptSuite provides meaningful variations to support strong evaluation practices. It is available through both a Python API: https://github.com/eliyahabba/PromptSuite, and a user-friendly web interface: https://promptsuite.streamlit.app/

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have become a prevalent technique in deep learning for code, utilizing a two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning procedure to acquire general knowledge about code and specialize in a variety of downstream tasks. However, the dynamic nature of software codebases poses a challenge to the effectiveness and robustness of PLMs. In particular, world-realistic scenarios potentially lead to significant differences between the distribution of the pre-training and test data, i.e., distribution shift, resulting in a degradation of the PLM's performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we stress the need for adapting PLMs of code to software data whose distribution changes over time, a crucial problem that has been overlooked in previous works. The motivation of this work is to consider the PLM in a non-stationary environment, where fine-tuning data evolves over time according to a software evolution scenario. Specifically, we design a scenario where the model needs to learn from a stream of programs containing new, unseen APIs over time. We study two widely used PLM architectures, i.e., a GPT2 decoder and a RoBERTa encoder, on two downstream tasks, API call and API usage prediction. We demonstrate that the most commonly used fine-tuning technique from prior work is not robust enough to handle the dynamic nature of APIs, leading to the loss of previously acquired knowledge i.e., catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we implement five continual learning approaches, including replay-based and regularization-based methods. Our findings demonstrate that utilizing these straightforward methods effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in PLMs across both downstream tasks while achieving comparable or superior performance.

Pretrained code language models have enabled great progress towards program synthesis. However, common approaches only consider in-file local context and thus miss information and constraints imposed by other parts of the codebase and its external dependencies. Existing code completion benchmarks also lack such context. To resolve these restrictions we curate a new dataset of permissively licensed Python packages that includes full projects and their dependencies and provide tools to extract non-local information with the help of program analyzers. We then focus on the task of function call argument completion which requires predicting the arguments to function calls. We show that existing code completion models do not yield good results on our completion task. To better solve this task, we query a program analyzer for information relevant to a given function call, and consider ways to provide the analyzer results to different code completion models during inference and training. Our experiments show that providing access to the function implementation and function usages greatly improves the argument completion performance. Our ablation study provides further insights on how different types of information available from the program analyzer and different ways of incorporating the information affect the model performance.

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.

The scope of neural code intelligence is rapidly expanding beyond text-based source code to encompass the rich visual outputs that programs generate. This visual dimension is critical for advanced applications like flexible content generation and precise, program-driven editing of visualizations. However, progress has been impeded by the scarcity of high-quality multimodal code data, a bottleneck stemming from challenges in synthesis and quality assessment. To address these challenges, we make contributions from both a data and modeling perspective. We first introduce a complete synthesis toolkit that leverages reciprocal synergies between data modalities to efficiently produce a large-scale, high-quality corpus spanning from standard charts to complex interactive web UIs and code-driven animations. Leveraging this toolkit, we construct JanusCode-800K, the largest multimodal code corpus to date. This powers the training of our models, JanusCoder and JanusCoderV, which establish a visual-programmatic interface for generating code from textual instructions, visual inputs, or a combination of both. Our unified model is a departure from existing approaches that build specialized models for isolated tasks. Extensive experiments on both text-centric and vision-centric coding tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the JanusCoder series, with our 7B to 14B scale models approaching or even exceeding the performance of commercial models. Furthermore, extensive analysis provides key insights into harmonizing programmatic logic with its visual expression. Our code and checkpoints will are available at https://github.com/InternLM/JanusCoder.

Memory safety violations in low-level code, written in languages like C, continues to remain one of the major sources of software vulnerabilities. One method of removing such violations by construction is to port C code to a safe C dialect. Such dialects rely on programmer-supplied annotations to guarantee safety with minimal runtime overhead. This porting, however, is a manual process that imposes significant burden on the programmer and, hence, there has been limited adoption of this technique. The task of porting not only requires inferring annotations, but may also need refactoring/rewriting of the code to make it amenable to such annotations. In this paper, we use Large Language Models (LLMs) towards addressing both these concerns. We show how to harness LLM capabilities to do complex code reasoning as well as rewriting of large codebases. We also present a novel framework for whole-program transformations that leverages lightweight static analysis to break the transformation into smaller steps that can be carried out effectively by an LLM. We implement our ideas in a tool called MSA that targets the CheckedC dialect. We evaluate MSA on several micro-benchmarks, as well as real-world code ranging up to 20K lines of code. We showcase superior performance compared to a vanilla LLM baseline, as well as demonstrate improvement over a state-of-the-art symbolic (non-LLM) technique.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance in software engineering yet face challenges in adapting to continually evolving code knowledge, particularly regarding the frequent updates of third-party library APIs. This limitation, stemming from static pre-training datasets, often results in non-executable code or implementations with suboptimal safety and efficiency. To this end, this paper introduces CODESYNC, a data engine for identifying outdated code patterns and collecting real-time code knowledge updates from Python third-party libraries. Building upon CODESYNC, we develop CODESYNCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to stay synchronized with code evolution, which covers real-world updates for 220 APIs from six Python libraries. Our benchmark offers 3,300 test cases across three evaluation tasks and an update-aware instruction tuning dataset consisting of 2,200 training samples. Extensive experiments on 14 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that they struggle with dynamic code evolution, even with the support of advanced knowledge updating methods (e.g., DPO, ORPO, and SimPO). We believe that our benchmark can offer a strong foundation for the development of more effective methods for real-time code knowledge updating in the future. The experimental code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucky-voyage/Code-Sync.

Using large language models (LLMs) to generate source code from natural language prompts is a popular and promising idea with a wide range of applications. One of its limitations is that the generated code can be faulty at times, often in a subtle way, despite being presented to the user as correct. In this paper, we explore ways in which formal methods can assist with increasing the quality of code generated by an LLM. Instead of emitting code in a target language directly, we propose that the user guides the LLM to first generate an opaque intermediate representation, in the verification-aware language Dafny, that can be automatically validated for correctness against agreed on specifications. The correct Dafny program is then compiled to the target language and returned to the user. All user-system interactions throughout the procedure occur via natural language; Dafny code is never exposed. We describe our current prototype and report on its performance on the HumanEval Python code generation benchmarks.

Software reverse engineering is an essential task in software engineering and security, but it can be a challenging process, especially for adversarial artifacts. To address this challenge, we present STraceBERT, a novel approach that utilizes a Java dynamic analysis tool to record calls to core Java libraries, and pretrain a BERT-style model on the recorded application traces for effective method source code retrieval from a candidate set. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of STraceBERT in retrieving the source code compared to existing approaches. Our proposed approach offers a promising solution to the problem of code retrieval in software reverse engineering and opens up new avenues for further research in this area.

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.

OpenAI's Codex, a GPT-3 like model trained on a large code corpus, has made headlines in and outside of academia. Given a short user-provided description, it is capable of synthesizing code snippets that are syntactically and semantically valid in most cases. In this work, we want to investigate whether Codex is able to localize and fix bugs, a task of central interest in the field of automated program repair. Our initial evaluation uses the multi-language QuixBugs benchmark (40 bugs in both Python and Java). We find that, despite not being trained for APR, Codex is surprisingly effective, and competitive with recent state of the art techniques. Our results also show that Codex is slightly more successful at repairing Python than Java.

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.

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.

Advancing automated programming necessitates robust and comprehensive code generation benchmarks, yet current evaluation frameworks largely neglect object-oriented programming (OOP) in favor of functional programming (FP), e.g., HumanEval and MBPP. To address this, our study introduces a pioneering OOP-focused benchmark, featuring 431 Python programs that encompass essential OOP concepts and features like classes and encapsulation methods. We propose a novel evaluation metric, pass@o, tailored for OOP, enhancing traditional pass@k measures. Our evaluation of 23 leading large language models (LLMs), including both general and code-specialized models, reveals three key insights: 1) pass@o offers a more relevant and comprehensive assessment for OOP code generation; 2) Despite excelling in FP, code-specialized LLMs like WizardCoder lag in OOP compared to models like ChatGPT; 3) The poor performance of all advanced LLMs on our OOP benchmark highlights a critical need for improvements in this field. Our benchmark and scripts are publicly released at: https://github.com/alphadl/OOP-eval.

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.

Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, including mitigating harm in LLM outputs, enhancing text summarization, and mathematical reasoning. This paper introduces an RLAIF framework for improving the code generation abilities of lightweight (<1B parameters) LLMs. We specifically focus on code generation tasks that require writing appropriate API calls, which is challenging due to the well-known issue of hallucination in LLMs. Our framework extracts AI feedback from a larger LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) through a specialized prompting strategy and uses this data to train a reward model towards better alignment from smaller LLMs. We run our experiments on the Gorilla dataset and meticulously assess the quality of the model-generated code across various metrics, including AST, ROUGE, and Code-BLEU, and develop a pipeline to compute its executability rate accurately. Our approach significantly enhances the fine-tuned LLM baseline's performance, achieving a 4.5% improvement in executability rate. Notably, a smaller LLM model (780M parameters) trained with RLAIF surpasses a much larger fine-tuned baseline with 7B parameters, achieving a 1.0% higher code executability rate.

Software testing plays a critical role in ensuring that systems behave as intended. However, existing automated testing approaches struggle to match the capabilities of human engineers due to key limitations such as test locality, lack of general reliability, and business logic blindness. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages functional programming and type systems to translate Scala backend code into formal Lean representations. Our pipeline automatically generates theorems that specify the intended behavior of APIs and database operations, and uses LLM-based provers to verify them. When a theorem is proved, the corresponding logic is guaranteed to be correct and no further testing is needed. If the negation of a theorem is proved instead, it confirms a bug. In cases where neither can be proved, human intervention is required. We evaluate our method on realistic backend systems and find that it can formally verify over 50% of the test requirements, which suggests that half of a testing engineer's workload can be automated. Additionally, with an average cost of only $2.19 per API, LLM-based verification is significantly more cost-effective than manual testing and can be scaled easily through parallel execution. Our results indicate a promising direction for scalable, AI-powered software testing, with the potential to greatly improve engineering productivity as models continue to advance.

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to achieve optimized performance from LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated the capabilities of LLMs to automatically conduct prompt engineering by employing a meta-prompt that incorporates the outcomes of the last trials and proposes an improved prompt. However, this requires a high-quality benchmark to compare different prompts, which is difficult and expensive to acquire in many real-world use cases. In this work, we introduce a new method for automatic prompt engineering, using a calibration process that iteratively refines the prompt to the user intent. During the optimization process, the system jointly generates synthetic data of boundary use cases and optimizes the prompt according to the generated dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to strong proprietary models on real-world tasks such as moderation and generation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a limited number of annotated samples. Furthermore, we validate the advantages of each one of the system's key components. Our system is built in a modular way, facilitating easy adaptation to other tasks. The code is available https://github.com/Eladlev/AutoPrompt{here}.

The research builds and evaluates the adversarial potential to introduce copied code or hallucinated AI recommendations for malicious code in popular code repositories. While foundational large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic guard against both harmful behaviors and toxic strings, previous work on math solutions that embed harmful prompts demonstrate that the guardrails may differ between expert contexts. These loopholes would appear in mixture of expert's models when the context of the question changes and may offer fewer malicious training examples to filter toxic comments or recommended offensive actions. The present work demonstrates that foundational models may refuse to propose destructive actions correctly when prompted overtly but may unfortunately drop their guard when presented with a sudden change of context, like solving a computer programming challenge. We show empirical examples with trojan-hosting repositories like GitHub, NPM, NuGet, and popular content delivery networks (CDN) like jsDelivr which amplify the attack surface. In the LLM's directives to be helpful, example recommendations propose application programming interface (API) endpoints which a determined domain-squatter could acquire and setup attack mobile infrastructure that triggers from the naively copied code. We compare this attack to previous work on context-shifting and contrast the attack surface as a novel version of "living off the land" attacks in the malware literature. In the latter case, foundational language models can hijack otherwise innocent user prompts to recommend actions that violate their owners' safety policies when posed directly without the accompanying coding support request.

Programming with Generative AI (GenAI) models is a type of Neurosymbolic programming and has seen tremendous adoption across many domains. However, leveraging GenAI models in code today can be complex, counter-intuitive and often require specialized frameworks, leading to increased complexity. This is because it is currently unclear as to the right abstractions through which we should marry GenAI models with the nature of traditional programming code constructs. In this paper, we introduce a set of novel abstractions to help bridge the gap between Neuro- and symbolic programming. We introduce Meaning, a new specialized type that represents the underlying semantic value of traditional types (e.g., string). We make the case that GenAI models, LLMs in particular, should be reasoned as a meaning-type wrapped code construct at the language level. We formulate the problem of translation between meaning and traditional types and propose Automatic Meaning-Type Transformation (A-MTT), a runtime feature that abstracts this translation away from the developers by automatically converting between M eaning and types at the interface of LLM invocation. Leveraging this new set of code constructs and OTT, we demonstrate example implementation of neurosymbolic programs that seamlessly utilizes LLMs to solve problems in place of potentially complex traditional programming logic.

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the 'Automate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has greatly facilitated code generation, but ensuring the functional correctness of generated code remains a challenge. Traditional validation methods are often time-consuming, error-prone, and impractical for large volumes of code. We introduce CodeSift, a novel framework that leverages LLMs as the first-line filter of code validation without the need for execution, reference code, or human feedback, thereby reducing the validation effort. We assess the effectiveness of our method across three diverse datasets encompassing two programming languages. Our results indicate that CodeSift outperforms state-of-the-art code evaluation methods. Internal testing conducted with subject matter experts reveals that the output generated by CodeSift is in line with human preference, reinforcing its effectiveness as a dependable automated code validation tool.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on code are revolutionizing the software development process. Increasingly, code LLMs are being integrated into software development environments to improve the productivity of human programmers, and LLM-based agents are beginning to show promise for handling complex tasks autonomously. Realizing the full potential of code LLMs requires a wide range of capabilities, including code generation, fixing bugs, explaining and documenting code, maintaining repositories, and more. In this work, we introduce the Granite series of decoder-only code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite Code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, suitable for applications ranging from complex application modernization tasks to on-device memory-constrained use cases. Evaluation on a comprehensive set of tasks demonstrates that Granite Code models consistently reaches state-of-the-art performance among available open-source code LLMs. The Granite Code model family was optimized for enterprise software development workflows and performs well across a range of coding tasks (e.g. code generation, fixing and explanation), making it a versatile all around code model. We release all our Granite Code models under an Apache 2.0 license for both research and commercial use.

The recent advancement of autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential for automating tasks on mobile devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Despite initial progress, these agents still face challenges when handling complex real-world tasks. These challenges arise from a lack of knowledge about real-life mobile applications in LLM-based agents, which may lead to ineffective task planning and even cause hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLM-based agent framework called MapAgent that leverages memory constructed from historical trajectories to augment current task planning. Specifically, we first propose a trajectory-based memory mechanism that transforms task execution trajectories into a reusable and structured page-memory database. Each page within a trajectory is extracted as a compact yet comprehensive snapshot, capturing both its UI layout and functional context. Secondly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine task planning approach that retrieves relevant pages from the memory database based on similarity and injects them into the LLM planner to compensate for potential deficiencies in understanding real-world app scenarios, thereby achieving more informed and context-aware task planning. Finally, planned tasks are transformed into executable actions through a task executor supported by a dual-LLM architecture, ensuring effective tracking of task progress. Experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that MapAgent achieves superior performance to existing methods. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

WebAssembly enables near-native execution in web applications and is increasingly adopted for tasks that demand high performance and robust security. However, its assembly-like syntax, implicit stack machine, and low-level data types make it extremely difficult for human developers to understand, spurring the need for effective WebAssembly reverse engineering techniques. In this paper, we propose StackSight, a novel neurosymbolic approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with advanced program analysis to decompile complex WebAssembly code into readable C++ snippets. StackSight visualizes and tracks virtual stack alterations via a static analysis algorithm and then applies chain-of-thought prompting to harness LLM's complex reasoning capabilities. Evaluation results show that StackSight significantly improves WebAssembly decompilation. Our user study also demonstrates that code snippets generated by StackSight have significantly higher win rates and enable a better grasp of code semantics.

To address intricate real-world tasks, there has been a rising interest in tool utilization in applications of large language models (LLMs). To develop LLM-based agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentation. But these documentations could be diverse, redundant or incomplete, which immensely affects the capability of LLMs in using tools. To solve this, we introduce EASYTOOL, a framework transforming diverse and lengthy tool documentation into a unified and concise tool instruction for easier tool usage. EasyTool purifies essential information from extensive tool documentation of different sources, and elaborates a unified interface (i.e., tool instruction) to offer standardized tool descriptions and functionalities for LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on multiple different tasks demonstrate that EasyTool can significantly reduce token consumption and improve the performance of tool utilization in real-world scenarios. Our code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS/ in the future.

Repository-level code generation remains challenging due to complex code dependencies and the limitations of large language models (LLMs) in processing long contexts. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks are widely adopted, the effectiveness of different retrieved information sources-contextual code, APIs, and similar snippets-has not been rigorously analyzed. Through an empirical study on two benchmarks, we demonstrate that in-context code and potential API information significantly enhance LLM performance, whereas retrieved similar code often introduces noise, degrading results by up to 15%. Based on the preliminary results, we propose AllianceCoder, a novel context-integrated method that employs chain-of-thought prompting to decompose user queries into implementation steps and retrieves APIs via semantic description matching. Through extensive experiments on CoderEval and RepoExec, AllianceCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Pass@1 by up to 20% over existing approaches.

Recent code large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in generating standalone functions but face limitations in repository-level code generation due to their lack of awareness of repository-level dependencies (e.g., user-defined attributes), resulting in dependency errors such as undefined-variable and no-member errors. In this work, we introduce ToolGen, an approach that integrates autocompletion tools into the code LLM generation process to address these dependencies. ToolGen comprises two main phases: Trigger Insertion and Model Fine-tuning (Offline), and Tool-integrated Code Generation (Online). During the offline phase, ToolGen augments functions within a given code corpus with a special mark token, indicating positions to trigger autocompletion tools. These augmented functions, along with their corresponding docstrings, are then used to fine-tune a selected code LLM. In the online phase, ToolGen iteratively generates functions by predicting tokens step-by-step using the fine-tuned LLM. Whenever a mark token is encountered, ToolGen invokes the autocompletion tool to suggest code completions and selects the most appropriate one. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate ToolGen's effectiveness in repository-level code generation. To facilitate this evaluation, we create a benchmark comprising 680 real-world code repositories and introduce two new repository-level metrics: Dependency Coverage and Static Validity Rate. The results demonstrate that ToolGen significantly improves Dependency Coverage by 15.2% to 45.8% and Static Validity Rate by 10.9% to 42.2% across three distinct code LLMs, while maintaining competitive performance in widely-recognized similarity metrics. Furthermore, our generalizability evaluation confirms ToolGen's consistent performance when applied to diverse code LLMs, including various model architectures and scales.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive potential in translating natural language (NL) instructions into program code. However, user instructions often contain inherent ambiguities, making it challenging for LLMs to generate code that accurately reflects the user's true intent. To address this challenge, researchers have proposed to produce multiple candidates of the program code and then rerank them to identify the best solution. In this paper, we propose CodeRSA, a novel code candidate reranking mechanism built upon the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, designed to guide LLMs toward more comprehensive pragmatic reasoning about user intent. We evaluate CodeRSA using one of the latest LLMs on a popular code generation dataset. Our experiment results show that CodeRSA consistently outperforms common baselines, surpasses the state-of-the-art approach in most cases, and demonstrates robust overall performance. These findings underscore the effectiveness of integrating pragmatic reasoning into code candidate reranking, offering a promising direction for enhancing code generation quality in LLMs.

AI agents are systems capable of perceiving their environment, autonomously planning and executing tasks. Recent advancements in LLM have introduced a transformative paradigm for AI agents, enabling them to interact with external resources and tools through prompts. In such agents, the workflow integrates developer-written code, which manages framework construction and logic control, with LLM-generated natural language that enhances dynamic decision-making and interaction. However, discrepancies between developer-implemented logic and the dynamically generated content of LLMs in terms of behavior and expected outcomes can lead to defects, such as tool invocation failures and task execution errors. These issues introduce specific risks, leading to various defects in LLM-based AI Agents, such as service interruptions. Despite the importance of these issues, there is a lack of systematic work that focuses on analyzing LLM-based AI Agents to uncover defects in their code. In this paper, we present the first study focused on identifying and detecting defects in LLM Agents. We collected and analyzed 6,854 relevant posts from StackOverflow to define 8 types of agent defects. For each type, we provided detailed descriptions with an example. Then, we designed a static analysis tool, named Agentable, to detect the defects. Agentable leverages Code Property Graphs and LLMs to analyze Agent workflows by efficiently identifying specific code patterns and analyzing natural language descriptions. To evaluate Agentable, we constructed two datasets: AgentSet, consists of 84 real-world Agents, and AgentTest, which contains 78 Agents specifically designed to include various types of defects. Our results show that Agentable achieved an overall accuracy of 88.79% and a recall rate of 91.03%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals the 889 defects of the AgentSet, highlighting the prevalence of these defects.

Code synthesis, which requires a deep understanding of complex natural language problem descriptions, generation of code instructions for complex algorithms and data structures, and the successful execution of comprehensive unit tests, presents a significant challenge. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in natural language processing, their performance in code generation tasks remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to code generation tasks leveraging multi-agent prompting that uniquely replicates the full cycle of program synthesis as observed in human developers. Our framework, MapCoder, consists of four LLM agents specifically designed to emulate the stages of this cycle: recalling relevant examples, planning, code generation, and debugging. After conducting thorough experiments, with multiple LLM ablations and analyses across eight challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks, MapCoder showcases remarkable code generation capabilities, achieving new state-of-the-art results (pass@1) on HumanEval (93.9%), MBPP (83.1%), APPS (22.0%), CodeContests (28.5%), and xCodeEval (45.3%). Moreover, our method consistently delivers superior performance across various programming languages and varying problem difficulties. We open-source our framework at https://github.com/Md-Ashraful-Pramanik/MapCoder.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce \framework, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, \framework enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess \framework using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, \framework demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.